August Jaeger


August Johannes Jaeger was an Anglo-German music publisher, who developed a close friendship with the English composer Edward Elgar.

Biography

August Johannes Jaeger was born in Düsseldorf, Germany. He came to London in 1878, where he first worked at a map-printing firm. In 1890 he joined the London music publishing company, Novello as a music reader.
Elgar's relationship with Jaeger is documented in Percy M. Young's book showing eleven years of correspondence, Letters to Nimrod. Jaeger met Edward Elgar in late 1897, when he was publishing office manager at Novellos, and their first correspondence was regarding the publication of Elgar's Te Deum and Benedictus. His advice, friendship and encouragement became invaluable to Elgar, for example causing the composer to rework many famous musical passages, including the finale to his Variations on an Original Theme and the climax of The Dream of Gerontius. Jaeger has been immortalized in the famous ninth variation "Nimrod" from the Variations, recalling a conversation on the slow movements of Beethoven.
Jaeger championed the work of the young composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, claiming to Elgar that Coleridge-Taylor was "a genius".
In 1898 Jaeger married Isabella Donkersley of Magdale, Honley near Holmfirth in West Yorkshire, an accomplished violinist and pupil of Henry Holmes in the Royal College of Music, and they had two children.
At the beginning of 1905 Jaeger was ill with tuberculosis and went to Davos in Switzerland, but he was still receiving a pension from Novellos. After the long and depressing illness, during which he and Elgar still corresponded about musical matters, Jaeger died in Muswell Hill on 18 May 1909.
The family changed their name to "Hunter" after World War I.

Works