On today's date in 1930, at a recording session in Kingsway Hall in London, the British composer Sir Edward Elgar conducted the first performance of his "Pomp and Circumstance March No. 5," the last in this popular series.

Two of the previous marches had been dedicated to organist friends of the composer, and so when organist Percy Hull asked Elgar for a new work for the 1930 Hereford Festival, he might just have had his fingers crossed for luck. In any case, he got what he wanted, and the "Pomp and Circumstance March No. 5" is dedicated to him.

In 1930, Elgar was 73 years old and he liked to go for drives in the country. Hull had given Elgar some driving lessons. Appropriately enough, just the year before, Elgar got the idea for the musical themes of his new march while riding through the countryside with a friend. Elgar suddenly asked for something on which he could jot down his ideas. All the driver could produce was an Ordnance Survey map of Worcestershire—so on its margins the first notes of Elgar's new march were scribbled.

The march proved to be one of his last new orchestral works. Elgar planned to write a sixth "Pomp and Circumstance" March, a kind of soldier's funeral march, he said, but Elgar himself died in 1934.