Dream Children

• Enfants d’un rêve (Dream Children), “two pieces after C. Lamb,” was composed and premiered in 1902.¹
• The title comes from an essay by English author Charles Lamb (1775-1834), in which an elderly bachelor dreams of what his life would have been like if he had had children.²
• Elgar headed these pieces with the following quotation from Lamb’s essay:

“and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter:… ‘we are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been.’”

Charles Lamb³

• Scholars aren’t quite sure exactly how this quote resonated with Elgar. Elgar’s wife was named Alice, but they did actually did have a daughter, Carice.⁴

1. Diana McVeagh, “Elgar, Sir Edward,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed September 18, 2019,  https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000008709.
2. Diana McVeagh, “The shorter instrumental works,” in Cambridge Companion to Elgar, ed. Daniel Grimley and Julian Rushton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 58.
3. Quoted in McVeagh, “The shorter instrumental works,” in Cambridge Companion to Elgar, 58.
4. McVeagh, “The shorter instrumental works,” in Cambridge Companion to Elgar, 58.