Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  The Malvern uplands are to be seen, not described. No appreciative mind can fail to be impressed with the bold outline, the imposing abruptness, and the verdant loveliness of these everlasting hills. Nature has left the impress of her smile on this favored region. It is a steep climb to the hilltop above Malvern Wells, but it more than repays the wayfarer who has eyes to behold and a soul to satisfy. The enjoyment of a quiet stroll along these grassy heights is greatly enhanced by the companionship of one who habitually thinks his thoughts and draws his inspirations from these elevated surroundings.5

  Barringer argues that Edwards’s description, presumably endorsed by Elgar, can be read partly as a statement of class aspiration, in which the sense of physical elevation upon the hills reflected Elgar’s desire to escape his essentially urban bourgeois tradesman’s origins and ascend (“a steep climb”!) to his wife’s upper-middle-class status. It also represents the adoption of a familiar Romantic subject position (that of the “wayfarer” or wanderer), in which the position of survey (from the “grassy heights”) marked both control over a lower dominion and proximity to an ethereal realm of divine creative genius. This sense of elevation furthermore suggests an exaltation of artistic value or a heightened aesthetic experience—the domain of high art.

  But elsewhere Elgar was no less eager to descend to the valley (both literally and figuratively) in order to ensure the broad popular appeal of his music, either to safeguard revenue (Elgar’s correspondence with his publishers illustrate his constant awareness of the need to maximize the commercial value of his work where possible) or perhaps to gain professional esteem in order to justify or validate his occupation as a creative practitioner in a commercial marketplace. The contemporary state of the music profession in Edwardian Britain, as Cyril Ehrlich has observed, was sufficiently precarious for such preoccupation with financial income to be virtually unavoidable, especially for musicians from Elgar’s socioeconomic background. As Ehrlich suggests, “A pervasive glut—an excess of supply over any conceivable level of demand—was the prevailing condition of musical life.”6 Indeed, both the early and, arguably, the latter half of Elgar’s career attest to some of the difficulties encountered by musicians without a significant independent source of income. “For the majority without such resources,” Ehrlich writes, “ceaseless teaching was the common lot, at home and in institutions which attached images of excellence to mediocre realities,” a fate that Elgar narrowly avoided. But Elgar experienced firsthand the extent to which, as Ehrlich notes, “the cultural environment of London did not nurture musicianship.”7 Each of the composer’s attempts to establish a permanent base in the capital proved unsuccessful.

  Elgar’s creative response to this professional situation, in spite of the lofty image portrayed by Edwards’s piece in The Musical Times, was to write music that appealed to different kinds of listeners. Hence, popular elements can be found even in his most “serious” high-art compositions (as discussion of Falstaff below will suggest). Indeed, such popular gestures do not represent a capitulation to the commercial forces of the marketplace, but an authentic mode of Elgar’s compositional voice. The various sites of production and consumption historically associated with Elgar’s work (not necessarily the same as those visited along the Elgar Route) point to his desire to address multiple levels of audience. And the need to communicate with his listeners in diverse contexts accounts for the different voices or musics that can be heard within Elgar’s work. Understood from this perspective, the popular emerges as a central category in Elgar’s music, but it is one that has not hitherto received extensive critical scrutiny. The popular can also be heard as a contested voice. It is represented most directly by a particular mode of civic music, inspired by the sounds of Elgar’s contemporary urban environments and opposed to the lone Romantic discourse of high art music that is prevalent elsewhere in Elgar’s work (and which in turn is no less prone to commercial appropriation). The remainder of this essay considers how Elgar’s music mediates such tensions in a number of brief case studies that exemplify different kinds of popular music in his work.

  Problems of defining the popular in music have been extensively discussed in the critical literature and need not be reiterated here.8 At least three distinct categories of popular music can be tentatively identified in Elgar’s work, each of which represents a different musical style or genre: salon music, music for civic occasions, and music expressive of an Arcadian nostalgia or lost innocence. The first category, salon music, consists of works such as Chanson de nuit (discussed in greater detail below) or the earlier hit Salut d’amour, pieces of moderate or “graded” difficulty suitable for performance by nonprofessional players in a range of informal contexts or venues. Elgar composed this music partly for his own use: works such as Very Easy Melodious Exercises in the First Position, op. 22 for violin and piano were generated initially as teaching material, though it is striking how the hymnic texture of these pieces resembles later works, such as the famous trio from the Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1. The category of salon music also includes the various dances (polkas, waltzes, and quadrilles) and chamber pieces composed for performance by members of Elgar’s own semiprofessional circle. Here, some of the links with Worcester promoted by the Elgar Route can be justified: such works were part of the staple repertory of the Glee Club to which Elgar belonged as a young man. Likewise, the larger-scale Harmoniemusik, or “Sheds,” that Elgar wrote for domestic use by a group of amateur wind players link the composer with Worcester.9

  Salon music represents a musical equivalent of the early-nineteenthcentury category of Trivialliteratur identified by Peter Börger—an early Romantic genre of mass-market literature of supposedly lesser aesthetic value directed toward a broad “popular” (meaning urban middle class) readership. As a species of Trivialmusik, salon music is problematic for the music historian because its very availability threatens to undermine the autonomous status of the artwork and its associated figure of creative genius. As Carl Dahlhaus has suggested, the mode of reception that such music engenders, which he terms “trivialized listening,”

  ignores or violates one of the major theoretical premises of classical-romantic art: the principle of self-absorption in the work as an aesthetic object. It does this by side-stepping the dialectic of form and content in music, extracting from it a topic or subject matter (mistaken for the work’s “contents”) and withdrawing from the acoustic phenomenon into the listener’s own frame of mind. In this way, the music, instead of constituting an aesthetic object, degenerates into a vehicle for associations and for edifying or melancholy self-indulgence.10

  Much of Elgar’s salon music works in this way, and the manner in which it conforms to these strictures has important implications for the critical reception of his work. As for Sibelius, another late-nineteenth-century composer who wrote many salon pieces, including hit tunes such as Valse Triste from his incidental music to Arvid Järnefelt’s play Kuolema (Death, 1903), the aesthetic value of works such as Salut d’amour has often been regarded as being in inverse proportion to their mass-market appeal.11 This was a view that Elgar partly held himself. In a letter addressed to his publishers at Novello & Co., dated 27 October 1897, Elgar articulated his concerns over the publication of the Chanson de nuit, recalling his recent experience with Salut d’amour: “I wish you could arrange terms for it which would leave me some interest in it: the last Violin piece I wrote [Salut d’amour], which unfortunately I sold some years ago for a nominal sum, now sells well—I understand 3,000 copies were sold in the month of January alone.”12 Barely a year later, when Elgar was still struggling to establish himself as a freelance composer, he wrote to August Jaeger at Novello about his aborted plans for a symphony based on the life of General Gordon: “I like this idée but my dear man why should I try?? I can’t see—I have to earn money somehow & it’s no good trying this sort of thing even for a ‘living wage’ & your firm wouldn’t give 5£ for it—I tell you I am sick of it all: why can’t I be en
couraged to do decent stuff & not hounded into triviality.”13

  For Elgar, in his less optimistic moments, salon music did become merely a means to an end: a potential source of income (sadly unrealized in the case of Salut d’amour) that detracted from his supposed “higher calling,” the composition of large-scale instrumental works such as symphonies. Yet Elgar cannot have maintained this view unequivocally, since he continued to compose similar salon pieces even after achieving a measure of financial security in the early 1900s, and such works evidently provided a certain amount of creative, as well as economic, satisfaction. In this sense alone, Elgar’s populism is an ambivalent category.

  This ambivalence can be explained partly by tensions within the genre itself. Dahlhaus argues that Trivialmusik in the nineteenth century played on the dialectic between autonomy and mass production. Hence, works such as Louis Lefébure-Wely’s Les cloches du monastère, directly comparable in tone and content to many of Elgar’s salon pieces,

  emerged as a paradoxical cross between sentimentality and mechanization, this being the aesthetic reflection of a sociohistorical clash between a philanthropical tradition and a drive toward commercialization and industrialization. It is deliberately bland, but with the pretense of being emotional. It wishes to be direct and intelligible to all, and for this reason remains within the narrowest confines of convention at the same time that it tries to appear as a spontaneous outpouring of feeling. It is banality masquerading as poetry, if only in the form of its title, for the simple reason that the nineteenth century discovered the effect of the poetical in a world that was becoming more and more prosaic.14

  At first reading, Dahlhaus’s analysis appears overly negative, reinforcing the boundaries between high and low art that much recent scholarship has sought to dismantle. It is hard to attach positive value to the suggestion that such works are “banality masquerading as poetry,” or that Trivialmusik is “deliberately bland” (the implication being that high art—meaning absolute music—is not). But underpinning Dahlhaus’s point is a more subtle one, which concerns aspects of musical process as well as reception. Here, salon music is of more intrinsic interest because it occupies a precarious aesthetic position:

  The mechanics behind its power to “touch,” though half-submerged, are nevertheless half-visible. The listener is permitted at once to enjoy and despise it. He is spared the exertions of immersing himself in the work, as required of him by great art. The cynicism of the popularmusic industry, which converts sentimentality into capital, is answered by a sentimentality which threatens at any moment to turn into cynicism and is not about to stand any nonsense.15

  This balancing point, at which the music’s sensibility just resists the commercial cynicism Dahlhaus associates with the “popular-music industry” in late-nineteenth-Century musical culture, accounts for the work’s poignancy and freshness. Elgar’s salon music is not simply trivial, therefore, but belongs partly within the high-art category of the Romantic miniature. This is a generic divide bridged also by many of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, another significant body of work whose salon associations have perhaps prevented substantial critical appreciation.16 The hybrid genre to which both Grieg’s and Elgar’s works belong contains pieces whose structural brevity hints at hidden depth or obscurity of meaning.

  Chanson de nuit belongs in exactly this category. Its outer sections articulate a hymnic melody of the kind that provides the basis for Elgar’s most obviously “popular” tune, the trio from the Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1. Musical signs of this hymnic discourse include the subdued dynamic level, the melody’s carefully graded profile and registral range (gradually unfolding over an octave and a half while avoiding successive angular leaps), the predominantly diatonic harmonic treatment, and the direction espress. e sostenuto over the violin’s initial entry. The piano’s organ- or harmonium-like accompanying chords suggest that the piece can be heard as a march or a solemn ritualized processional, similar to those in the Vesper Voluntaries for organ, op. 14 (1890), which Elgar may have modeled on César Franck’s pieces for harmonium (many titled “Offertoire”), music likewise intended for either chapel or domestic consumption. As John Butt observes, the Vesper Voluntaries owe their origins to Elgar’s employment at the Roman Catholic St. George’s church in Worcester, and the individual numbers “doubtlessly reflect something of the experimentation that service accompaniment fostered. [Elgar] clearly followed continental models rather than the traditional Anglican organ style.”17 Though it is not obviously a religious piece, Chanson de nuit, which was originally titled “Evensong,” shares this sense of liturgical context.18 The idea of communion suggested by the more urgent and impassioned middle section of the piece is arguably a spiritualized rather than an eroticized one. In that sense, the piece crosses the sacred-secular divide in a manner typical of the genre. As Dahlhaus remarks of Lefébure-Wély’s Les cloches du monastère:

  If the piece is sufficiently “characteristic” to be perceived at all (and selected from the vast oversupply of “musical commodities”), its harmony, rhythm, and melody nevertheless remain so simple that it poses not the slightest obstacle to a mode of listening that glides across the musical structure and loses itself in an imaginary vision of monastic quietude, or in melancholy self-indulgence in the listener’s own need for repose.19

  It is precisely this sense of quietude—of the convent rather than the monastery, perhaps, given the character piece’s conventionally feminine-gendered associations in the nineteenth century—which Chanson de nuit evokes.20 But this spirit of pious kitsch (a designation intended here without pejorative connotations) does not prevent the employment of musical figures that imply a greater degree of abstract musical thinking than the work’s title might otherwise suggest. The unstable harmonic progress of the middle section, for instance, is prefigured by the descending chromatic contour of the bass in the opening phrase (mm. 1–8, Example 1a), and the central climax in E-flat major from letter B (mm. 26ff., Example 1b) is anticipated by the first chromatic intrusion in the work, at measure 2. Elements of this motivic chromaticism influence the coda (marked più lento, mm. 46ff.), particularly the music’s emphasis on A#, an enharmonic transformation of the pivotal Bs that had launched the earlier climax from letter B. In Chanson de nuit, Elgar succeeds, therefore, in applying the most upto-date sophisticated harmonic techniques without compromising the genre’s essential directness and accessibility of expression. The companion piece of Chanson de nuit, the Chanson de matin, composed slightly later (1899), achieves a similar state of balance.21 The melodic design of the outer sections again suggests a chaste innocence characteristic of the genre, but the coda here leads to a sudden moment of inwardness (mm. 93–97) in which Elgar dwells on the juxtaposition of two diatonic seventh chords in first inversion, vi7 and vii7/V, in a manner that temporarily suspends any firm sense of modality.

  Example 1a. Elgar, Chanson de nuit, opening, mm. 1–4.

  Example 1b. Elgar, Chanson de nuit, central climax, mm. 25–33.

  If Chanson de matin and Chanson de nuit point to the use of Continental, rather than English, musical models, as comparison with the Vesper Voluntaries and Franck’s work suggests, then they also illustrate Elgar’s indebtedness to a musical genre with which he has not readily been associated in the critical imagination: French and Italian opera. The mood of innocence and contemplation captured in both works is derived from similar representations of meditative devotion which were common in Romantic opera. The vocal character of the melodic writing in Chanson de nuit in particular reinforces the comparison. Elgar had gained firsthand knowledge of the repertoire through membership in the Worcester Glee Club, whose playing list included favorite items from early-nineteenth-century operas, and his correspondence suggests that he was a keen operagoer during his early visits to London in the 1880s and ’90s.22 Reference to opera is also significant because it helps to collapse the tension between popular and high-brow musical styles identified by Dahlhaus. Opera was among the mos
t readily accessible musical forms in nineteenth-century musical culture, even in England, and as a genre it thrived on precisely the “paradoxical cross between sentimentality and mechanization” that Dahlhaus identifies as a characteristic of Trivialmusik. As with other salon works of their type, therefore, Chanson de matin and Chanson de nuit can be imagined as miniature operatic scenas, transposed from the public sphere of the opera house into the domestic space of the drawing room. And despite his subsequent historical reputation as a national symphonist in the Austro-German mold, such pieces suggest that Elgar’s creative roots lie in an alternative musical milieu.

  The second category of popular music that can be identified in Elgar’s work consists of pieces written for civic occasions: symphonic marches and commissioned works intended to celebrate large-scale public events such as Coronation Ode and the “Imperial Masque,” The Crown of India.23 These pieces were often enthusiastically received at their premiere. Henry Wood recalled that, following the London premiere of the Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1 in October 1901,

  the people simply rose and yelled. I had to play it again—with the same result; in fact, they refused to let me go on with the program. After considerable delay, while the audience roared its applause, I went off and fetched Harry Dearth who was to sing Hiawatha’s Vision (Coleridge-Taylor); but they would not listen. Merely to restore order, I played the march a third time. And that, I may say, was the one and only time in the history of the Promenade concerts that an orchestral item was accorded a double encore.24