Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  The book by Longfellow that held the most intense fascination for both mother and son was Hyperion (1839). In 1899 Elgar sent a copy of this volume to one of his great champions, the German conductor Hans Richter, along with a letter that confided, “I send you the little book about which we conversed & from which I, as a child, received my first idea of the great German nations.”39 One wonders what, if anything, Richter made of this sentimental gift, for Longfellow’s book is an odd hybrid production that might have puzzled any native German. Cast in four volumes, Hyperion is a Wanderroman clearly modeled upon Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796). Longfellow retails the experiences of a young American, Paul Flemming, who, as he attempts to forget the death of the “friend of his youth,” journeys through early nineteenth-century Germany.40 Flemming’s travels are drenched in German literature and culture; indeed, the American author has his protagonist “improvise” remarkably polished translations of contemporary German poets such as Salis and Uhland. This selection of verse tastefully decorates a travelogue through the Teutonic landmarks favored by American and English tourists during the nineteenth century—such as Edward and Alice Elgar, who took several holidays to Bavaria in the 1890s. Arvin shrewdly observes that Hyperion gave such travelers “an agreeable sense of moving among the Sehenswürdigkeiten of the Rhine valley, the Alps, the Tyrol—the Rhine itself, the Rhone glacier, Mont Blanc at sunrise, the Jungfrau as seen from the Furca Pass, the ancient castle at Heidelberg, or the Franciscan church at Innsbruck.”41

  Longfellow cheerfully uses his characters as mouthpieces for the expression of his own earnest aesthetic beliefs. A great many serious discussions ensue between the protagonist and a variety of interlocutors, often culminating in proclamations about the meaning of “Art” and the role of “the Artist.” Flemming and his friends are given to spouting aphorisms such as “The artist shows his character in the choice of his subject” and “Nature is a revelation of God; Art is revelation of man… . It is the creative power by which the soul of man makes itself known through some external manifestation or outward sign.”42 Although the dialogue of Hyperion is so stilted as to be virtually unreadable today, it made a deep impression upon Elgar. The young Elgar may have seen himself in Longfellow’s protagonist, whom Arvin describes as “serious, intense, high-minded, a little humorless and prudish, but sensitive and imaginative.”43 Influenced early in life by the pronouncements that passed for conversation in Hyperion, the adult composer rose to such heights himself, as when he dismisses an opinion of Roger Fry: “Music is written upon the skies for you to note down… . And you compare that to a DAMNED imitation.”44

  Elgar drew from Hyperion the text for his cantata The Black Knight—in particular Uhland’s uncanny “Der Schwarze Ritter,” one of the hero’s spontaneous translations that tend to pour forth at crucial junctures of the narrative. Although the surface of Longfellow’s “romance” is genteel to the point of obliquity, the subject is German Romanticism, after all, and undercurrents of eroticism pervade the book. Newton Arvin comments that when Hyperion was published it “enjoyed at first a mild success of scandal”; perhaps American readers of 1839 knew just how to interpret obliquity.45 In any case, the protagonist’s improvised translation of Uhland’s grim poem comes at the most erotically charged moment in the novel: Flemming is alone with a comely young Englishwoman, Mary Ashburton, and is in the process of courting her. This poem describes how the Black Knight, a figure of supreme potency who combines both Eros and Thanatos, unseats the king’s son in a joust and then dances with the king’s daughter, causing the “flowerets” in her hair to fade and drop to the ground. She is thus deflowered as her partner “coldly clasped her limbs around.” Both son and daughter then wither and die before their father’s eyes, poisoned by their shame as they drink “golden wine,” as the grim knight exults in the final line: “‘Roses in the spring I gather!’” After commenting that the “knight in black mail, and the waving in of the mighty shadow in the dance and the dropping of the faded flowers, are all strikingly presented,” Longfellow’s hero remarks that Uhland’s poem “tells its own story and needs no explanation.”46

  Elgar’s choice of this poem, which as Aidan J. Thomson has insightfully observed is the obverse of the narrative of Wagner’s Parsifal, speaks to a darker inheritance that the young Edward may have received from his mother.47 Elgar constantly reenacted in his own life moments of tension between repression and disclosure such as those that figure in the Mary Ashburton chapters in Hyperion with some intensity. As Jerrold Northrop Moore points out, when Ann Elgar chose excerpts from Longfellow’s volume for her scrapbook, “she copied out several passages from Hyperion bearing directly on the artist and his problems… . The first was from a scene in which the young hero contemplates the ruins of a high old castle above the Rhine, and seems to hear it say: ‘Beware of dreams! Beware of illusions of fancy! Beware of the solemn deceivings of thy vast desires.’”48

  In its brevity and simplicity, Ann Elgar’s couplet describing her son Edward evinces an acute psychological penetration: “Nervous, sensitive and kind, / Displays no vulgar frame of mind.” But most children are vulgar at times, and it is healthy for them to be so. Did Ann instinctively use Hyperion as an instrument for asserting her influence over her disconcertingly emotional and, even at an early age, obsessive son? Was this her very effective way of teaching him to police his own emotions, of keeping him from slipping into a “vulgar frame of mind”? If so, what, exactly, did she fear for him? That he might slip into some kind of “vulgarity” if not warned of the “solemn deceivings” of his “vast desires”?

  The effect of their shared devotion to Longfellow’s Hyperion on her son’s psychological development cannot, perhaps, be gauged fully. It is certain, however, that Ann Elgar’s taste in literature exercised a deep and lasting effect on the sort of poetry that her son set to music over the course of his career. When Elgar was moved to write poetry himself, such as for “The River,” op. 60, no. 2 (1909), his verse is reminiscent of Longfellow’s in both mood and scansion, but such was the vogue: other writers, including Tennyson and A. C. Benson, provide the same patterns. Nevertheless, a great deal of the poetry set by Elgar features the smooth stress patterns and chiming rhymes favored by Longfellow and reflects his mother’s taste for such lyric effusions. Elgar was rarely tempted to set poetry outside the canon of his own early tastes; although he knew Walt Whitman’s poetry, he was, with Parry, one of the few British composers of the time to find no musical potential in this American’s expansive verse.49

  In his loyalty to the literary idioms of his youth, including classic authors, Elgar demonstrated a trait common to many working-class autodidacts: a tenacious and detailed persistence of memory. Elgar held fast to early aesthetic and literary experiences and returned to them repeatedly over the course of his adult life. In this process, acquiring used books played a large part. Like many penurious readers, Elgar soon became expert in the collection of old editions purchased at bargain prices. In Robert J. Buckley’s early biography of Elgar, published in 1904, the author testifies: “The composer revealed himself as a book enthusiast, a haunter of the remoter shelves of second-hand bookshops, with a leaning to the rich and rare.”50 Intimidated by the ever-snobbish Alice Elgar, who sent him a detailed commentary on the interview before it appeared, Buckley turns Elgar’s “haunting of second-hand bookshops” into evidence of the composer’s connoisseurship—a “leaning to the rich and rare.”51 Elgar may in fact have developed this habit in his youth because new books were expensive. Such constraints meant that working-class readers often favored literature of earlier periods, including the eighteenth century, which could be obtained in inexpensive popular editions, in secondhand bookstalls, in cheap reprints, or, as in Elgar’s case, by happenstance.

  Certain of the composer’s biographers have seen Elgar’s interest in earlier literature as a mark of extraordinary intellectual curiosity, but a fascination with such authors was common among working-class
autodidacts in the mid-nineteenth century.52 In the interview with The Strand Magazine in 1904 Elgar explains how he began to “read everything”:

  I had the good fortune to be thrown among an unsorted collection of old books. There were books of all kinds, and all distinguished by the characteristic that they were for the most part incomplete. I busied myself for days and weeks arranging them. I picked out the theological books, of which there were a great many, and put them on one side. Then I made a place for the Elizabethan dramatists, the chronicles including Barker’s and Hollinshed’s, besides a tolerable collection of old poets and translations of Voltaire and all sorts of things up to the eighteenth century. Then I began to read. I used to get up at four or five o’clock in the summer and read—every available opportunity found me reading. I read till dark. I finished reading every one of those books—including the theology. The result of that reading has been that people tell me that I know more of life up to the eighteenth century than I do of my own time, and it is probably true.53

  In an earlier interview with F. G. Edwards, Elgar relayed this story in a less vivid fashion but named titles: “In this way, he made the acquaintance of Sir Philip Sydney’s Arcadia, Baker’s Chronicles, Drayton’s Polyolbion, etc.”54 In “Elgar’s Use of Literature,” Brian Trowell wrote, “Edwards originally mentioned only Sir Philip Sydney” but Elgar added the rest of the list to the proof. Trowell opines that “these are indeed extraordinarily unlikely books for a fifteen-year-old to read, more a test of endurance than a literary experience.”55 Trowell misses a vital point, however, for an impecunious but voracious reader starved for material virtually any book will suffice, especially if nothing else is available. As Rose relates in his history, the self-educated Marxist author T. A. Jackson (1879–1955) testified that as an adolescent he read “Pope, old volumes from the Spectator, Robinson Crusoe, Pope’s translations of Homer, and a copy of Paradise Lost” for “the simple reason that there was nothing else to read.” Jackson later commented, in terms surprisingly close to those of Elgar, that “mentally speaking” he dated “from the early 18th century.”56 Rose further cites the memories of C. H. Rolph, who recalled that his father, a London policeman, read such books as “Aristotle’s Ethics, The Koran, Xenophon’s Memorabilia, the Nibelungenlied” as well as “Schiller’s William Tell.” After considering the effect of Xenophon on a London policeman of the Edwardian era, it is perhaps less difficult to imagine a young Edward Elgar devouring Sydney, Voltaire, and other authors more abstruse.

  Ann Elgar’s reading may have included easily acquired classics, such as Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad, a volume that remained popular with working-class readers throughout the nineteenth century.57 Such an interest in these classic authors may account for Frank Schuster’s curious belief, told to Sassoon, that Elgar’s mother “used to sit up half the night reading Greek and Latin with him when a boy.”58 Whereas it is certainly true that some working-class readers did teach themselves Greek and Latin, it seems unlikely that a woman with a wayward husband and five children to feed, clothe, and educate had time to acquire the linguistic skills required to read Homer or Virgil in the original. In December 1874, Ann expounded upon the challenges of her situation: “It is no joke to have men and women to rule, and keep peace between, and to keep home in something [of] order and comfort.”59 Michael De-la-Noy is tartly dismissive of Schuster’s remark, implying that it was the result of a typically Elgarian exaggeration, but it is quite possible that Schuster was laboring under a misapprehension, since it seems unlikely that Elgar, even in his most self-mythologizing moods, would have concocted such an improbable tale. But it is entirely plausible that Elgar related to Schuster how his mother used to read translations of the Greek and Latin classics to him.60 Reading aloud was a major form of entertainment and edification in all kinds of households throughout the nineteenth century and, indeed, until the advent of radio broadcasting.61

  However he may have found the literature of earlier eras, including the Greek and Latin classics, Elgar’s youthful interest in writers of earlier centuries—especially that of the previous one—resonated throughout his work. Has any other English composer since the death of Arne written so many minuets? These minuets, along with a light sprinkling of gavottes, appear throughout his career. Aside from the dedicated Minuet for Piano (1897; later orchestrated as op. 21), they appear in such disparate works as the Harmony Music no. 5 (1878), containing a minuet that Elgar reworked fifty-two years later for the Severn Suite, op. 87 (1930); the first Wand of Youth Suite, op. 1A (despite the fanciful opus number, this score dates from 1907); The Crown of India Suite, op. 66 (1912); and the incidental music to Beau Brummell (1928). Evocations of the eighteenth century occur in the Variations on an Original Theme, op. 36 (Enigma Variations, 1898–99)—Elgar once implied that the eighth variation, “W.N.,” was in part “suggested by an eighteenth-century house”—and consistently throughout his ballet, The Sanguine Fan, op. 81 (1917), the action of which unfolds in a rococo setting. Jerrold Northrop Moore writes: “The Sanguine Fan score opened with an ‘18th century theme’ (as the diary described it)—a courtly minuet elaborately descending.”62 (This four-measure minuet theme, usually presented as an antecedent phrase in search of a balancing consequent, permeates the entire work; it is treated almost like a ritornello throughout a substantial part of the score and is the source from which most of the thematic material is derived.) None of these minuets give off even the merest whiff of either irony or pastiche: Elgar’s musical antiquarianism was spontaneous, sincere, and informed by childhood memories.

  Example 1. “Minuet” Theme, The Sanguine Fan, op.8, starting three measures after the opening.

  One result of his unsupervised early reading may have been Elgar’s compulsion toward mystification.63 As part of this inner game, and to throw pursuers off his track, Elgar often sprinkled his manuscripts with epigraph “hints” from seemingly obscure sources such as Virgil, Tasso, Lesage, and others. It is not always apparent, however, that the composer was familiar with the entire book from which he quotes—or indeed where he may have found the epigraph in the first place. For example, the notoriously ambiguous line that Elgar affixed to the score of his Violin Concerto was drawn from Alain-René Lesage’s eighteenth-century picaresque novel, L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35; translated into English by Tobias Smollett in 1748 as The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane). Given its eighteenth-century provenance, and its translation by a noted English novelist of that period, Gil Blas would seem to fall firmly within the ken of Elgar’s literary enthusiasms; Brian Trowell has observed that this novel “was much better known in Elgar’s time than it is today,” an assertion that may well be true, but for which the author declines to offer even anecdotal evidence. Moore has pointed out, however, that this epigraph may have come to Elgar through the mediation of a contemporary poet, W. E. Henley, who quoted the same phrase—”Aquí estí encerrada el alma de …”—at the beginning of a volume titled Echoes.64 Did Elgar seek to appear more learned than he was, or was the temptation to expropriate a good mystifying quotation just too strong for him to resist?

  The epigraph drawn from Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (1865) that Elgar inscribed on the full score manuscript of The Dream of Gerontius is another matter altogether, and points up the composer’s contradictory allegiances regarding his working-class origins. This epigraph is drawn from the first of the lectures that constitute Sesame and Lilies, Of Kings’ Treasuries,” section 9: “This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved, hated, like another: my life was as the vapor, and is not: but this I saw and knew: this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory.”65 Unlike the ambiguity surrounding Gil Blas, Elgar had clearly read Sesame and Lilies: he had received this volume, along with Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Crown of Wild Olive, and others, as a gift from E. W. Whinfield in 1889.66 Induced by Charles F. Kenyon, a journalist who wrote under the pseudonym Gerald Cumberland, into r
ecommending models of pure literary style, Elgar innocently cited Shakespeare, Ruskin, and Cardinal Newman.67 Elgar’s response to Cumberland thus places Ruskin in a triumvirate at the top of his pantheon.

  Brian Trowell remarks that today it seems “not only odd, but disappointing” that Elgar declined to evoke Ruskin’s name during the course of the Peyton Lectures he gave at the University of Birmingham in 1905–6.68 But Elgar may have had cogent reasons for not quoting Ruskin directly, for as Trowell astutely observes, “Few people read Ruskin today, and it is curious how superficial our notions of ‘Ruskinian aestheticism’ have become… . In his own time, Ruskin was considered by many to be an unsettling and dangerous writer, or at best an impractical visionary.”69 Although Ruskin was admired by nearly all for his art criticism, his radical theories on political economy, including his comments on the need for a fixed wage for workingmen, were pilloried in the British press. The Saturday Review, for example, excoriated Ruskin’s political writings as “eruptions of windy hysterics … utter imbecility.”70 Ruskin’s plea in Sesame and Lilies for educational reforms designed to benefit workingmen and women, including for the establishment of “great libraries that will be accessible to all clean and orderly persons at all times of the day and evening” are far less startling than his suggestion that “maximum limits should be assigned to incomes, according to classes.”71 For voicing such progressive and compassionate sentiments, Ruskin, who put his educational beliefs into practice by teaching at the Working Men’s College, was revered by working-class readers.72

  As Percy M. Young has noted, the public lecture itself was a tradition rooted in an ethic of Victorian adult education that had its roots in the working-class Mechanic’s Institutes—and Ruskin was widely considered the preeminent master of the public lecture. Even though Ruskin is not cited, Elgar’s Peyton Lectures are in essence a Ruskinian project. Young writes: “Elgar, the beneficiary of Victorian education and non-education, did not attempt to disguise a moral purpose, as is shown particularly by his loaded adjectives and his inspirational quotations from other writers… . Nor did he fail to draw attention to the responsibility that should be borne by those who controlled the nation’s wealth.”73 Elgar’s retentive memory allowed him to echo certain passages from Sesame and Lilies in both style and substance. Even the controversy engendered by Elgar’s lectures is reminiscent of how certain Ruskinian ideas were received by the popular press.