Edward Elgar's Four Partsongs for chorus, Op. 53, date from 1907, the same year that Elgar, after many years of ardently avoiding the task, finally began work on his first symphony. Three of the Op. 53 partsongs take up texts by famous poets; the words of the fourth and last, on the other hand, were written by Elgar himself. Each is scored for the usual SATB choir, sometimes, however, divided into as many as eight parts. Elgar wrote many partsongs over the years, and he seems to have had a genuine love for the genre; each of the Op. 53 choral songs is a finely crafted item, thick and rich and lush in the Elgar way but never giving the impression that there is a single note too many.

The text of Op. 53, No. 1, "There is Sweet Music," is a familiar one—it comes from Tennyson's The Lotus-Eaters. Visually, the score is quite shocking: the eight-part choir is divided down the middle from top to bottom (i.e. high and low) and each of the two groups has its own key signature! At first, the G major group and the A flat major group sing separately, overlapping just momentarily; later, as they combine their efforts and the texture grows ever fuller, the two groups, though still notated in two different key signatures, find a chromatically-compatible common ground. At the very end of the song the underlying tonal conflict does, however, get played out as the two half-choirs quietly exchange G major and A flat major chords to the word "sleep." The skill and control demonstrated throughout "There is Sweet Music," which Elgar composed in Rome in December, 1907, are quite extraordinary.

No. 2, "Deep in my Soul," comes from Byron's The Corsair. Now the voices operate as an ordinary four-part choir, and they all agree on E flat major. But we don't get to enjoy the home sonority very often! There is an abundance of chromatic activity in this Andante espressivo, and by the time five bars have passed we have touched, in a roundabout way, on G major and E major.

"O Wild West Wind," No. 3, is a setting from Shelley's Ode. The wild wind swirls around the choir in loud, rowdy triplets (usually descending in parallel thirds).

For the final number, which Elgar calls an epitaph, and which he finished in Rome on the very last day of 1907, the composer penned a poem titled "Owl." The music is Elgar at his most inscrutable. Much of the course is tonally and harmonically ambiguous—"Owl" is filled, and even ends with, a bizarre chromatically drooping gesture in two voices, always to the text "nothing," always sung by sopranos and altos.

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