by Adams, Byron
Example 5. Polonaise, “March of the Mogul Emperors,” Crown of India.
The generic resonance of the polonaise with which Elgar tacitly casts his Mughal music effectively invokes not only noble or martial associations but also, more significantly, the borderline between dance and processional. Elgar thereby suggests, with the help of several orchestral effects designed specifically for his Mughal depiction, the image of a colorful, festive oriental parade. As the motif introduced in bars 5–8 (see Example 4) is extended upward in a series of trills and pseudo-glissandi, it seems to mimic the trumpeting of elephants as they carry their Mughal masters. This is particularly striking when trumpets, muted (for effect rather than volume), repeat the phrase portamento (with slides) and fortississimo; they are punctuated by bass tuba, trombones, bass clarinet, contra-bassoon, double-bass, timpani, bass drum, and “Indian” gong (tam-tam) in second-beat accents (a la polonaise) suggestive of ponderous elephant steps (Example 6). These trumpet trills, used earlier in the masque’s minuet to portray European gentry in the entrance of the East India Company, now gaudily cloaked by tambourine, cymbals, and gong, become audible manifestations of Indian ornamentalism (opulent Mughal costumes and jewelry, lavishly decorated elephants, bejeweled Mughal swords, and so on). A series of illustrations of “Greater Britain” published in The Sketch, a popular London weekly, demonstrates how the Mughal emperors and elephants Elgar depicted in the march served, at the time, as symbols of India itself (figure 3).97 India, for the British, in Elgar’s march as in The Sketch’s illustration, is represented as a bejeweled, hedonistic, and trumpeting elephant-Emperor, an allegory of wealth and self-indulgence.98
Example 6. “Trumpeting” motif, “March of the Mogul Emperors,” Crown of India.
Figure 3. “India.” Part of “Greater Britain.” The Sketch, 21 April 1897. Courtesy the Bancroft Library collections, University of California at Berkeley.
Elgar’s marches, like most examples of the genre (and famously on account of Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1), contain a central trio section of a less martial, more lyrical or nobilmente character. Yet the Mughal emperors’ polonaise has no such trio to interrupt the fanciful orientalist procession. Instead, the “trumpeting” motif dominates, taken up by all the instruments in turn and juxtaposed with the dissonant opening theme. This trumpeting, together with the militaristic polonaise rhythm reiterated by timpani and side drum, and the heavy second-beat polonaise-style elephant steps punctuated by cymbals and bass drum conjure what the Musical Times referred to as “the magnificent barbaric turmoil” of this inspired, and somewhat eccentric, polonaise.99
Elgar the Barbarian
The cymbal-crashing, gong-ringing fortississimo that brought to a close the “Mogul March,” and hence The Crown of India Suite, came to embody the acme of Elgarian imperialism for the musical intelligentsia after the First World War. In A Survey of Contemporary Music in 1924, Cecil Gray, Scottish critic and composer, established what was to become a trope (with minor alterations) in Elgar criticism: the distinction between “the composer of the symphonies and the self-appointed Musician Laureate of the British Empire.”100 Concluding that “the one is a musician of merit; the other is only a barbarian,” Gray denounced all of Elgar’s marches, odes, and other occasional pieces, particularly The Crown of India—which he found “undoubtedly the worst of the lot”—as “perfect specimens” of jingoisim. By 1931, The Crown of India was, for F. H. Shera, professor of music at the University of Sheffield, an almost unmentionable piece of Elgar’s imperialism that had been “allowed to fade into deserved oblivion.”101
While Gray’s and Shera’s criticisms reveal the contemporary attitudes of many critics and modernists of their generation, they tell us little about the continuing popularity of Elgar’s music with the British public. In his study, “Elgar and the BBC,” Ronald Taylor states that by 1922, Elgar’s music could be heard on at least one of the BBC stations most days of the year.102 Significantly, not only were his imperial works among the most regularly broadcast but, of them (apart from the literally countless broadcasts of “Land of Hope and Glory” and Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1), The Crown of India suite (the “worst” product of Elgar’s “barbarian” mind) was heard most frequently—102 times between 1922 and 1934.103
Radio Times, a magazine reflective of popular tastes, featured an article in December 1932 that appears to have been crafted in response to the criticisms of Gray, Shera, and others. The author, Alex Cohen, in a spirit of fervent support for the Raj, suggested that “superior folk” had “sniffed” at Elgar’s imperialism and that these detractors thought the composer “should have adequately equipped himself … first by a study of oriental mysticism … followed by a few years apprenticeship as a Hindu ascetic.”104 Cohen’s contempt for such criticism of Elgar’s lack of engagement with India in his music is evident in his retort, in which he derided not only the Indian practice of meditation but also Mohandas K. Gandhi’s satyagraha in particular as years of Hindu asceticism Elgar “might have spent standing on one leg and contemplating the very essence of things until he grew talons a yard long and could subsist on air alone.” (Gandhi’s staunch adherence to satyagraha was widely considered by many British at best eccentric and at worst an extremely effective form of resistance.) Cohen concluded that “west is not east and the miracle has never been achieved … he was the child of his environment” who, accordingly, had mixed in his music “the faith of St Francis the Visionary and an admiration for Cecil Rhodes, the Empire-builder.”105
Along with the position accorded The Crown of India by Gray, Shera, and others in their censure of Elgar’s imperialist music, Cohen’s perceived connection between Elgar’s orientalism and the maintenance of colonial rule in India suggests a way of understanding the critics’ changing interpretations. Their rejection of The Crown of India and other imperialist works in the late 1920s and early 1930s coincides with significant changes in Anglo-Indian colonial relations and policies during that time. In 1930, Gandhi broke the salt law, thereby setting in motion a flurry of civil actions against British authorities; that year also saw the first roundtable conference summoned by the British concerning a new Indian constitution. Anticolonial sentiments from English liberals intensified in the face of negligible native participation in the constitution’s makings and even more in 1932 when the Indian Congress was declared illegal and Gandhi was arrested. It was perhaps neither Elgar’s death in 1934 nor a received view that his music had become outmoded but rather the passing of the Government of India Act in 1935 that proved the most potent catalyst for his music’s reinterpretation as pastoral. The India Act provided for the establishment of an All-Indian Federation and a new system of government on the basis of provincial autonomy—signaling the beginning of the end of colonialism. As Jeremy Crump argues:
Only in the 1930s, at the time of the Peace Pledge Union and concern for the League of Nations, when the Indian Act [of] 1935 marked a commitment to a less expansionist phase of colonial imperialism, [did] the pastoral became dominant in some interpretations of Elgar. The retreat to rural values was consonant with the view of “sunset splendour” in the Edwardian Elgar, and coincided with a cultural conservatism, marked in music by the decline in the fashion for experimental works like Walton’s Fagade (1921).106
Thus, the earlier association of empire and the war was dismissed from Elgar’s music so that it could provide a locus of nostalgia for the Edwardian era. Along with the ever-growing resistance to English imperial might in India, the breakup of landed estates and economic crisis all contributed to what Crump describes as “a yearning for past glories and a mythical, stable social order”—at home and in the colonies.107 In response to this yearning, Elgar’s music was reinterpreted as redolent of the imagined virtues of a preindustrial rural Britain that many sought. His music was not only increasingly related to the English countryside but was also seen as belonging to the folk music revival, particularly by Ralph Vaughan Williams, who suggested
that Elgar’s exploitation of the musical idiom of “the people” was comparable with Burns’s and Shakespeare’s use of the vernacular.108 Writers at this time often emphasized the English spirit of Elgar’s music, asserting its power to “express the very soul of our race,” as Ernest Newman put it in 1934, much as during previous decades.109
One of the strategies used to distance this intangibly English Elgar from the English imperial enterprise is to largely ignore his nationalistic works (except at graduation time or the Last Night of the Proms). Lovers of Elgar’s music have, since the 1930s, regularly tried to save the composer from himself. As a result, the established Elgar canon is based on the Enigma Variations, the symphonies and concertos, the overtures, Dream of Gerontius, and some smaller instrumental works, including the Serenade, and Introduction and Allegro for strings. The subsequent dismissal of a large body of Elgar’s music has been justified by denying the integrity of his output and appealing to the “two Elgars” theory, seen in embryo in Gray’s criticism.110 In 1932, A. J. Sheldon claimed that “political ideas can never inspire the artist in the same way, or to a like extent, as poetical ideas can.” Thus he declared that Elgar’s music connected with imperialism “should be buried soon; at present it is a clog on the endearing place Elgar holds in our estimation.”111 Three years later, Frank Howes clarified this view of the two Elgars, with only one worthy of retaining, stating that “the two Elgars may be roughly described as the Elgar who writes for strings and the Elgar who writes for brass.”112
The result has been that long-established nationalistic myths (pastoral, spiritual, and nostalgic) have dominated interpretations, forming the basis of the composer’s revival in the 1960s.113 Historian Jeffrey Richards has noted that the pillars of this revival, Ken Russell’s BBC documentary Elgar (1962) and Michael Kennedy’s Portrait of Elgar (1968), “seriously distort the picture” because of a desire to “exculpate Elgar from imperialism.”114 Works like The Crown of India have thus either been put off limits or uncritically celebrated. Yet, listening insightfully to Elgar’s music with attention to its political subtext can tell us far more about the music and its times than abstract notions of imperialism.
The emergence of a postcolonial consciousness has sparked discussion about the British Empire that promotes a new understanding of what Britain was—and is. Landmark scholarship has done much to remedy the historiographical distortions surrounding the composer and his music.115 Alain Frogley recently argued that consideration of imperialism by scholars of English music is a necessary part of challenging “the prevailing orthodoxies of British music historiography.”116 Thus, while a reevaluation of Elgar is well under way, one of the challenges for historians of early-twentieth-century England today is to connect the musical works of Elgar and his contemporaries not only with the pleasure of listening but also with the British imperial enterprise—particularly the Raj, “a reign of such immense range and wealth as to have become a fact of nature for members of the imperial culture.”117
In this context, Elgar’s Crown of India, like Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), can be understood to be central to the high point of the Raj and in some ways to represent it. The masque is a fascinating work of imperialism: historically illuminating and often musically rich, it is nevertheless a profoundly embarrassing piece—a significant contribution to the orientalized India of the English imagination.118 We might hear it, in some ways, as the realization of British imperialism’s cumulative process: the control and subjugation of India combined with a sustained fascination for all of its intricacies. As The Crown of India’s emphases and omissions suggest, Elgar not only recognized the nature of imperialism, but also recognized the situation of the Empire in the early years of twentieth century, when it began to dawn on the British that India was once independent, that England now dominated it, and that, in time, growing native resistance to British rule would inevitably win back India’s freedom.119
But there is, I think, a larger conclusion. The works of the “real” Elgar have, for the most part, been received as powerful artistic statements from the pioneer of English musical nationalism. Yet the critical obsession with identifying in them an essential Englishness, while ostensibly intended as an affirmation of their worth, has served only to separate the music from the mainstream and confine it within the nation’s boundaries. That Elgar has often been drawn on to define England musically has set the limits on what should—and can—be heard in his music. Reluctance to acknowledge that Elgar’s music is imbued with traces of the empire it played a part in promoting is reflective of a larger and equally counterproductive unwillingness to understand modern England as having been, in many ways, shaped by its colonial rule and its colonial Others.
NOTES
I am indebted to Richard Taruskin who helped me at every stage in my examination of Elgar’s musical relation to the British Empire. Thanks also to Roger Parker and Bonnie C. Wade for their enormously helpful critical input on an earlier version of this chapter. I am also grateful to Mariane C. Ferme, Paul Singh Ghuman, and the late Edward W. Said for their role in shaping my work on imperialism and music. Thanks also to Byron Adams, Alain Frogley, Mary Ann Smart, and Paul Flight for their suggestions, advice, and encouragement at various stages of my work. Finally, I appreciate the assistance offered to me by staff at the Elgar Birthplace Museum during my research visits there.
1. The Pall Mall Gazette from which this essay’s epigraph was drawn was found in the cuttings files, Elgar Birthplace Museum, Lower Broadheath, Worcester, vol. 7 (June 1911–June 1914), ref. 1332, 9; hereafter, EBM Cuttings.
2. A “Kinemacolour” film of the Delhi Durbar, titled With Our King and Queen Through India, was shown in London from February 1912. E. A. Philp, With the King to India, 1911–12 (Plymouth: Western Morning News Co., 1912); The Historical Record of the Imperial Visit to India, 1911, compiled from the official records, with illustrations (London: John Murray, 1914). The “Programme of Ceremonies” is included in The Delhi Durbar Medal 1911 to the British Army, ed. Peter Duckers (Shrewsbury: Squirrel Publishing, 1998); John Fortescue, Narrative of the Visit to India of Their Majesties King George V and Queen Mary and of the Coronation Durbar Held at Delhi 12 December 1911 (London: Macmillan, 1912).
3. N. D. Barton, “The Durbar Ceremonials,” in At the Delhi Durbar 1911: Being the Impressions of the Head Master and a Party of Fourteen Boys of the King’s School, Parramatta, New South Wales, Who Had the Good Fortune to be Present (March 1912), ed. Stacy Waddy, British Library, India Office: ORW 1989, A.2237, 22–28.
4. Ibid., 71.
5. Gargi Bhattacharyya has observed that the dutiful use of the term British rather than English glosses over the fact that in power relations there is no difference between them: British was imposed by the English on the non-English. For this reason, I generally use these terms interchangeably. “Cultural Education in Britain,” from the Newbolt Report to the National Curriculum, in Robert Young, ed., “Neocolonialism,” Oxford Literary Review 13 (1991): 4–19, 19n.
6. Quoted in Shelland Bradley, An American Girl at the Durbar (London: John Lane, 1912), 162–63.
7. The boundaries of the old province of Bengal, those of the provinces in 1905, and the provinces as rearranged in 1911 are shown in Muir’s Historical Atlas—Mediaeval and Modern, 9th ed., ed. R. F. Treharne and Harold Fullard (London: George Philip and Son Ltd., 1962), 73.
8. For a detailed account of these years, see Nirad Chaudhuri, “Enter Nationalism,” The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1952); repr. in Modern India: An Interpretive Anthology, ed. Thomas Metcalf (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Ltd., 1994), 303–22.
9. Barjorjee Nowrosjee, ed., Cartoons from the “Hindi Punch” 1905 (Bombay: Bombay Samachar Press, 1905), 57.
10. Richard Paul Cronin, British Policy and Administration in Bengal, 1905–1912: Partition and the New Province of Eastern Bengal and Assam (Calcutta: Firma KLM Private Ltd., 1977), 207–13.
11. Ibid., 441.
12. Ibid.
, introduction, in which Cronin analyzes the implications of the partition and its repeal.
13. The London Coliseum program for the opening week of the masque (commencing March 11, 1912) is in the British Library (BL): London Playbills (1908–13), ref. 74/436. Two copies are also held at the Elgar Birthplace Museum: Concert Programmes (Jan–July 1912), ref. no. 1126.
14. Times, 9 January 1912, 6.
15. Daily Telegraph, 4 March 1912, EBM Cuttings, 16.
16. Eastern Daily Press, 24 February 1912, EBM Cuttings, 16.
17. Three photographs from the masque appeared in The Daily Sketch,12 March 1912, 8–9. Illustrations and photographs of the Delhi Durbar abound: see, for instance, John Peeps Finnemore, Delhi and the Durbar with Twelve Full-page Illustrations in Colour by Mortimer Menpes (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1912); Sir Stanley Reed, KBE, The King and Queen in India. A Record of the Visit of Their Imperial Majesties to India, from December 2nd 1911 to January 10th 1912 (Bombay: Bennet, Coleman & Co., 1912); The Great Delhi Durbar of 1911, written to accompany a series of lantern slides (1912), BL: 010056.g.26.
18. The Standard, 1 March 1912, EBM Cuttings, 16.
19. The Crown of India: An Imperial Masque, written by Henry Hamilton, composed by Edward Elgar, op. 66 (London: Enoch & Sons, 1912); BL 11775.h5/2; hereafter, Hamilton, The Crown of India: libretto.
20. For a discussion of the motivation behind the transfer of the capital, see Cronin, British Policy, 217.
21. Barton, At the Delhi Durbar 1911, 75.
22. Such interpretation of pageants, masques, and other imperial entertainments as pieces of popular propaganda dates back to J. A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London: G. Richards, 1901). For more recent examples of this general view see two important books, John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); and Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986).