The musicologist Jerrold Northrop Moore, who has died aged 90, did much to chronicle the career and works of Edward Elgar. At the centre of his publications were his encyclopedic biography Elgar: A Creative Life (1984) and four volumes of the composer’s edited correspondence (1987-90).
A US citizen, Jerry was drawn to Elgar’s music while still a student. When he first visited Britain in 1954, he went to the Three Choirs festival in Worcester, and met the composer’s daughter, Carice.
Before a second visit five years later, he wrote to ask if she would help him meet and interview close acquaintances of Elgar: the soprano Agnes Nicholls, who sang in the first performance of his oratorio The Kingdom; Percy Hull, dedicatee of the Pomp and Circumstance March No 5; Dora Penny, the Dorabella of the 10th of the Enigma Variations; two of the four musical Harrison sisters, the cellist Beatrice and violinist Margaret; and his nieces May and Madge Grafton, who acted as his personal assistants.
This initiative gave rise to his first book, Elgar: A Life in Photographs (1972). He later returned to his two visits of the 1950s in a memoir, Friend of the Friends (2023), accompanying accounts of his meetings with photographs that he took himself. Elgar on Record (1974) tracked the composer’s pioneering contribution to the embryonic gramophone industry through conducting recordings of his own orchestral works. In passing, it also revealed his ambition in later years to achieve recognition as a recorded pianist.
Indeed, Jerry had a deep interest in early sound recordings in general, developed during nine years from 1961 as Yale University’s curator of historical sound recordings. A Voice in Time (1976) was a brief biography of The Gramophone Company’s pioneering engineer and producer Fred Gaisberg against a background of technical developments in the music industry in the 1920s and 30s. Sound Revolutions (1999) provided a fuller biography of Gaisberg.
Jerry’s admiration of Adrian Boult found voice in Music and Friends (1979), the conductor’s correspondence with the composers whose works he performed. Jerry went on to celebrate one of them in Vaughan Williams: A Life in Photographs (1992). His interest in the visual arts also led to The Green Fuse: Pastoral Vision in English Art 1820-2000 (2006), a collection of short biographies of pastoral artists, and FL Griggs: The Architecture of Dreams (2008), a biography of the artist, etcher and illustrator.
Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Jerrold was the son of Lettie (Letitia, nee Northrop) and Harold Moore, who worked in insurance. The family had close ties to the Confederacy in the American civil war. Lucius Northrop, an antecedent on his mother’s side, had served as commissary general, responsible for providing food and other support to the southern troops. In his biography Confederate Commissary General, Jerry provided an in-depth study of the supply problems faced by the Confederacy.
At Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, Jerry studied English literature, played the organ and developed the interest in Elgar that took him to Worcester after a summer course in London. After gaining a PhD at Yale in 1958, he spent three years on the staff of Rochester University, New York state, before taking up the curatorship at Yale; but when an anticipated sabbatical was unexpectedly declined, he left the world of formal academia and moved permanently to Britain in 1970 to pursue a career writing about his own specific interests, settling in Worcestershire.
Beyond the mornings that he spent writing, Jerry’s greatest pleasure lay in the books he owned, the majority of them large glossy coffee-table books bought after they had been remaindered. His prized possessions included quality facsimiles of the Lindisfarne gospels and The Book of Kells, and rare portfolios of engravings of scenes from Wagner operas by Franz Stassen.
His attic was full of books, and piles began to accumulate on the floor and furniture in his sitting room until it required military precision for guests to negotiate the obstacles to reach their allotted seats. When his upright piano went, its place was soon filled with books.
He used his middle name to avoid confusion with the piano accompanist Gerald Moore. Though I had first encountered him four decades ago, I got to know him better in the mid-2000s when setting up Elgar Works, a music publishing charity tasked to take the Elgar Complete Edition through to its logical culmination, publication having been suspended in 1993. Jerry was inclined to insist on involvement when no help was needed, but the absolute priority of his own work made this insistence easy to deflect.
Meetings at Elgar’s birthplace, The Firs, outside Worcester, required only a minor detour to visit Jerry in Broadway, and I worked with him on Friend of the Friends.
His brother, Malcolm, died last year, and he is survived by a niece, Rebecca, and two nephews, Read and George.
• Jerrold Northrop Moore, musicologist and author, born 1 March 1934; died 18 May 2024
