by Adams, Byron
It must be noticed by all visitors to the Coliseum that its audience is largely made up of women and children, conspicuously in all parts of the house. Society ladies, sitting in the boxes and stalls with their children, have not been quicker to seize the opportunity which are offered for bright, wholesome entertainment than the wives of the artisan, who, with their numerous progeny, crowd the balconies, proving in the most conclusive manner that the pit is quite as eager and capable as the stalls of responding to a genuinely artistic appeal.”36
Figure 6. Opening illustration in the publicity publication To the Coliseum.
Music was a serious and carefully considered part of the ideological program advanced by Stoll and the management of the Coliseum: “It will surprise the uninitiated to know what infinite pains are taken to promote in the public a love for good music.” A considerable amount of space in the promotional brochure was expended on describing the classically trained vocalists in the house choir, the organ and organist, and the quality of the music (figure 9): “It is not a music hall in any acceptance of the term; but a ‘music-theatre,’ where high-class renderings of the greatest scores may be heard which, aided by the cultured interpretation given them, can be thoroughly enjoyed.”37 The pamphlet specifically mentioned opera scenes presented by the noted diva Alice Estey and a staged excerpt from Gounod’s popular Faust that had recently been featured at the Coliseum.
Despite such claims, the frequency with which “serious” art music was programmed at the Coliseum was erratic. Stoll’s commission of Crown of India represented an exception rather than the rule, and Elgar’s music was, after all, commissioned to adorn the elaborate libretto rather than as a serious extended piece of music in its own right. At the Coliseum, like most variety palaces, art music was considered just one of the many building blocks used to construct the elaborate edifice of an evening’s entertainment. Sometimes these classical selections were unexpected, as when Stoll staged scenes from Parsifal during the 1913 season, the first time extended excerpts from Wagner’s music drama had been heard in London.38 In 1912, the year before this excursion into Wagnerian territory, the “Milan Opera” performed Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci at the Coliseum. More often, however, scenes and selections from longer works were scheduled as part of the rotation of turns within the three-hour shows, and light orchestral pieces were used as filler. Elgar’s Salut d’amour, for instance, turns up occasionally on the list of an evening’s offerings.39 It was mainly through the popular ballets that audiences heard music by serious composers, since spectacular ballets and pantomimes—of which Crown of India was just one example—were hallmarks of the Coliseum, the Alhambra, and the Empire. For instance, the new revue of January 1913, titled Keep Smiling, included an “Assyrian” ballet featuring music by Glazunov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Goldmark, Ravel, Arends, and Montague Ring.40
The quantity of art music played in the various Edwardian and Georgian music halls is less important than the belief, shared by management and audiences alike, that such high-class works belonged there. At the same time, audience and management seemed to agree that just a smattering of highbrow music was enough, and such pieces were squeezed in between the acrobats, shadowgraphists, sharpshooters, and comic singers. This unspoken agreement, too, helped to constitute the modern identities of the new music hall audiences.
Figure 7. “Domesticity” at the Coliseum one of the several tearooms.
Figure 8. A view of the Coliseum’s auditorium
Figure 9. The “cultured interpreters” of the Coliseum as “music theater”—the Coliseum choir.
The presentation of scenes from Parsifal is a case in point. This production attracted great attention at the time: the distinguished conductor Henry Wood directed an augmented orchestra; the noted designer Byam Shaw created the sets and costumes; and an elaborate program was printed to provide spectators with the story, background materials, and brief discussion of the selections, all designed to whet their appetite and enhance their enjoyment.41 But the Parsifal excerpts occurred within the context of a normal night out at the Coliseum. The bill began with an overture, followed by Australian dancers, a comic duo, ragtimers, and a female comic singer. The big novelty of the season, the Parsifal tableaux, appeared in the spot immediately after intermission. It was followed by a short play with music, Max Pemberton’s David Garrick. The evening ended with Austrian woodcutters and a “Kinemacolour” presentation. The sequence of turns preceding and succeeding Crown of India was similar.42
Significantly, a new version of popular culture emerged from these evolving forms of mass entertainment for middle-class audiences. John MacKenzie has asserted that during the Edwardian period intellectual and popular tastes converged to an extent encountered at perhaps no other time.43 Elgar certainly hoped to appeal to the broadest possible Edwardian audience. By crossing the threshold of the Coliseum, however, Elgar became a pawn in the Edwardian game played by Stoll and other impresarios that sought to efface class distinctions, especially with respect to artistic taste, for commercial gain.
Elgar as “Public Poet”
How might Elgar be positioned as a voice for (or against) this newly emerging popular culture linked to the middle class? J. H. Grainger has identified and characterized the role of the “public poet” during the first decade of the twentieth century, and it may well be useful to imagine Grainger’s description as a metaphorical space into which a composer of functional music, such as Elgar, might enter profitably. The role of “public poet” is especially relevant if this composer chose to address the issue of imperialism within the context of mass culture, as Elgar did so conspicuously in Crown of India. Grainger has defined the “public poet” as one who
reminded, reassured, mobilized, sang praises and identified enemies within an objective, easily recognized world. Far from illumining their own subjective wholenesses, they were content to tell men what they already knew… . The poet repeatedly affirmed sentiments and told the tale again and again. As the public poet of a wide successful imperium he was not bardic. Bards are for lost or submerged patriae. Yet like the bard he looked for the heroic, the singular in the familiar story, emphasizing not freedom broadening down from precedent to precedent, not the long slow march of everyman, but deeds that made the realm and Empire… . The public poet invoked, exhorted, clearing not muddying the springs of action.44
Grainger’s description of the poet who rehearsed over and over what the people already implicitly felt about England aptly fits much of Elgar’s functional music. A persistent demotic attitude characterizes scores, such as Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1, as the veritable embodiment of English national identity. It is therefore illuminating to think of Elgar reflexively assuming the voice of a “public poet” in music, one who sings on behalf of his entire nation.45 With Crown of India, Elgar’s assumption of a public voice is augmented by the nationalist implications of its genre, that of the “masque.”
To have written a masque during the Edwardian period meant that the composer firmly positioned such a work within a venerable and uniquely British tradition stretching back hundreds of years, through Purcell to the Elizabethans. The Edwardian and Georgian masque composers sought to signify “Englishness” musically in ways that gestured toward popular culture, especially in the mediation of traditional components like spectacle and allegory.46 Many of these elements of the masque are clearly present in Crown of India; thus Elgar’s entrance into the Coliseum was made through an aesthetic portal provided by a genre that has traditionally linked celebrations of “Englishness” with popular spectacle.
Younger contemporaries of Elgar who also participated in the revival of the masque, such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, were enticed in part by the genre’s historical resonances, combining the musical and the literary with the artistic. Vaughan Williams pointedly used the designation “masque” to imply connections between his own music and that of the glorious Tudor past.47 While this is far from the only reason that he was interested in t
he genre, part of Vaughan Williams’s ambition was to validate certain constructs of British history, such as the glorification of the Elizabethan age. In this way, composers like Vaughan Williams were inoculated to a degree from the contagion of vulgar, popular modernity—the contemporary life that Elgar seemed to promote in accepting the commission for Crown of India. But unlike the putatively “historical” masques of his younger colleagues, Elgar’s work confronts instead the hunger of the middle class for a reflection of their own concerns. By writing for the Coliseum, Elgar avoided historical nostalgia and instead cultivated the role of the “public poet.”
Elgar was usually unwilling to claim explicitly the status of “public poet.” He displayed the same ambivalence in this regard as he did for most of the personae that he adopted, preferring—especially as he grew older—to let others, such as George Bernard Shaw and Ernest Newman, make such claims on his behalf. Elgar, however, permitted occasional glimpses of his outlook on the relationship he had with the British public. The most famous (or notorious) of these instances occurred during lectures he delivered in 1905 as part of the Peyton Professorship at the University of Birmingham.48 Among several controversial assertions found in these lectures, Elgar repeatedly criticized those British composers (clearly referring to his archenemy Stanford) who eschewed the challenge of the contemporary through recourse to historical materials. When alluding to the musical glories of the past, he stated unequivocally, “I think it unnecessary to go back farther than 1880.” In Elgar’s opinion, the trend in English music toward a dry academic historicism—“to sing ‘Ca ira, ca ira’ chanted to the metrical tune of the ‘Old Hundredth’”—would cause irrevocable damage to the development of native art, since from the “big music” of the last twenty-five years “we had inherited an art which has no hold on the affections of our own people.” His severest criticism of such music is that it is “commonplace”:
Critics frequently say of a man that it is to his credit that he is never vulgar. Good. But it is possible for him—in an artistic sense only, be it understood, to be much worse; he can be commonplace. Vulgarity in the course of time may be refined. Vulgarity often goes with inventiveness, and it can take the initiative—in a rude and misguided way no doubt—but after all it does something and can be and has been refined.”49
Obviously, Elgar evinced no distaste of vulgarity per se—by which he meant strong emotion, not the bawdiness of the late Victorian comic song. Instead, he distrusted any music, high or low, that does not engage with its audience, no matter how that audience was constituted. Accusing his more academic colleagues of composing music for one another’s delectation, Elgar states forthrightly, “Is it possible to conceive that Bach or Beethoven or Brahms so wrote for a narrow circle? No, they addressed a larger party, a responsive, human and artistic mass, and amongst these we find our greatest supporters.” He warned the “youthful English composer” not to “misjudg[e] his own strength—the public his works are to meet: I mean, of course, not that he should compose with a view to please a certain audience, but he should, on the rare occasions of a performance, choose a work suited to the occasion.”50
In 1905, there were cogent distinctions to be made about audiences, the absence of which reveals a certain lack of clarity in Elgar’s bold assertions, as well as his ambivalence about what sort of listeners constituted an audience for meaningful English music. On the one hand, he repeatedly warned young composers not to pander to the “popular public,” but in his lectures he seemed to be concerned with the cynical exploitation of the wider public just for fame and easy profit.51 As an alternative to easy fame, Elgar urged young British composers to imagine an audience consisting of thoughtful people drawn from all walks of intellectual and artistic life. Yet as some of the assertions quoted above demonstrate, Elgar demanded that composers take a wider public into consideration as well, even going so far as to recommend that, in giving “people’s” or “cheap concerts,” organizers should eschew condescension in the selection of repertory:
When good music is offered to the people, there is too much of an attitude of Sterne about the givers. When Sterne saw the hungry ass—he, after much thought, gave him a macaroon. His heart, he says, smites him that there presided in the act more pleasantry in the conceit of seeing how an ass would eat a macaroon than of benevolence in giving him one. Now—the English working-men are intelligent: they do not want treating sentimentally, we must give them the real thing, we must give them of the best because we want them to have it, not from mere curiosity to see HOW they will accept it.52
In this quotation, Elgar’s remarks demonstrated an implicit tension, if not contradiction, between Victorian assumptions about what sort of music was appropriate to each social class and an instinctual realization by the composer of “Land of Hope and Glory” that the new century had ushered in a decided shift in cultural power. Elgar’s assertions also shed light on his relationship with the Coliseum, as the music halls of the early twentieth century helped to amalgamate the previous disjunctions between lowbrow and highbrow into a somewhat disjointed but powerful middleclass cultural aesthetic, that of the “middlebrow.” Just like the music halls that he so enthusiastically blessed in his letter to Colvin quoted earlier, Elgar self-consciously desired to create a relationship with wider modern audiences that provided new compositional stances but still maintained an overarching musical aesthetic aimed squarely at the educated bourgeoisie.
The unresolved tensions and inconsistencies found in Elgar’s opinions have given rise ever since to problematic views concerning the relationship between Elgar’s music and popular culture. For Elgar to have written music for Stoll’s Coliseum was not, as some have suggested since the premiere of Crown of India, merely egregious opportunism by a great composer in need of ready cash. He did need the money at that point, surely, but as we have seen, remuneration was not the whole story. Elgar took this compositional opportunity as a means of reaching eclectic new audiences, and he achieved this goal by assuming the role of a “public poet.”
When Elgar strode into the Coliseum, he entered a space peopled in large part by an exuberant audience who demanded contemporary music that reflected its concerns. The later reputation of Elgar’s popular commercial works, considered in many twentieth-Century histories of British music as subsidiary to his art music, should not blind us to the composer’s personal interest and enthusiasm when he composed Crown of India in 1912. Elgar’s willingness to adopt a compositional attitude calculated to appeal to a diverse public—to adopt the emerging popular culture of that public—was a daring gesture for a serious composer of his time. Taking their cue from this model, musicologists might profitably explore the different environments, both physical and metaphorical, that Elgar inhabited and explored throughout his career, positioning them against the rapidly changing ways by which these spaces were being defined (and redefined) during the socially transitional years of the Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian periods. Such efforts will surely result in a more nuanced view of the composer and his music, for, beyond the Coliseum, where else can we find Elgar?
NOTES
I wish to thank Jenny Doctor and Byron Adams for their help and advice in the course of completing this essay, as well as express gratitude for the pioneering work of Robert Anderson, Nalini Ghuman, and Corissa Gould on The Crown of India. Also, thanks to the Victoria and Albert Museum for all the images related to the London Coliseum.
1. Felix Barker, The House That Stoll Built (London: F. Muller, 1957), 18. The Coliseum is now the home of the English National Opera.
2. One notorious example of a musicologist characterizing Elgar’s music as “vulgar” was E. J. Dent’s tart opinion of the composer written in 1924 for Adler’s Handbuch der Musikgeschichte. Dent’s assertions were only seriously challenged when the second edition of the Handbuch appeared in 1930. An anguished cry of indignation was then sounded by Elgar’s defenders. Somewhat unexpectedly, it was the sardonic modernist composer Peter Warlock who ga
thered signatures from leading musicians of the day, as well as eminent supporters such as George Bernard Shaw and Augustus John, for an “open letter” of protest praising Elgar. See Robert Anderson, Elgar (New York: Schirmer Books, 1993), 167. Dent’s opinions are frequently cited in discussions of Elgar’s character, popular appeal, and literary pretensions. Brian Trowell neatly summarizes the reception of Dent’s comments over the years in his “Elgar’s Use of Literature,” in Edward Elgar: Music and Literature, ed. Raymond Monk (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 182–287.
3. Barry J. Faulk, Music Hall and Modernity: The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004).The classic discussion of emerging forms of Victorian leisure activity and the attendant class ideologies remains Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1995 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).