Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  The appeal of St. George’s rousing solo “Rule of England” can be understood in the context of its popular musical language, for which Elgar drew on several well-known idioms of the day. The chorus’s energetic four-square melody and marching bass, along with the text’s call to arms and imperialist sentiments, is akin to the “crusader” hymn tradition in general and to the popular exemplar “Lift High the Cross” in particular. The militaristic idiom and lofty imperialism expressed in such hymns and patriotic songs had been caricatured in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas to great acclaim at the Savoy Theatre since the 1870s.60 Elgar owned several of these libretti and had seen, played in, and conducted many of Sullivan’s works in the 1880s and ’90s, including Iolanthe which, along with HMS Pinafore, seems to have inspired “Rule of England.”61 Ironically, or perhaps with original irony intact and intended, echoes of Sullivan’s imperialist spoof, “He is an Englishman” (HMS Pinafore) can be heard in the male chorus section of St. George’s song with its marching bass and nationalistic text. And “Rule of England’s” risoluto section, with its ostinato, marked marcato, and lofty sentiments, appears to have strayed out of Lord Mountararat’s song with chorus: “When Britain really ruled the waves … in good King George’s glorious days.” Elgar even invoked his own “Land of Hope and Glory” in the song’s accompaniment to tug at nationalistic heartstrings.62

  In contrast to this popular patriotism, the “Dance of the Nautch Girls” is one of the pieces “illustrating the Indian portion of the libretto” that “appeals to musicians who will distinguish with pleasure the hand of a master in subtleties of tone-colour and cross rhythms.” In writing a nautch girl’s dance, Elgar was tapping in to one of the most pervasive cultural signifiers of India in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century England. From the early days of the Raj, Indian dance had been a popular form of entertainment for the English. Yet, familiar with such dances as the waltz, the colonizers tended to misunderstand the dance they came across most often: kathak, the north Indian performance genre that includes mime, singing, accompanying music (usually tabla and sarangi) and intricate rhythmic improvisations with the feet in response to virtuosic tabla sequences.63 Kathak has a strong erotic character, as it often depicts the amorous exploits of Krishna with his consort Radha. Although traditional kathak dates back to the progressive Bhakti movement of medieval times and was later danced by skilled courtesans, or tawaifs, at the royal courts, it had, by the turn of the twentieth century, become synonymous with what foreigners termed “nautch” dancing (from the Hindi nach, meaning dance), a derogatory term associated with prostitution.64

  Nautch songs and dances in all kinds of instrumental and vocal guises had become all the rage in England; these included Venanzi’s “Dance of the Bayaderes” in Kiralfy’s India, Walter Henry Lonsdale’s “Nautch Dance” for piano (1896), Frederic H. Cowen’s “The Nautch Girl’s Song” (1898), a setting of words by the well-known authority on Indian literature, Sir Edwin Arnold.65 In June 1891, the London populace first became privy to the secrets of the nautch girl when Edward Solomon’s opera The Nautch Girl began a successful run at the Savoy in a production designed, like The Crown of India, by Percy Anderson. As Hollee Beebee, a character in the opera, explained in tantalizing detail:

  First you take a shapely maiden …

  Eyes with hidden mischief laden, Limbs that move with lissom grace,

  Then you robe this charming creature, so her beauty to enhance:

  Thus attired you may teach her all the movements of dance …

  Shape the toe, point it so, hang the head, arms out spread

  Give the wrist graceful twist, eyes half closed now you’re posed …

  Slowly twirling, creeping, curling … gently stooping, sweeping, drooping

  Slyly counting one, two, three …

  Bye and bye this shapely creature will have learned the nautch girl’s art,

  And her eyes … throwing artful, furtive glances …

  Wringing heartstrings as she dances, making conquests all along.66

  In his “Dance of the Nautch Girls,” Elgar evoked the (imagined) intricacies of kathak dance in an almost pointillistic sequence of musical gestures suggestive—to his Coliseum audience, at least—of the perceived eroticism of the dancing girl’s hand, head, and eye movements (“Limbs that move with lissom grace”/“Slowly twirling, creeping, curling”/“Eyes with hidden mischief laden”): pianissimo muted violin and flute running thirds in triplets and sextuplets with scrupulous attention to articulation; trills; tempo changes; muted string chords; and touches of muted horn, harp, and bass drum. Later, the Allegro molto features a repetitive rhythmic pattern on Elgar’s Indian drum (“Tomtoms”), along with fortissimo parallel fifths, flat leading tones, and a swirling sixteenth-note figure in flutes and piccolo to evoke the perceived wild or barbarous nature of the nautch as described by one onlooker in the late 1870s: “She wriggled her sides with all the grace of a Punjaub [sic] bear, and uttering shrill cries which resemble nothing but the death-shriek of a wild cat.” (See Example 1).67

  Following the London premiere of the Crown of India Suite, one critic described the effect of hearing the “Menuetto” after the “Dance of the Nautch Girls”:

  This movement follows as if to illustrate the statement that “East is East and West is West” in the dance as in other matters. Nothing could be in more effective contrast to the tempestuous conclusion of the Nautch Dance than this quiet and majestic old-world Minuet.68

  Beyond the irony that the minuet could be considered “old world” in comparison with the centuries-old tradition of kathak, the critic’s reference to Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West” (“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”) lends perspective to our understanding of The Crown of India’s music.69 In the masque, the stately E-flat minuet, titled “Entrance of John Company,” heralded the highest officials of “the Honourable East India Company” including Clive of India, Lord Wellesley and Warren Hastings, as well as several “heroes” of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 such as Sirs Henry Lawrence, Colin Campbell, and Henry Havelock. Marked dolce e maestoso, stilo antico, its trills and rhythmic gestures conjure up the social hierarchy of courtly eighteenth-Century European aristocracy in which the minuet promoted a particular kind of grace, agility, and control (Example 2). The minuet exemplified the European idea of dancing as a social activity in which both sexes participated. It would be difficult, then, to find two more contrasting dance forms and musical accompaniments than the European and Indian styles that Elgar depicted in his masque.

  Example 1. Allegro molto, “Dance of the Nautch Girls,” Crown of India

  Perhaps Elgar’s most exotic composition in the masque, and indeed in his entire output, is Agra’s “Hail, Immemorial Ind!” Yet, far from displaying the kind of studied musical orientalism of the “Dance of the Nautch Girls,” Agra’s song has a refined musical setting in which Elgar drew on elements of his personal idiom and, inspired by the Indian subject, expanded their expressive capacities.70 The name Agra was evocative both for Elgar and his audience: it was the former capital of the Mughal Empire and the location of several wonders of the Muslim world, including Emperor Akbar’s city Fatehpur Sikri and Shah Jehan’s Taj Mahal, which served as Agra’s backdrop at the Coliseum.71 The song unfolds in the form of a historical “mythography” of India’s glories from ancient times to British conquest and rule and is, as Benares explains, essentially an homage to India:

  O Mother! Maharanee! Mighty One! …

  Thy daughters bless thee and their voices blend

  With that unceasing song.72

  Written for alto solo and an orchestra scored to depict the mysterious delights of the distant land of its text, Agra’s song recalls Elgar’s earlier song cycle for alto and orchestra, the well-known Sea Pictures (1897–99). The sea—Shakespeare’s realm of “strange sounds and sweet aires”—inspired a highly evocative, often exotic musical language for Elgar (as it did for other c
omposers, including Debussy, Ravel, and later, Britten). While Elgar seems to have used these earlier songs as a touchstone for Agra’s aria, the Indian imagery of Hamilton’s verse evidently suggested to Elgar an extended and more nuanced vocabulary of musical expression with which he evokes every detail of this historical paean to India.73 Agra’s rich contralto, timbrally redolent (for an audience brought up on nineteenth-Century exotica) of the feminized East, begins with a refrain colored by an insistent and exotic augmented triad (A–C#–F), and closes with a suspended ninth resolving downward in the lowest regions of the orchestra (bass tuba, basses, bass drum). This gesture is derived from Agra’s singing of “Ind” and it musically suggests the ancient, mystical, and, in Agra’s own description, “dark” depths of “immemorial” India (see the first return of this refrain as it is taken up by the chorus of Indian cities in Example 3). Agra’s “quasi recitative” is peppered with tritones that call to mind “the Orient,” as Elgar’s setting of those words to a rising G#–D attests. Her vivid descriptions are brought to life by an attendant orchestra of shimmering ponticello tremolo strings, harp, flute, oboe, bassoon, clarinet, piccolo, cymbals, triangle, and glockenspiel that lead Agra’s narrative through a harmonic sequence of chromatic lines punctuated by diminished-seventh harp glissandi and ornaments (see fourth bar of Example 3).

  Example 2. Moderato, “Menuetto,” Crown of India.

  Example 3. Agra’s aria, “Hail, Immemorial Ind!” Crown of India

  Agra’s aria, along with the rest of the masque, has largely been condemned to the obscurity its colonialist premise might seem to deserve.74 The complete music from the masque was published in vocal score by Enoch & Sons in 1912, but only the well-known orchestral suite, originally published separately by Hawkes & Son (owing to the demise of the Enoch firm in the 1920s), is extant in full score and parts.75 When, in 1975, Leslie Head wished to conduct the complete masque, only two movements could be found (Agra’s song and the “Crown of India March”), and any performance of the work today would involve orchestrating the vocal score. How far, though, do memories of the masque inform our hearing of the Crown of India we know today, the orchestral suite, op. 66?

  Can the Mughals March?

  Martial music, in a decidedly Indian vein.

  —The Daily Sketch, 12 March 1912

  In September 1912, six months after the successful run of his imperial masque, Elgar conducted the premiere of his Crown of India Suite, comprising five movements: Introduction, Dance of the Nautch Girls, Menuetto, Warriors’ Dance, Intermezzo, and March of the Mogul Emperors.76 Praised as one of Elgar’s exemplary marches, this last was favored by its composer, who chose to record it several times, the last being with the Gramophone Company in 1930.77 These recordings were made, along with “Dance of the Nautch Girls,” to the delight and approval of Elgar who declared “Mogul Emperors” to be “a terrific! record.”78 The following year, Alan Webb recalled his first meeting with Elgar: “It at once became evident that most of the evening would be taken up with listening to records… . I was fascinated by his choice … of his own music, we had ‘March of the Mogul Emperors’ from The Crown of India, the new Pomp and Circumstance March no. 5, and the opening and close of the First Symphony.”79

  Soon after the Crown of India’s run at the Coliseum, the “March of the Mogul Emperors” was singled out as a popular choice for patriotic and imperial occasions. A fine example of the former is the “great patriotic concert” held at the Royal Albert Hall in April 1915 which involved more than four hundred performers drawn from army recruiting bands, and from which all proceeds went to the Professional Classes War Relief Council and the Lord Mayor’s Recruiting Bands.80 At the concert, “Mogul Emperors” was featured alongside “Land of Hope and Glory” and such favorites as “Tipperary” and “Your King and Country Need You.” Nearly a decade later, Elgar contributed music for the British Empire Exhibition held at Wembley in the summer of 1924.81 His name appeared some twenty times on the program of the grand Pageant of Empire, most prominently in “The Early Days of India” that featured his Indian Dawn (setting of Alfred Noyes) written for the occasion, along with three numbers from The Crown of India: the Introduction, the “Crown of India March,” and the “March of the Mogul Emperors.”82 These, interspersed with the other exemplary “Indian” works such as Old Indian Dances by an unidentified Shankar (undoubtedly Uday), represent what best depicted India for the British public and how India was perceived.83 For an England intoxicated by imperial power, India could be no more vividly evoked than by Elgar’s “Indian” March.

  In a preview of the masque, a critic for the Daily Telegraph had noted that “the score fairly bristles with marches, in the composition of which we all know Elgar to be an expert.”84 Some seventy years later Michael Kennedy exclaimed that the “clue” to Elgar’s marches is “how nostalgic they are,” and that “they also represent aspiration and hope”; he described the “March of the Mogul Emperors” in particular as “a fine piece of Elgarian imperialism which requires no apology.”85 More recently, in her article on the composer for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Diana McVeagh suggests:

  [Elgar’s] unaffected love of English ceremonial, and of the grand moments in Meyerbeer and Verdi, prompted him to compose marches all his life: independent pieces like [the Pomp and Circumstance marches], or for particular occasions (Imperial March, 1897; Coronation March, 1911; Empire March, 1924) or as parts of larger works (Caractacus, The Crown of India). Mostly they are magnificent display pieces, apt for their time, and still of worth, if they can be listened to without nostalgia or guilt for an imperial past … Elgar’s march style causes embarrassment only where it sits uneasily, as in the finales of some early choral works, or as an occasional bluster in symphonic contexts.86

  We might, however, also understand Elgar’s celebrated marches, especially “Mogul Emperors,” as belonging, musically and ideologically, to the late-nineteenth-Century tradition of the march as the favorite signifier of the Raj. By midcentury, the prevailing militarism was generating marches with titles such as “Empire,” “Oriental,” “Battle,” “Hindu,” “Cavalry,” “Delhi,” and even an “Indian Wedding March.”87 In Adolphe Schubart’s fantasia The Battle of Sobraon, published in London in 1846, Sikhs can be heard marching to their entrenchments to the strains of “There Is a Happy Land.”88 Queen Victoria’s crowning as Empress of India in 1876 inspired a further plethora of the genre, including John Pridham’s The Prince of Wales’ Indian March (1876) and General Roberts’ Indian March (1879), whose title refers to Elgar’s father-in-law.89 Kiralfy’s India featured two “grand” marches, those of “the Rajahs at Delhi” and of “the Mogul Court.” By the 1897 Diamond Jubilee, the march had come to signify both imperial expansion and national celebration; in the process, it had become linked specifically with British India, as exemplified by Thomas Boatwright’s 1898 Indian March: The Diamond Jubilee.90

  The “Mogul Emperors” was not Elgar’s first exotic march. It followed by eleven years Pomp and Circumstance March no. 2, dedicated to the master of Indo-Persian exotica, Granville Bantock. In that earlier (nonprogrammatic) A minor march, Elgar created an exotic sound chiefly by omitting the leading tone in the main theme. For these marching Mughals, Elgar expanded his orientalist musical armor considerably. At first glance the stately moderato maestoso with its marziale and pomposo sections played by a vast orchestra of full brass and percussion (cymbals, timpani, bass drum, side drum, tambourine, tom-tom, and large “Indian” gong) does seem to be an unequivocal instance of Elgarian imperialism. Listening to the music with insight, however, suggests a rather different interpretation. The first sounds we hear hint at the march’s unconventional character; the piece begins not, as we have come to expect from such a genre, with consonant affirming triads but with an accented diminished seventh (EJ-D) followed by a dissonant tritone (D-GJ /GJ -D) as if to conjure up the oriental despotism of the Mughal emperors depicted within (Example 4).91


  In The Crown of India masque, this was the music that accompanied the emperors Akbar, Jehangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb onto the Coliseum stage: “Four names,” Delhi announces, “whose splendours nothing shall annul … Come, oh ye mighty ones from out the Past”92 Unusually for Elgar’s marches, the music is cast in 3/2 with a distinctly triple-meter feel, lest we forget Kipling’s rejoinder that it was, after all, “well for the world” only if the “White Men tread their highway side by side,” marching in 2/4 or 4/4 naturally!93 Indeed, Elgar’s Mughals do not march at all, but rather “process” to a (thinly disguised) polonaise, with all its ceremonial associations, just as Rimsky-Korsakov’s Nobles did in Mlada (1892).94 Elgar’s three swaggering beats divided by two; second-beat accents (see Example 4); striking eighth-note fanfare figures; and the appearance of the rhythm popularized in examples of this genre by Chopin, Glinka, Tchaikovsky, and others, reveal this “march” to be a polonaise. (Example 5, a rare passage of thematic development, shows the polonaise rhythm that permeates the final section.) For these courtly Mughals of bygone times, Elgar drew on the polonaise’s history in nineteenth-Century Russian art music as a stately, processional dance associated with the court; in this guise the polonaise often replaced the march where official “pomp and circumstance” was desired.95 While the “Mogul March” emulates the particular style of Rimsky-Korsakov’s grand maestoso polonaise with its brassy fanfares and prominent timpani, Elgar may also have known the “parade-ceremonial” polonaises with patriotic overtones in Tchaikovsky’s Vakula the Smith and Yevgeny Onegin, and in the opening choral pageant of Borodin’s Prince Igor.96

  Example 4. Opening, “March of the Mogul Emperors,” Crown of India.