Edvard Elgar is honored as a national composer in England. He created numerous works in all musical genres. These include the frequently performed Enigma Variations for orchestra and the oratorio Dream of Gerontius. His six marches entitled Pomp and Circumstances, the first of which contains the hymn Land of Hope and Glory, are widely known.
The small six-part cycle Scenes of the Bavarian Highlands for choir and piano from 1895, which can be heard today, is also charming. Elgar had spent a vacation in Upper Bavaria with his wife Caroline Alice (1848-1920) the previous year and both had fallen in love with the local landscape, the people, their festivals and customs and the folk music. Elger's Scenes on poems by his wife are a kind of memorial to this memory. The composer lovingly adapts Bavarian folk music and culture, but it sounds somehow English, and in any case wonderfully romantic.

In 1934, Carl Orff (1895-1982) from Munich came across a collection of 254 songs and drama texts in Middle Latin, Middle High German and Old French written and bound on parchment in the Bavarian Benediktbeuern monastery in the 13th century. These are texts full of life. They deal with religion, politics and war, spring, love again and again, life among the traveling folk, boisterous drinking in convivial company and much more. Orff used the collection to create a libretto for the great cantata Carmina burana, the Beurische Gesänge, songs from the aforementioned monastery. And so, with Orff's power and rhythmic radiance, one of the most sung choral works of all time came into the world. Today it can be heard here in concert in a version authorized by Orff for soloists, choir, children's choir and two pianos along with many percussion instruments.