Adagio for string orchestra, harp and organ. First Performance : Date : 15 August 1914 Venue : Queen's Hall, London Conductor : Sir Henry Wood Dedicated to : W H (Billy) Reed, leader of the London Symphony Orchestra, close friend and confidant of Elgar Elgar provisionally called this short work Soupir d'Amour, intending it as a companion piece to Salut d'Amour, a light popular work for the masses. What emerged, however, was a work of considerably greater substance. He composed it in the months leading up to the outbreak of the First World War and it was perhaps the gathering stormclouds of war that moved him to write a heartfelt, bleak adagio that would not be out of place as the slow movement of an Elgar symphony.