Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

Rather than presenting a comforting illusion, Elgar’s best music occasionally stumbles across the intuition of a happy existence that for the most part remains out of reach. It is escapist in this sense, and numerous passages and techniques could be cited in illustration. The pastoral interludes in the choral and symphonic works (Caractacus, In the South, Falstaff, the symphonies) could be viewed as isomorphic to Mr. Polly’s weekend excursions: they are wonderfully idyllic, but they do not last. Thematic reminiscence in Elgar’s works—the recollection of material from an earlier movement in a later movement—is often as sensual as his memory of College Hall in Worcester: the recollections are prepared portentously, presented mysteriously, and cloaked in a hazy atmosphere. The cadenza of the Violin Concerto and the slow movement of the Second Symphony contain wellknown examples. (By contrast, the musical “present” of the later movement is usually far more prosaic.) There is a common process in Elgar’s symphonic works whereby a grandiose climax swiftly recedes and gives way to intimate, introspective music—a process known in the literature as “withdrawal.”27 During the 1910s, Elgar developed a tendency to conclude his major compositions with bitter irony or with palpable, unresolved duality. His last two substantial symphonic works, Falstaff (1913) and the Cello Concerto (1919), along with The Music Makers (1912), endure painful ruptures in their final bars, which push dream and reality, memory and present consciousness into stark oppositions. In all these examples, escape is characterized by displacement: digression from the main “argument” or “frame” of a piece. Such displacement is almost always corrected in the end. Interludes recede, reminiscences fade, and movements end with the reiteration of their “proper” frame and close in the “home” key. It is very unusual for a movement in one of Elgar’s scores to be permanently disrupted by an escapist digression and its overall course altered. Just as in Elgar’s life, there is no equivalent to Mr. Polly’s successful act of resistance. Despite their shared determination to succeed in a caste-bound society, Elgar possessed little of Wells’s resilience or enterprise, traits the author drew upon and transmuted to create the character of Mr. Polly. This is not to say the displacements leave no mark on Elgar’s music. Reality prevails, but at a price: it is diminished and discredited. In the final bars of Elgar’s later symphonic works, closure is achieved, but resolution is absent.

  A related form of escape by displacement is illustrated by Elgar’s characteristic use of abrupt tonal shifts or slippages. In many cases these shifts are soon reversed, allowing the music to resume in its original tonal sphere. They are parenthetical utterances, indicating moments of distraction or fleeting reverie. A late but charming example is found in a piece titled “Dreaming,” from the 1931 Nursery Suite (Example 1). Drowsiness turns briefly to deeper slumber six bars after rehearsal number 57, as a 6–4–2 chord on D enters, the parts marked lento, espressivo, pianissimo, and the double basses entering briefly to darken the color. But the music soon finds its way back to the tonic E and continues on its way. The examples could be multiplied. For instance, the songs from Elgar’s incidental music to the stage play The Starlight Express—given to a character known as the Organ Grinder—contain three such digressions—again flatward—each of which coincides with a call for a return to the dreams and enchantment of childhood. The reassertion of the mundane adult world is effected briskly, and sometimes brutally. The opposition between dream and reality is starkly underlined.28

  In the symphonic works, tonal displacement occasionally receives more complex treatment. Although in the final analysis an uncomfortable duality is upheld, the effect of the displacement is felt longer. In Example 2, for instance, from the Adagio of the First Symphony, a movement cast in D major, a sequence in A major underpins a rising diatonic linear pattern in the upper voice, beginning C#–D–E–F# (Examples 2a and 2b). The sequence stops when the progression turns to G# instead of G#. This turns out to be a chromatic passing note that merely delays the appearance of dominant harmony (with G#s) and then tonic harmony, completing an implicit progression of a sixth in the upper voice: C#–A. The sequence then begins again. But in the meantime the G is expanded by means of a G major chord and its applied dominant. During that expansion, the regular progress of the sequence is halted; the pulse is less marked; the texture broadens; musical time slows. This example does not present an absolute duality: the music of the sequence already possesses an idyllic tone, and the G major harmony is well integrated into the musical paragraph by virtue of the underlying voice-leading. Indeed, the broadening of the textual and rhythmic dimensions impels the music onward and allows, as it were, the sequence to unfold all the more expansively on its repetition. In this view the G major music stores up a kind of potential energy, which is released on the return to A major, the overall key of this passage.

  Example 1. “Dreaming,” Nursery Suite, rehearsal nos. 57–58

  In Example 3, from the Larghetto of the Second Symphony, the mustering of forces for a grand climax is interrupted and partially reversed by a shift from a B-flat major/G minor sphere to D major, combined with a slowing of tempo, a sudden reduction in dynamics, and a fleck of color from the clarinets. Here the sense of purpose and drive of the preceding bars is sapped—not altogether, but the gradual buildup taking place during this section has to begin all over again in the new key, D major. The music finds its way back to the tonal center of this section of the movement—F major—although much more gradually than in the excerpt from the Adagio from the First Symphony cited in Example 2a. Still, F major is asserted unambiguously at the climax of the Larghetto (see full score, rehearsal number 76) and is stabilized thereafter, so the section overall is tonally closed.

  Example 2a. Adagio, Symphony no. 1 in A-flat Major, op. 55.

  Example 2b. Adagio, Symphony no. 1 in A-flat Major, op. 55, voice-leading reduction.

  The Adagio of the Cello Concerto is perhaps the closest Elgar ever comes, from the perspective of tonality, to a wholly “escapist” movement. The piece is framed by an eight-bar period in B-flat at its beginning and end, but otherwise the tonality is fluid. A few ideas are repeated in irregular sequences, moving swiftly through distant modulations with no apparent rationale for the choice of keys that are briefly established. In Example 4, where the harmonic progressions are based around chromatic motions in parallel sixths, the abrupt tonal shifts are coordinated with changes of instrumental color (woodwind replacing strings) and, for the soloist, upward leaps to 9–8 appoggiaturas. The movement as a whole amounts to a reverie, which acquires a kind of coherence only through the consistency of its waywardness. Its melancholy quality arises not just from its obsessive dwelling on a handful of ideas but from its determination to be always distracted by them.29 Still, this attitude is sustained for only sixty bars; the opening of the finale reasserts conventional rhetoric and function and gets the concerto back on course.

  Example 3. Larghetto, Symphony no. 2 in E-flat Major, op. 63.

  The techniques illustrated by these examples have long been admired by commentators on Elgar. They are usually understood—surely correctly—as evidence of some kind of musical-cum-psychological dualism. According to Diana McVeagh:

  The half-shy, half-impulsive moments in Elgar’s music often come from a chord escaping from the prevailing tonality either to double back at once … or to turn right aside … [here she cites part of Example 3]. This was from the first a personal fingerprint … Always the unexplained chord is itself simple; its aloofness comes from its alien context, it is lingered over in a sudden hush, and its effect is of a withdrawal, a shrinking for an instant into a secret self, that is the essence of Elgar the dreamer.30

  Example 4. Adagio, Cello Concerto in E Minor, op. 85.

  And Wilfred Mellers puts it thus:

  In music such as this [part of Example 4] the rhetorician is silenced; in the free rubato of the lyricism an intimate human voice speaks directly to you and me, while an unexpected chord or modulation reveals the private heart beneath the public manner.31

&
nbsp; The idea of a “secret self” or “private heart” into which Elgar “withdraws” is a commonplace of the critical literature. Although occasionally pushed to injudicious extremes, it is undoubtedly invited both by his behavior and by his music.32

  But one might venture a further, less familiar observation, for there is a striking feature common to all these examples of tonal displacement. In each case the moment of “withdrawal” or “shrinking” coincides with an alteration in what might be termed the musical dynamic (referring now to an analogy with forces in mechanics, not loudness). On the one hand, there is a certain relaxation; on the other, suspense, like a holding of the breath. The relaxation is partly rhythmic—the effect of slowing, pausing, or the nonarticulation of pulse—and partly the result of the harmonic shift. Since the new chord has no conventional function in the old key, the harmonic logic that might otherwise link the music’s past and present and point on to its future is suspended. For a moment, as it were, things seem easy: a weight is lifted; the pressure of directed motion is released. In Examples 2 and 4, the upward leaps at the moments of tonal shift, followed by unhurried descents, accelerating only gradually, present unmistakable images of floating. These metaphors of weight and motion clarify the character of the escape under discussion here: it is an escape of the body. The music articulates the first half of Mr. Polly’s conviction: somewhere, however inaccessible, exist “pure and easy and joyous states of body and mind.”

  The notion of bodily escape in Elgar is striking because so many aspects of his mature style—style in both the sense of his personal behavior and the idiom of his music—can be linked to the Victorian disciplining of the male body. Elgar did not attend one of the great public schools, such as Eton or Rugby, but something of the ethos of those institutions—the value of strenuous physical exercise and its relation to virtue and chivalry (“fair play”) and to British imperialism—nevertheless seeped into his consciousness and into his music, too. His liking for a regular, clearly marked pulse, usually in march time; his use of florid, “courtly” gestures in his melodic lines; the many broad, serene tunes that sit precisely in the register of a male tenor voice—whether or not they are sung—could all be cited. By the same token, the emphasis on chivalry and medieval romance in Elgar’s choice of texts, his attraction to grand ceremonial, his call for English music to adopt “an out-of-door sort of spirit,” and his description of the motto theme of the First Symphony as a “sort of ideal call” resonate strongly in their various ways with the constructions of masculinity by Thomas Carlyle, Charles Kingsley, and others.33 In many cases those constructions centered on the regulation and control of masculine “energy.” On these terms, Elgar’s sudden tonal shifts represent the rare moments when the regulating practices break down and the energy is released in some new form. The results are not, as the Victorians might have feared, chaotic, but marvelously easeful.

  Part of Elgar believed in the self-disciplines and even embraced them; he probably never wholly lost his tendency to high-minded Victorian idealism, however diluted or overwritten by other attitudes it may have become in later years.34 It is of crucial importance, however, to recognize that Elgar himself did not live up to the ideals of physical masculinity sketched out here. Indeed, his mental indigestion appears to have manifested itself rather clearly in the movements of his body. Contemporary accounts described Elgar as nervous, twitchy, and ill at ease in formal company; caricatures of him conducting portrayed him as hunched, bony, and jerky. If anything, Elgar’s body fitted more closely the category of the neurasthenic in the late Victorian discourse on “decadence” and social “degeneration.”35 In this light, Elgar’s carefully posed photographs and his bristling moustache—and indeed the supposed “self-portrait” of the final Enigma variation—must be understood as compensatory strategies. The famous photograph taken by William Eller in August 1900 as Elgar was finishing Gerontius shows us, as David Cannadine puts it, “Elgar as he wanted to be seen, yet giving away more than he knew: the tradesman’s son trying too hard to conceal the fact that he was.”36 Accordingly, many of Elgar’s sudden tonal shifts—along with some of his interludes, recollections, and “withdrawals”—could be said to acquire a ring of truth. This is not a truth along the lines of “here is the true Elgar—the poet, the dreamer, not the Edwardian gentleman,” for the assiduously cultivated image of the Edwardian gentleman was also the true Elgar. Rather, it is the displacement that matters, and the overall pattern of psychological fault lines that result.

  In conclusion, it seems appropriate to distinguish two phases of Elgarian escape. In the first, Elgar attempts to escape his predicament through selfimprovement, but in so doing entraps himself further. Evidence for this compulsion can be discerned in his behavior, appearance, and music. But its effects reach even beyond Elgar’s own lifetime. For decades after his death, Elgar’s image was tarnished by his associations with nationalism, conservatism (artistic and political), and imperialism. These factors have helped confine him to the fringes of music history textbooks and of concert programs (at least, outside the United Kingdom), and until recently made academics wary of him as an object of study.37 Despite books like this one, Elgar may never wholly escape that marginalization. But the self-defeating first phase of escape is a precondition for the second, emphatically musical phase. At this point the opportunity arises for Elgar to develop some of the most affecting and powerful qualities of his music and to create a good deal of what we now value highly in his work. It was, in a way, part of Elgar’s genius to entrap himself so tightly; perhaps only a shopkeeper’s son could have brought it off with such conviction.

  NOTES

  1. On the topic of Elgar and childhood, see Michael Allis, “Elgar and the Art of Retrospective Narrative,” Journal of Musicological Research 19 (2000): 289–328; and Matthew Riley, “Childhood,” in Edward Elgar and the Nostalgic Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chap. 5.

  2. Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius and The Apostles carry epigraphs from Ruskin and Morris, respectively. Elgar quoted Kingsley in his lecture “English Composers” as professor of music at the University of Birmingham, and may have tacitly invoked him during an interview with Gerald Cumberland in 1905. Elgar probably identified with the idealistic aims of these writers, although the extent to which he endorsed their specific political agendas is unclear. See Brian Trowell, “Elgar’s Use of Literature,” in Edward Elgar: Music and Literature, ed. Raymond Monk (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 197, 228–39; Edward Elgar, A Future for English Music and Other Lectures, ed. Percy M. Young (London: Dennis Dobson), 91.

  3. J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf: Including the Poem “Mythopoeia” (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 61. Tolkien’s observation that critics have made the confusion “not always by sincere error” may even hint at the connections between modernist aesthetics and authoritarian politics in the 1930s.

  4. H. G. Wells, The History of Mr. Polly (London: Penguin, 2005), 14.

  5. See Trowell, “Elgar’s Use of Literature,” 182–326.

  6. Wells, Mr. Polly, 206.

  7. Rosa Burley and Frank C. Carruthers, Edward Elgar: The Record of a Friendship (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1972), 38.

  8. As witnessed by his letters to the Times Literary Supplement between 1919 and 1923, discussed (disparagingly) by Trowell, “Elgar’s Use of Literature,” 201–3.

  9. Wells, Mr. Polly, 159.

  10. A possible exception to this rule is the explosion that took place after one of Elgar’s chemical experiments in his garden shed in Hereford. But this was apparently accidental. W. H. Reed, Elgar as I Knew Him (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), 39.

  11. Hubert A. Leicester, Notes on Catholic Worcester (Worcester: Ebenezer Bayliss, 1928); Forgotten Worcester (Worcester: Trinity Press, 1930); How the Faith Was Preserved in Worcestershire (Worcester: Ebenezer Bayliss, 1932); Worcester Remembered (Worcester: Ebenezer Bayliss, 1935; repr. East Ardsley: S. R. Publishers Ltd., 1970). See also Leicester’s Notes on the
History of Freemen (Worcester; printed for private circulation, 1925).

  12. Leicester, Forgotten Worcester, 15, 19.

  13. Ibid., 17.

  14. Ibid., 18.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Ibid., 64; Leicester, Worcester Remembered, 49.

  17. Leicester, Worcester Remembered, 50–52.

  18. Leicester, Forgotten Worcester, 65; Notes on Catholic Worcester, 16.

  19. Leicester, Forgotten Worcester, 92, 104, 113, 112.

  20. Leicester would have approved of Pugin’s drawing of “contrasted residences for the poor” from Contrasts (1836). As the historian of religion Nigel Yates has observed, “The noble monastic buildings are replaced by a utilitarian workhouse; a diet of beef, mutton, bread and ale by one of bread and gruel; the poor person in his quasimonastic habit by a beggar in rags; the master dispensing charity by a master wielding whips and chains; decent Christian burial by the dispatch of the corpse for dissection by medical student; and the discipline of an edifying sermon by that of a public flogging.” A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts and The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (Reading: Spire Books Ltd., 2003), app., fig. 14; Nigel Yates, “Pugin and the Medieval Dream,” in Victorian Values: Personalities and Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Society, ed. Gordon Marsden (London and New York: Longman, 1990), 60–70, esp. 65.

  21. See William Stafford, “‘This Once Happy Country’: Nostalgia for Pre-Modern Society,” in The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, ed. Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1989), 33–46; and Frances Hutchinson, The Political Economy of Social Credit and Guild Socialism (London: Routledge, 1997), 14–15.

  22. See Jerrold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 465.

  23. Allis speaks of a “surfeit of references to past events” in “Retrospective Narrative,” 291; see also 328 for some examples.