Obscure Music Monday: Parry's Elegy for Organ

As those of us in the United States honor the fallen on this Memorial Day, we take a look at a more somber work, the Elegy by Charles Hubert Hastings Parry. This short work for organ (not to be confused with Parry's Elegy for Brahms, which was written for orchestra) is a stately, refined work, written to honor Sidney, 14th Earl of Pembroke, at his funeral on April 7, 1913.

The opening theme includes a dotted 8th note and 16th note figure, common to a march, but in a much more somber setting, undulating between an opening A♭ cord, immediately moving to a B♭ 7 chord. The opening theme immediately reappears, but moves to a resolution on a G chord.

Parry introduces a flowing 8th note line as a second theme - with a steady stream of 8th notes alternating between the left and right hands for most of the second theme, before the right hand takes over with a string of 8th notes, marked dolce, which take us back to a modified version of the first theme. Parry spends 10 measures developing the ideas of the first phrase in a pp section that ends with a diminuendo and ritardando into a final return of the main theme.

After a short statement, Parry brings us to the second theme, this time beginning in A♭, ending with a short coda and a quiet sustained A♭ chord.

We've only been able to locate two commercial recordings of this piece with limited availability today, both of which were released in 2001:
- Complete Organ Works of Sir Hubert Parry by James Lancelot
- Wanderer: Organ Works of C Hubert H Parry by Robert Benjamin Dobey