Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  24. See Charles McGuire’s essay in this volume for a detailed discussion of Elgar’s Catholicism.

  25. 3 June 1931 in Jerrold Northrop Moore, ed., Edward Elgar: Letters of a Lifetime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 438. Cited also in Allis, “Retrospective Narrative,” 322.

  26. Leicester, Notes on Catholic Worcester, 16.

  27. For a discussion of the history of this idea, see Riley, “Identity,” chap. 6 in Nostalgic Imagination.

  28. Two of Elgar’s letters refer to his liking for flatward modulation: to A. J. Jaeger, 19 September 1908, and to Ernest Newman, 27 October 1908. See Jerrold Northrop Moore, ed., Elgar and his Publishers: Letters of a Creative Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 2:710; and Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 199. For a discussion of the modulations in the Organ Grinder’s songs, see Riley, Nostalgic Imagination, chap. 5. Numerous antecedents for Elgar’s flatward shifts can be found in nineteenth-Century music, most notably in Schubert. For a discussion that links these phenomena with modern philosophical dualism, see Karol Berger, “Beethoven and the Aesthetic State,” Beethoven Forum 7, ed. Mark Evan Bonds (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 17–44.

  29. For further discussion of melancholy in the Cello Concerto, see Christopher Mark, “The Later Orchestral Music,” in The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, ed. Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 166–69.

  30. Diana McVeagh, Edward Elgar: His Life and Music (London: J. M. Dent, 1955), 200–201.

  31. Alec Harman, Anthony Milner, and Wilfred Mellers, Man and his Music (London: Barrie & Rockliffe, 1962), 970.

  32. See Riley, Nostalgic Imagination, chap. 6.

  33. Elgar, A Future for English Music, 57; letter to Ernest Newman, 4 November1908, cited in Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 200.

  34. Elgar’s biographer Basil Maine referred to “the growing scepticism of Elgar’s attitude to life,” but added that “it is one of the many contradictions that are to be discerned in his character, that this scepticism exists in him together with an intense and noble idealism. The problem is to discover which of the two is the more deeply rooted.” Basil Maine, Elgar, His Life and Works (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1933), 1:197.

  35. See for instance, the caricature of Elgar conducting (1905), reproduced without attribution in Elgar, A Future for English Music, 44–45; and the two Edmond Kapp drawings of Elgar conducting held by the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham. See also the extract from Gerald Cumberland’s Set Down in Malice: A Book of Reminiscences (London: Grant Richards, 1919), reproduced in An Elgar Companion, ed., Christopher Redwood (Ashbourne: Sequoia/Moorland, 1982), 130–36; and the commentary on this passage by Byron Adams, “The ‘Dark Saying’ of the Enigma: Homoeroticism and the Elgarian Paradox,” in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitsell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 223–24.

  36. David Cannadine, “Sir Edward Elgar,” in The Pleasure of the Past (London: Collins, 1989), 121.

  37. This tradition is maintained in Richard Taruskin’s The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), which ignores Elgar entirely.

  Elgar and the Persistence of Memory

  BYRON ADAMS

  The attribute of intelligence is not to contemplate but transform.

  —Jean Piaget, Psychology and Epistemology, 1972

  “I am self-taught in the matter of harmony, counterpoint, form, and, in short in the whole of the ‘mystery’ of music,” declared Edward Elgar in a 1904 interview published in The Strand Magazine. The composer then laid the necessity for self-tutelage at the feet of his humble birth: “When I resolved to become a composer and found that the exigencies of life would prevent me from getting any tuition, the only thing to do was to teach myself… . I read everything, played everything, and heard everything I possibly could.”1 Elgar’s claim is characteristically flamboyant and self-dramatizing, but it is essentially accurate. All of Elgar’s biographers have traced the stages of Elgar’s learning, demonstrating that the composer was indeed essentially self-taught in music theory and that he amassed his formidable technique largely through his own initiative.2

  As the interview suggests, Elgar was clear concerning his unconventional education, the facts of which were well-known within his profession as well as in academia. When the composer was awarded an honorary doctorate from Cambridge in 1900, the Public Orator pointedly lauded Elgar as an “autodidactus.”3 But if, like Schoenberg, Elgar was one of the stunningly successful autodidacts of music history, the question arises how his self-education shaped his later habits and choices. What exactly does it mean to be an autodidact, that is, one who undertakes to educate oneself?

  Applied to Edward Elgar, this question proves to be of great import, especially as several possible answers can illuminate aspects of both the man and his music. Recent investigations of autodidacts in the fields of social history and educational psychology provide a lens through which to view the experience of this ardent autodidact from Worcester. A clearer outline of Elgar’s personality and creative process emerges when he is placed among contemporary British working-class people striving to better themselves. New work in educational psychology may help reveal the effect that his early learning experiences may have had on several mature compositions. Definitive conclusions cannot be reached in an essay of this size: with a subject as complex as learning—especially when applied to Elgar’s multifaceted and contradictory personality—it will only be possible to provide a starting point for a much longer scholarly journey.

  The Voracious Reader

  Print is the technology of individualism.

  —Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, 1962

  To comprehend better Elgar’s keen need for self-education, the true nature of his class background must first be described without sentimentality. Although many writers on Elgar speak of his family as lower-middle-class tradesmen, this designation became appropriate only several years after Elgar’s birth in 1857. Elgar was born into a working-class family that later rose in the world to a marginally higher station. During the course of a conversation recorded by Siegfried Sassoon, Elgar’s patron Frank Schuster summed up the social status of the composer’s parents: “E[lgar]’s mother [was a] barmaid at a little pub. E[lgar]’s father used to ride around the country on a cob and tune pianos for the local gentry.”4 (Elgar himself gave a similar description of his father, with the telling addition that “he never did a stroke of work in his life.”)5 Born in 1822, William Elgar came to Worcestershire from Dover with some practical musical skills, the ability to tune a piano, and a very modest education; at least one of his son’s biographers has called William “semi-literate.”6 Despite his thoroughbred mare and cultivated air of gentility, William Elgar’s modest financial status, lack of education, and manner of labor left him poised between the lowest rungs of the lower-middle class and the upper echelons of the unvarnished working class. When William took his son along on his professional visits to Madresfield Court, palatial home of the noble Lygon family, young Edward was dispatched to play with his social equals, the children of the head gardener.7

  If the class status of his father was ambiguous, the origins of Elgar’s mother, Ann (née Greening), were frankly working class.8 Born in the same year as her husband, Ann came from a family of poor and largely illiterate farm laborers; for a very few years she attended the local parish school at Weston-under-Penyard.9 Ann learned to read during her abbreviated formal education and evinced an early love of learning. As a teenager, she left her native Herefordshire to settle in Worcester, working at a tavern called The Shades.10 Here she met her future husband, with whom, after their marriage in 1848, she had seven (or possibly eight) children.11 At first the couple lived simply, as befitted their modest social status and income. Shortly after settling in Worcestershire, William Elgar became a fixture on the local musical scene, playing among the
second violins in various ensembles and, unusual for an Anglican, accepting the post of organist of St. George’s Roman Catholic Church in 1846.12 These musical odd jobs provided a welcome supplement to his income as an itinerant piano tuner. In 1860 William Elgar, who was luckily assisted by his hardworking brother Henry, opened a music shop at 10 High Street in Worcester. Due to Henry Elgar’s diligence, and in spite of William’s indolence, the shop was moderately prosperous.13 With the opening of this shop, young Edward’s family made its modest ascent into the ranks of lower-middle-class tradesmen.

  The more censorious among their small-town neighbors may well have considered the Elgar family to be less than perfectly respectable. William used his pay to imbibe more than a pint or two, an expensive habit that was the source of continuing friction at home. Worse yet, in 1852 Ann Elgar converted to Roman Catholicism, the result of having followed her husband to St. George’s when he played organ for Sunday mass. Ann’s conversion, made in the face of her husband’s exasperated disapproval, was audacious indeed for the daughter of Protestant farm laborers in a rural town.14 Not only was she seeking religious consolation but self-assertion in rigid little Worcester.

  Ann Elgar’s desire for individual choice, joined with a lifelong habit of reading, puts her squarely within the tradition of the autodidacts whose testimonies are collected in Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.15 Beginning in the late eighteenth century and concluding in the latter decades of the twentieth century, Rose’s book, though filled with statistics regarding the education, reading, and cultural preferences of its subjects, is most valuable for its testimonies. In a manner as admirable as it is unusual, working-class voices rise from Rose’s pages, their words often eloquent. Rose’s procedure of interlacing testimony with fact and sociological analysis produces a landscape teeming with earnest self-educators, which challenges received opinion on the nature of the working class during the Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian eras.

  If placed in the company of the working-class learners who populate Rose’s history, Ann Elgar is unusual only in that, given the rigid gender boundaries of the time, fewer women are found in their ranks than men.16 Given the obstacles, she must have been extraordinarily determined to gain control over her own lot and improve the lives of her children. The seed of Ann’s ambitions bore fruit with two of her five surviving children: Ellen Agnes, who took the vows of a nun after her mother’s death and eventually was appointed prioress of the Convent of St. Rose of Lima at Stoke; and her oldest surviving son, Edward, who became successful beyond his mother’s wildest hopes.17

  Nowhere is Ann Elgar’s strength of character demonstrated more plainly than in her struggle to obtain the best education possible for Edward. He was born thirteen years before the 1870 Education Act (also known as the Forster Act), which, as Rose notes, “supplemented the church schools (which had never served the entire population) with state schools governed by elected school boards.”18 Before this reform, working-class children generally received a scant few years of instruction. Before 1870, practically no educational opportunities were open to the working classes; those that existed were private and often affiliated with religious organizations. For working-class Roman Catholics, the situation was often dire.

  Elgar was first sent to a Dame school, a charity establishment primarily intended for girls. This school was run by Miss Caroline Walsh, whom Charles Edward McGuire accurately characterizes as a fervent “Catholic convert.”19 On the basis of the available evidence, Miss Walsh’s Dame school—a designation that does not refer to the gender of the instructors but, as Rose writes, is “a generic term applied to any working-class private school”—seems to have been at least competently organized, serious, and decorous.20

  The quality of Elgar’s next school, St. Anne’s, is open to question based on the composer’s own memories. This school was established by the venerable and Catholic Berkeley family at their estate, Spetchley Park, as a charitable institution intended chiefly for those children whose parents worked on the estate itself.21 In a letter of 1912 to Ernest Newman, who was visiting Spetchley Park at the time, the composer reminisced that “S[petchley] is the village where I spent so much of my early childhood—at the Catholic School house: my spirit haunts it still.”22 Perhaps the general context of this letter to Newman, which mostly concerned Elgar’s The Music Makers, a deeply autobiographical score, prompted Elgar to exaggerate Spetchley’s significance, as he spent just two terms there.23 The more so that this recollection was confided to none other than Ernest Newman, who related in 1955, quite late in his own life: “Elgar told me that as a boy he used to gaze from the school windows in rapt wonder at the great trees in the park swaying in the wind.”24 It is disconcerting, however, that the adult composer’s chief memory of St. Anne’s was looking out the schoolroom window—rather than anything he might have learned there.

  The last few years of Elgar’s formal education, from 1869 to 1872, were spent at Francis Reeve’s school, Littleton House, which was situated across the Severn River from Worcester Cathedral. Elsewhere in this volume, McGuire paints a vivid portrait of this institution, and the young Elgar was lucky indeed to attend what was, in essence, a modest Catholic “public” school run by a professional schoolmaster, for profit.25 How Ann Elgar managed to pay for Edward’s schooling there is a wonder, given the slender household budget. Reeve must have been an effective teacher, since the adult Elgar once wrote him a brief encomium that declared, “Some of your boys try to follow out your good advice & training, although I can answer for one who falls only too far short of your ideal.”26 That Elgar remained in school until fifteen is a testament to his mother’s steely determination in the face of both fluctuating income and the easygoing indifference of her husband.27

  Through her love of reading, her own writing, and her taste in authors, Ann Elgar neatly fits the profile of a working-class autodidact of nineteenth-century Britain. To her granddaughter Carice, Ann wrote in 1897, “When I was a very young girl I used to think I should read all the books I ever met with.”28 (Recall Elgar’s own testimony, quoted previously, that “I read everything, played everything, and heard everything I possibly could.”) Like many others of her class, Ann knew instinctively that learning would give her a greater measure of agency over her inner life. One working-class autodidact testified: “Life only becomes conscious of itself when it is translated into word, for only in the word is reality discovered.” Of this observation, Rose notes: “That was the autodidacts’ mission statement: to be more than passive consumers of literature, to be active thinkers and writers.”29

  A striking aspect of many working-class readers was a marked devotion to poetry. Furthermore, many of these working-class readers were not merely “passive consumers” of poetry, but wrote verse themselves. Ann Elgar was one such amateur poet; though lacking technical polish, her poetry is often touching in its sincerity and infinitely more readable than the technically accomplished verse, sadly marred by a simpering gentility, written by Edward’s cultivated wife, Alice.

  One of Ann Elgar’s favorite poets was the American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, an enthusiasm she passed on to Edward.30 Longfellow’s mellifluous verse struck a resonant and sustained chord in the hearts of British readers.31 That he was fêted by the great reflected this: on an 1868 visit to England the American poet was granted degrees by both Cambridge and Oxford; was received at Windsor by Queen Victoria; and was handsomely entertained by the likes of Gladstone, Dickens, Ruskin, and Tennyson.32 As Newton Arvin remarks, “The most familiar of his poems—it will by no means do to say always his best—had entered, as it might seem ineradicably, into the popular consciousness.”33 An additional inducement for working-class British readers was that along with other American authors, Longfellow was published in inexpensive editions, for, as Rose observes, the “United States failed to sign an international copyright agreement until 1891… . Thanks to this availability, the literary conservatism so common amon
g the working classes was reversed in the case of American authors, who were enjoyed by common readers long before they acquired respectability in critical circles.”34

  Longfellow’s poetry appealed to nineteenth-century readers such as Ann Elgar for several reasons: its suave, easy-to-memorize verse patterns; a surface propriety overlaying an intense and at times vaguely erotic romanticism; its vivid descriptions and lucid narrative flow; and its unashamed appeal to the emotions. Like many, Ann Elgar may have modeled her own verse after the American’s more domestic lyrics.35 Ann’s touching couplet evoking her daughter Ellen—“Slender, thoughtful tender maid,/Like a young fawn in the shade”—is reminiscent of Longfellow’s “The Children’s Hour,” with its touching description of his own daughters: “Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, /And Edith with golden hair.”36 In addition, chivalric romances enthralled Ann Elgar; her daughter Lucy once wrote that her mother’s youth had “been peopled from noble books, and it was in their pages she had met her friends and companions—men romantically honourable and loyal, women faithful in love even unto death; both alike doing nobly with this life because they held it as a gauge of life eternal.”37

  Ann’s musical son was particularly drawn to Longfellow throughout the 1890s, setting the American poet’s verse in two large choral scores, The Black Knight, op. 25 (1889–92) and Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf, op. 30 (1895). Elgar also used Longfellow’s translation of Froissart for one of his finest songs, “Rondel,” op. 16, no. 3. (1894). Like his mother, Elgar was inspired by figures such as King Olaf; the dynamic passages extracted directly from Longfellow for Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf inspired some of the composer’s most dashing music. Furthermore, Elgar modeled the third tableau of Part I of his oratorio The Apostles, op. 49 (1902–3), “In the Tower of Magdala,” on Longfellow’s portrait of Mary Magdalene as found in the epic poem The Divine Tragedy. Although the composer’s verses are drawn from holy writ, the dramatic progression of this tableau is indebted to Longfellow’s portrayal of the penitent Magdalene.38