Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  4. Most of the current biographies of Elgar discuss this aspect to a greater or lesser extent. An essay by Meirion Hughes offers perhaps the most focused discussion of Elgar’s problematic relationship to his family background and subsequent efforts to project a more genteel identity. Meirion Hughes, “The Duc d’Elgar: Making a Composer Gentleman,” in Music and the Politics of Culture, ed. Christopher Norris (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 41–68.

  5. Pertinent chapters on Elgar’s functional music found in The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, ed. Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) include J. P. E. Harper-Scott, “Elgar’s Unwumbling: The Theatre Music,” 171–84; Charles Edward McGuire, “Functional Music: Imperialism, the Great War, and Elgar as Popular Composer,” 214–24; and Diana McVeagh, “Elgar’s Musical Language: The Shorter Instrumental Works,” 50–62. See also Daniel M. Grimley’s essay in this volume.

  6. Not that Elgar was alone in this ambition by any means; for instance, his archrival Charles Villiers Stanford also sought to compose popular, lucrative works and succeeded with oft-performed (and patriotic) choral works such as The Revenge. See Jeremy Dibble, Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 178–79. Stanford never ventured into the music halls, however.

  7. There is a large, fascinating bibliography on the music hall, truly interdisciplinary in the range of fields from which it has emerged. Besides Barry J. Faulk’s magisterial book, a list might include the collection of essays Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, ed. Peter Bailey (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986); Dagmar Kift, The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class, and Conflict, trans. Roy Kift (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and the wonderful section on the music hall in Dave Russell’s Popular Music in England, 1840–1914, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).

  8. King George V’s Delhi Durbar was a huge event, exciting intense interest in the British media. Part of the royal tour of India, the Durbar was a modern court occasion, when Indian princes assembled to pay homage to the ruler. As an “invented tradition,” in Eric Hobsbawm’s terms, this sort of ceremony was perfectly geared for the imposition of a new British ruler on Indian soil. For more on the fascinating impact of the event on the imaginations of the British people, and how this was fueled by emerging media technologies, see Corissa Gould, “Edward Elgar, The Crown of India, and the Image of Empire,” Elgar Society Journal 13, no. 1 (March 2003): 25–35.

  9. Robert Anderson has recently prepared an edition of the score for the masque for the Elgar Complete Edition, vol. 18, (London: Elgar Society with Novello, 2004). Despite the pervasiveness of the exotic idiom in music during the nineteenth century, particularly in Britain, musicological investigations of the ways in which the orientalist impulse mapped onto British musical composition and its reception are relatively limited. Recently there has been a rise of interest. See especially Nalini Ghuman Gwynne, “India in the English Musical Imagination, 1890–1940,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2003. Jeffrey Richards offers an overview of the subject in Imperialism and Music: Britain 1876–1953 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Finally, for a pan-European look at critical approaches to the subject of orientalism, see the collection of essays edited by Jonathan Bellman, The Exotic in Western Music (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998).

  10. For a discussion of such songs, see Derek B. Scott, The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour, 2nd ed. (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2001), 177.

  11. Barker, House That Stoll Built, 179.

  12. Jerrold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 629–30.

  13. Diana McVeagh, for example, has characterized the music of Crown of India as “trumpery in a colourful and dashing manner.” See Diana McVeagh, “Elgar” in The New Grove Twentieth-Century English Masters, ed. Stanley Sadie (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1986), 44.

  14. 1 March 1912, as quoted in Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 629.

  15. Gould, “Edward Elgar, The Crown of India and the Image of Empire,” 25.

  16. Letter to Frances Colvin, 14 March 1912, as quoted in Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 630.

  17. Barker, House That Stoll Built, 179. In the first three chapters, Barker paints a vivid picture of Stoll’s peculiar but successful style of management.

  18. Stoll was right: Elgar convinced the actress Mary Anderson to appear at the Coliseum in 1917, citing his own happy experience there; see Barker, House That Stoll Built, 135.

  19. Gould, “Edward Elgar, The Crown of India and the Image of Empire,” 29.

  20. Both Edward and Alice Elgar may have been further reassured by Stoll’s own high standards of respectability, for he neither drank nor smoked and swore only on the rarest of occasions; see Barker, House That Stoll Built, 53.

  21. Ibid., 27.

  22. Anton Dolin, a major star, had been premier danseur with the Ballets Russes; see Richard Buckle, Diaghilev (New York: Atheneum, 1984), 413ff. For Elgar’s interest in having Dolin choreograph his Nursery Suite, see Barker, House That Stoll Built, 158–59.

  23. See Russell, Popular Music in England, 1840–1914; and Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England; as well as an essay by Penny Summerfield, “Patriotism and Empire: Music Hall Entertainment, 1879–1914,” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 17–48.

  24. For more on the anxiety over musical halls and their role in working-class life, see Kift, The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Confict, in particular chaps. 5 (“1860–1877: The Demon Drink”) and 6 (“1875–1889: Programs and Purifiers”).

  25. Walter Sickert was one of the most important British artists in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. A student of the self-consciously modern Whistler, he came under the influence of Degas and thus was firmly rooted in French Impressionism and committed to the “painting of modern life.” Sickert remained a successful artist throughout his life, his style changing with the times, and also was extremely important as a teacher and mentor to younger British artists. For more information about Sickert and his music hall paintings in particular, see David Peters Corbett, “Seeing into Modernity: Walter Sickert’s Music-Hall Scenes, c. 1887–1907,” in English Art 1860–1914: Modern Artists and Identity, ed. David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 150–67, and Walter Sickert (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2000). Anne Greutzer-Robins discusses Sickert’s knowledge of the music hall scene in “Sickert ‘Painter in Ordinary’ to the Music Hall,” in Sickert Paintings, ed. Wendy Baron and Richard Stone (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

  26. Walter Sickert, Writings on Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 14.

  27. Barker, House That Stoll Built, 29–30.

  28. For the politics and social conditions involved in this contest over relicensing, see Tracy C. Davis, “The Moral Sense of the Majorities: Indecency and Vigilance in Late-Victorian Music Halls,” Popular Music 10, no. 1 (1991): 39–52. For the Oxford Music Hall controversy, see Faulk, Music Hall and Modernity, 75–110. Oswald Stoll’s own churchgoing in-laws considered such theaters as “sinful homes of the devil”; see Barker, House That Stoll Built, 50.

  29. Such “variety palaces” were found in most of the larger towns and cities across England as well as in London.

  30. The Chairman played an important role in the music halls until the 1890s, introducing the turns and keeping order; see Barker, House That Stoll Built, 30.

  31. Anon., To the Coliseum (London: Raphael Tuck and Son, 1906).

  32. Ibid., 8.

  33. Ibid., 6.

  34. Ibid., 6

  35. Ibid., 3, 7.

  36. Ibid., 6

  37. Ibid., 18.

  38. The timing of these excerpts from Parsifal was largely the result of a copyright issue. See Barker,
House That Stoll Built, 177.

  39. For instance, the program on February 9, 1913, was sponsored by the National Sunday League. “A Grand Orchestral Concert with the Meistersingers Orchestra, conducted by Mr. Norfolk Megone. Mix of songs, orchestral favorites, Viennese waltzes, the William Tell overture, Elgar’s ‘Salut d’Amour’ and Three Dances from German’s Henry VIII.” The Coliseum program is in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum Theatre Archives.

  40. I have not been able to trace the identity of the composer “Arends” mentioned in this program. But given the frequent misspellings of the foreign composers’ names in ephemeral documents of the time such as this one, it is entirely possible that this composer was actually Anton Arensky, a Russian who had written ballet works in an orientalist vein.

  41. The program even included musical examples explicating Wagner’s musical dramas. The scenes from Parsifal presented:

  1. Killing of the Swan

  1b. Towards the Castle of the Grail

  2. Amfortas Administering the Grail

  3. Ejection of Parsifal from the Castle of the Grail 4a. The Magic Garden

  4b. The Temptation of Parsifal by Kundry 4c. Kundry Repulsed by Parsifal 4d. Parsifal and the Spear

  5. The Overthrow of Klingsor’s Splendour

  6. The Flowery Mead

  7. The Healing of Amfortas

  8. Redeeming Love

  Coliseum program, March 1913, Victoria & Albert Museum Theatre Archives.

  42. On the program: A family of gymnastic equilibrists / Tom Stuart in dramatic and burlesque impressions / Thora, a ventriloquial novelty / Billy Merson, the new London eccentric comedian / Dmitri Andreef, the famous Russian solo harpist / Miss Irene Vanbrugh in J. M. Barrie’s “The Twelve-Pound Lock” / Rudolfo Giglio, chanteur napolitain / Crown of India / A company of famous Continental mimes in “Pierrot’s Last Adventure,” with music by Fridrich Bermann and produced by the Viennese ballet master Charles Godlewsky. Coliseum program, March 1913, Victoria & Albert Museum Theatre Archives.

  43. John M. MacKenzie, “Introduction,” Imperialism and Popular Culture, 1–16.

  44. J. H. Grainger, Patriotisms: Britain 1900–1939 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).

  45. It is important to emphasize that the voice of the “public poet” was only one of many personae adopted by Elgar, both in his life and works. It is enough to say here that the negation of personal subjectivity, which is in some way demanded by the utterances of the “public poet,” was a source of personal conflict for a composer whose work seems in many ways replete with autobiography and self-representation. Few Elgar scholars today, influenced by the seminal work of Jerrold Northrop Moore and Byron Adams, would argue that Elgar could ever project a unitary identity.

  46. See Deborah Heckert, “Composing History: National Identity and the Uses of the Past in the English Masque, 1860–1918,” Ph.D. diss., Stony Brook University, 2003.

  47. Ibid., passim.

  48. In 1905, Elgar was offered the new Peyton Chair in Music at the University of Birmingham. Richard Peyton had endowed this position with the stipulation that it would be offered to Elgar. Elgar was not enthusiastic about the offer, worried that his lack of academic credentials made him unqualified for the job, and justly fretted that his busy schedule would be further complicated by the addition of new responsibilities. However, with the creation of the professorship at stake, and with persuasive arguments from friends and colleagues in Birmingham, Elgar accepted the post. Part of his responsibilities included delivering a set of public lectures. Elgar gave seven lectures between 1905 and 1906, many of which proved quite controversial, before his resignation in 1907. See Percy Young’s introduction and commentary to Edward Elgar, A Future for English Music and Other Lectures, ed. Percy M. Young (London: Dennis Dobson, 1968). See also Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 446–48, 456.

  49. Elgar, A Future for English Music, 33, 41, 47–49.

  50. Ibid., 37, 89.

  51. Ibid., 41–43.

  52. Ibid., 213.

  Elgar’s War Requiem

  RACHEL COWGILL

  This is already the vastest war in history. It is war not of nations, but of mankind. It is a war to exorcise a world madness and end an age.

  —H. G. Wells, The War That Will End War

  While Elgar’s patriotism and sense of Empire have been treated with considerable insight in recent years, Elgar scholarship seems to have found it relatively difficult to explore objectively the religious and denominational contexts in which he lived, and their significance or otherwise for his music.1 Indeed, in some cases emphasis on the former has obscured the latter, as with Jeffrey Richards’s suggestion that The Dream of Gerontius can be considered an imperialist work on the grounds of Elgar’s identification with “the idea of Christian heroism,” exemplified by General Gordon of Khartoum.2 Where Elgar’s Catholicism has been broached in the literature, as Charles Edward McGuire discusses elsewhere in this volume, there has been a tendency to accept without much question two tropes that emerged shortly after Elgar’s death, which can be seen at least in part to have originated from remarks made by Elgar himself: the first of these, that a crisis of faith had rendered religion no longer of significance in his life (an identity McGuire refers to as the “Weak Faith” avatar); and the second, that as an English Catholic he had learned to appreciate and operate within the codes of Protestantism (the “Pan-Christian” avatar). Just as these avatars arguably offered Elgar himself a means of appeasing his Protestant countrymen and for dulling his often sharply felt sense of otherness within British society, they have also offered convenient strategies for his past biographers who perhaps either did not recognize the centrality of religious identity as a social dynamic in British society of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, reflecting the increasing secularization of subsequent generations, or whose view of their subject was filtered by a particular denominational position or personal belief.3

  Scholars who have tackled the topic of Elgar’s Roman Catholicism directly have done so, understandably, in relation to his sacred and organ music.4 But Elgar’s Catholic identity can be seen to have a broader significance both for his art and for its place within English culture, as will be explored here in relation to one of his ostensibly secular vocal works, The Spirit of England, op. 80 (1915–17). This is a setting for tenor or soprano soloist, orchestra, and chorus of three poems from The Winnowing-Fan, a collection of verse published in the early months of the Great War by the poet, dramatist, and art scholar Laurence Binyon (1869–1943).

  In his 1984 study of Elgar’s life and works, Jerrold Northrop Moore points to an interrelationship between the themes the composer worked with in his music and his religious beliefs:

  The fortunes of Elgar’s faith can be traced in the subjects he chose for his major religious choral works, his treatment of those subjects, and how they intertwined with the more purely literary heroes for compositions, also of his own choosing.5

  Yet Moore places The Spirit of England among Elgar’s imperialist works, reserving discussion of it for the chapter titled “Land of Hope and Glory” and denoting it “the other face of the Coronation Ode of 1902.”6 In this regard he echoes Donald Mitchell, who had remarked earlier on “Elgar’s convinced committal to what we may generally term ‘imperial’ topics (the Coronation Ode, Crown of India, Spirit of England and the rest).”7 Both writers are surely correct to highlight the overt nationalism of this score, which Moore emphasizes further by adopting its title for his book (Spirit of England: Edward Elgar in His World). At first glance Binyon’s poetry does not seem far removed from A. C. Benson and indeed many British poets writing in the autumn and winter of 1914. The opening stanzas revel in a version of Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden”—England’s mission to free those enslaved by ignorance and tyranny, to vanquish the forces of evil, and to spread the beacons of civilization—all couched in heady imperial imagery designed to stiffen the backbone in the face of mounting death tolls on the wester
n front. Musically Elgar seems to respond in a like manner, with expansive, aspirational melodies built around upward leaps and rising sequences in full choir and orchestra, marked grandioso, nobilmente, and sonoramente.8 However, to accept unquestioningly this bracketing of The Spirit of England with Elgar’s imperialist works without further investigation would be to perpetuate the whiff of jingoism and propaganda that has lingered around the work, and which probably accounts for its neglect both in the concert hall and in the literature, despite the quality of the music and its significance within Elgar’s creative output.9 As will be seen, The Spirit of England can be interpreted as a specifically Catholic response to the outbreak of war in Europe, and understanding it as such can yield insights into Elgar’s changing attitudes to his faith—the faith in which he was immersed as a young child—and its relationship to his sense of heroic nationalism in the turbulent second decade of the new century.10 When taken out of context, Elgar’s words to Frank Schuster on hearing of the commencement of hostilities against Germany on August 4, 1914, can seem startlingly inhumane:

  Concerning the war I say nothing—the only thing that wrings my heart & soul is the thought of the horses—oh! my beloved animals—the men—and women can go to hell—but my horses;—I walk round & round this room cursing God for allowing dumb brutes to be tortured—let Him kill his human beings but—how CAN HE? Oh, my horses.11

  Volunteers were flooding to join the British Expeditionary Force across the Channel, but the British army was still perceived as a body of professionals; conscription would not be instituted for two years and the full horrors of trench warfare had yet to become a reality. Like many of the aristocracy with whom he aligned himself, especially as an enthusiastic racegoer, Elgar’s concerns were thus for the noble beasts that as cavalry mounts and draught animals had been crucial to Britain’s pursuit of the Boer War, and which epitomized the ideal of unwavering service and loyalty until death, most poignantly when slaughtered in their hundreds to sustain the besieged citizens of Mafeking (1899–1900).12 Frustrated that he was “too old to be a soldier,” Elgar signed up as a Special Constable within two weeks of the outbreak of war, and a few months later switched to the Hampstead Volunteer Reserve, involving himself in regular drills and rifle practice.13 He mobilized A. C. Benson into revising the words for “Land of Hope and Glory” and was soon devoting his creative energies to a range of small-scale compositions, including recitations with orchestral accompaniment of poetry by the Belgian patriot Émile Cammaerts (1878–1953): Carillon (op. 75, 1914), Une voix dans le désert (op. 77, 1915), and Le drapeau belge (op. 79, 1916).14