Edward Elgar and His World
Page 2
Rather than espousing an overt ideology, many biographers have preferred to concentrate on the composer’s fascinating, contradictory, and infuriating personality. For some authors, Elgar has served as a pretext for indulging in an ill-advised nostalgia about the Edwardian era—actually a time of rapid scientific change and political upheaval—as if the entire period was a luxuriant perpetual summer before the carnage of the First World War. Of the reign of the grossly self-indulgent Edward VII, one distinguished Elgarian scholar once wrote that “life was more leisurely then, the countryside less spoilt, birds and butterflies more numerous, gardens more scented, most human beings less sophisticated and cynical… . There was style [author’s emphasis] in that era and most of all a degree of innocence and charm which was to blasted away for ever [sic] by the First World War.”20 All of this expensive loveliness was enjoyed by a tiny percentage of the British population, however; the scented gardens and unspoiled countryside would have been an alien environment to industrial laborers working six days a week in “dark satanic mills” that spewed out pollution on an unprecedented scale.21 Upward mobility was much less common than in today’s Britain, and the process was extremely painful, as the diaries and letters of those working-class men and women who did better their lot (including Elgar himself) eloquently attest.
Recently, however, musicologists studying Elgar have begun to plot a course to avoid the seductions of nostalgia. Building on a foundation laid by Robert Anderson, Diana McVeagh, Jerrold Northrop Moore, James Hepokoski, Julian Rushton, and others, these scholars have started to examine Elgar using tools provided by critical theory, colonialist studies, and revisionist history, as well as intriguing multivalent approaches in music theory. A number of monographs and essay collections on Elgar have been published in recent years, encouraged in part by such distinguished journals as Music and Letters, The Musical Times, and, above all, 19th-Century Music, in whose pages a series of searching articles on this British composer, some quite provocative, have appeared over the past few years. The essays that constitute Edward Elgar and His World advance this re-evaluation of the composer and his music by studying him in a series of different contexts—his worlds, so to speak. While the essays in this book are grouped by their relation to either Worcester or London, the essays themselves often suggest how porous such boundaries were for him (and are for us), as Elgar frequently seems to have a foot planted in each, unsure exactly to which world, if any, he really belonged.
Elgar’s ambivalent vacillations between town and country, faith and doubt, high and low, set off resonances that chime from essay to essay in ways both revealing and unexpected. Charles Edward McGuire, in the first chapter of the “Worcester” section of this book, investigates Elgar’s cultural Catholicism; Rachel Cowgill, in the final chapter of the “London” section, illuminates the ways in which Elgar’s Catholicism pervaded his reactions to the First World War and affected the creation of his “war requiem,” The Spirit of England. Matthew Riley also touches upon Elgar’s early Catholicism in the context of the composer’s boyhood in Worcester and explores ways that this and other factors may have contributed to the view of Elgar as an “escapist” composer; both Riley and Cowgill use books by Elgar’s contemporary H. G. Wells to explicate aspects of the composer’s personality and work. In a counterpoint to McGuire’s research on Elgar’s Catholic education, I explore how the composer’s self-tutelage, manifested in childhood and encouraged by his mother, acted both to tie him to and to liberate him from the modest class position into which he was born. Nalini Ghuman and Deborah Heckert organize their essays around Elgar’s masque, The Crown of India, but while Ghuman uses the score to elucidate the fraught question of Elgar’s possible collusions with imperialism, Heckert provides a portrait of the composer as a “public poet” who embraced modernity by entering into the vital popular culture of the Edwardian music halls. Daniel M. Grimley’s essay on Elgar’s musical populism, and the attendant charges of “vulgarity” leveled against the composer, might be read profitably alongside Aidan J. Thomson’s lively investigation of those contemporary critics who were less than enamored of Elgar’s music. While Thomson, Heckert, and Ghuman place Elgar in the context of his public life, especially in urban settings, Sophie Fuller demonstrates how a web of private social and musical connections served Elgar’s career and molded his music. The world revealed by Fuller stands in contrast to the private spaces that the composer inhabited as a boy in Worcester, especially the uneasy intimacy of his family circle. It is to be hoped that readers will make many such connections throughout this volume, enriching their understanding of Elgar’s music and character. By design, the two “documents” chapters are placed in the center of Edward Elgar and His World, functioning as a bridge between the two worlds: Aidan J. Thomson’s reception history of Elgar’s oratorio, The Apostles, looks back toward Worcester, the Three Choirs Festival, and the choral tradition of the West Midlands; Alison I. Shiel’s documentation of the Violin Concerto looks ahead toward one of the composer’s greatest triumphs in the concert halls of London.
As is customary with this series, Leon Botstein provides a summation that brings together many of the issues discussed throughout the volume. Botstein connects Elgar’s aesthetics and ambitions to the work of Arnold, Longfellow, and Ruskin, as well as to the canvases of the Pre-Raphaelite painters Millais and Burne-Jones. Furthermore, Botstein aptly views Elgar’s life and work though the lens provided by the writings of Cardinal Newman, whose poem “The Dream of Gerontius” provided the libretto for the composer’s great oratorio. By providing a broad context that engages specifically with Elgar’s cultural Catholicism, Botstein’s thoughtful peroration suggests paths for future research.
Did Elgar ever decide between the life represented by London and that of Worcester? By 1919, he realized that he could not maintain Severn House, and tried to sell it; he did succeed in finding a buyer—who paid a disappointingly low sum—a year after his wife’s death in 1920.22 Thus Elgar’s second experiment at living in London came to an end more melancholy than the first. For the last fourteen years of his life, Elgar lived mostly in comfortable country houses, enduring fluctuations in musical fashion that often relegated his music to an earlier, pre-war age. Although his output as a composer slowed drastically after his wife’s death, it is an exaggeration to say that he did not continue to compose: who among admirers of Elgar’s music would choose to renounce such exquisite occasional works as The Nursery Suite (1931)? The aging composer showed a certain enterprise by embracing new technologies such as radio broadcasting and the phonograph recording. In the years after Lady Elgar’s death, he set about creating a performing tradition for his music based on his own recordings, surely one of the first composers to do so.
Near the end of his life, riddled with the cancer that would kill him, Elgar asked to be cremated and have his ashes scattered at the confluence of the Severn and Teme rivers.23 Unfortunately, this touching and wholly appropriate wish, along with his urgent request that his desultory sketches for a Third Symphony be burned, was shown no respect by his daughter and by his supposedly loyal friends. In the end, he was buried with his wife in the dreary churchyard of St. Wulstan’s Catholic Church in Little Malvern, and the Third Symphony was completed later by other hands, dishonoring his memory.24
To what world did Elgar finally give his allegiance? He was happy neither in the West Country, where he yearned for the plaudits of London, nor in the great city, where he cast a nostalgic halo of prelapsarian innocence around his childhood in Worcester. Instead he internalized both places, importing aspects of London and Worcester into his true homeland, that of his imagination. While Elgar was composing his major works in the first decades of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust—with whom the English composer shared at least one acquaintance, Gabriel Fauré—was gradually discovering within himself the vast landscape of his roman fleuve, á la recherche du temps perdu. Describing a septet created by his fictional composer Vinteuil, Proust writes el
oquently of the mysterious imaginary world inhabited by composers. His words may offer a key to understanding Elgar’s tormented life and appreciating his enduring work: “Each artist seems thus to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten, and which is different from that whence another great artist, setting sail for the earth, will eventually emerge… . Composers do not actually remember this lost fatherland, but each of them remains all his life unconsciously attuned to it; he is delirious with joy when he sings in harmony with his native land, betrays it at times in his thirst for fame, but then, in seeking fame, turns his back on it, and it is only by scorning fame that he finds it when he breaks out into that distinctive strain the sameness of which—for whatever its subject it remains identical with itself—proves the permanence of the elements that compose his soul.”25
NOTES
1. Michael De-La-Noy, Elgar the Man (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 55.
2. Percy M. Young, Alice Elgar: Enigma of a Victorian Lady (London: Dennis Dobson, 1978), 167.
3. Jerrold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 631, 646.
4. Mrs. Richard Powell (Dora Penny), Edward Elgar; Memories of a Variation, 4th ed., rev. and ed. Claud Powell (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 119.
5. Felix Barker, The House that Stoll Built: The Story of the Coliseum Theatre (London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1957), 179.
6. Quoted in Robert Anderson, Elgar (New York: Schirmer Books, 1993), 102.
7. Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 630.
8. Both Jerrold Northrop Moore and Michael Kennedy have cast doubt whether or not Elgar really was suffering from Ménière’s disease. Moore opines that the composer’s giddiness might have been “only the symptom of a deep desire to escape,” while Kennedy declares that a tonsillectomy that Elgar had in 1917 effected a cure, as the composer “was not afflicted by deafness during the remaining sixteen years of his life.” See Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 630 and Michael Kennedy, The Life of Elgar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 153. Both writers ignore the complaints Elgar voiced throughout his later life, of distracting noises in his ear and debilitating episodes of giddiness, which are just as much symptoms of Ménière’s as progressive deafness. One such instance is recorded in a letter from Carice Elgar to Alice Stuart-Wortley posted on 2 June 1920: “It was arranged that [Elgar] should go to his sister yesterday, but he had another giddy attack in the morning … The Dr. says he is better today, but wants to keep him quiet a little longer … It is so distressing this giddiness again—& depresses him so.” Jerrold Northrop Moore, ed., Edward Elgar: The Windflower Letters. Correspondence with Alice Caroline Stuart Wortley and Her Family (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 241.
9. Andrew Neill, “Elgar’s War: From the Diaries of Lady Elgar, 1914–1918,” in Oh, My Horses! Elgar and the Great War, ed. Lewis Foreman (Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 2001), 29.
10. According to Alice Elgar’s diary of 8 April 1916, before catching the train, her husband had said “he felt giddy & was not sure he would go.” Elgar was befriended in his distress by a concerned army officer, Captain Dillon, and spent time in a nursing home. See Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 695.
11. William W. Austin, Music in the 20th Century: From Debussy through Stravinsky (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 87.
12. Frank Howes, “The Two Elgars,” Music and Letters 16, no. 1 (January 1935): 26–29, reprinted in An Elgar Companion, ed. Christopher Redwood (Ashbourne: Sequoia Publishing, 1982), 259.
13. See Rosa Burley (and Frank Carruthers), Edward Elgar: The Record of a Friendship, (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1971), 27–28, 38.
14. Ibid., 25–26.
15. Letter of 19 July 1912 in Jerrold Northrop Moore, Windflower Letters, 103.
16. Ralph Vaughan Williams, “What Have We Learnt from Elgar?” Music and Letters 16, no. 1 (January 1935): 13–19, reprinted in Ralph Vaughan Williams, National Music and Other Essays, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 248–55.
17. Howes, “The Two Elgars” in Redwood, Elgar Companion, 259.
18. W. H. Reed, Elgar as I Knew Him (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 86–87.
19. Quoted in Michael Kennedy, Portrait of Elgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 74.
20. Michael Kennedy, The Life of Elgar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2.
21. At Renishaw, the stately home of the Sitwell family, the lawns and gardens were covered with thick black coal dust from neighboring iron foundries for most of the Edwardian and Georgian periods; see Philip Ziegler, Osbert Sitwell (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 15.
22. Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 745–46, 760.
23. Ibid., 823.
24. This rage for “completing” unfinished scores by Elgar, unleashed by the completion of the Third Symphony, now includes a sixth Pomp and Circumstance march and a piano concerto, both based on the most slender of sketch materials.
25. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: The Captive, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Random House, 1982), 258–59.
PART I
WORCESTER
Measure of a Man:
Catechizing Elgar’s Catholic Avatars
CHARLES EDWARD MCGUIRE
In Memoriam (I): The Pan-Christian Avatar, or “What Is the Meaning of Prayers for the Dead?”
In the back of the nave of Worcester Cathedral is the Elgar Window, a memorial to the composer Edward Elgar. This window is an adornment the cathedral holds with pride: besides the requisite postcards, pamphlets, and Pitkin guides for sale in the gift shop, signs pointing the way to the window are attached to the walls of the cathedral itself, greeting visitors as they enter from the north door. The window, designed by Archibald Nicholson, was the result of an appeal by Ivor Atkins (friend of Elgar’s and longtime organist of Worcester Cathedral) and the dean of the cathedral, William Moore-Ede. Its construction proceeded rapidly in the ancient building, and the dedication occurred on September 3, 1935 at the Worcester meeting of the Three Choirs Festival, a little over a year after Elgar’s death. As was fitting for a fallen cultural hero, Viscount Cobham, then Lord Lieutenant of Worcester, unveiled the memorial.1
The Elgar window is an idealized representation of several scenes from The Dream of Gerontius. It is constructed of three panels, capped by six smaller arched windows (figure 1). In the center, Gerontius appears in two manifestations. In the lowest panel, he is the sick, dying old man from Part I of the oratorio. His attendants pray for him, underscored by the text “Go forth upon thy journey, Christian Soul” (Part I, rehearsal number 69). This prayer sends the viewer into the second segment of the window above, where Gerontius, transformed into the Soul, is borne aloft toward the throne of Christ by an obviously masculine Angel.2 Surrounding the throne, right, left, and above, are other angels hovering around a rainbow; they sing a hymn (from Part II of Gerontius, rehearsal number 60), “Praise to the Holiest in the height, and in the depths be praise.” The window’s side panels feature holy figures, including local saints with nationalistic connotations—Dunstan, Oswald, and Wulstan—the musical figures Saint Cecilia and Gregory the Great, plus a number of the persons mentioned in the Part I prayers of Gerontius, which are labeled for those not familiar with popular hagiographic iconography.3 Close by the window is a more specific memorial plaque (figure 2), with the inscription “Edward Elgar O.M., Master of the King’s Musick, 1857–1934, Proficiscere Anima Christiana De Hoc Mundo.” This Latin phrase, drawn from the liturgy, is sung by the Priest at the end of the first part of Gerontius (Part I, rehearsal number 68).
Figure 1. The Elgar Window, Worcester Cathedral.
Figure 2. Elgar memorial plaque, Worcester Cathedral.
For the window’s dedication, “Nimrod” from the Variations on an Original Theme, op. 36 (the Enigma Variations) followed Ludwig van Beethoven’s Drei Equale for trombones. An afterno
on performance of The Dream of Gerontius (in the time slot traditionally reserved at the Three Choirs Festival for Felix Mendelssohn’s Elijah) completed the day’s events.4
That these memorials were appropriate to Elgar is not in question. After all, at the time of his death on February 23, 1934, he was Britain’s “official composer,” a status publicly acknowledged by his being made a baronet and awarded the Order of Merit, and in his position as Master of the King’s Musick. Even if his music was not at the time as revolutionary or relevant as that of a younger generation of British composers, the program to proclaim him as “essentially English” or even “quintessentially English”—and therefore a totem of nationalism—had already begun.5 Worcester was proud of its native son, and there was no place more appropriate to begin memorializing him than within the walls of its most famous building.