by Adams, Byron
24. Quoted in Hatcher, Laurence Binyon, 1. In their experiences of the war, David Cannadine stresses the difference between “those at the front, who saw and purveyed death, and those at home, who saw no death, no carnage and no corpses, but experienced bereavement.” Cannadine, “War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain,” 213. On this important distinction, see also Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), passim. From 1915 Binyon used his annual leave from the British Museum to work as a volunteer ambulance driver, hospital orderly, and medical reporter in France; see Hatcher, Laurence Binyon, 198–210. It is worth noting here that Binyon’s long dramatic poem, The Madness of Merlin (London: Macmillan, 1947), based on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s tale of a twelfth-Century Welsh prince who waged war on the Picts but was horrified by the slaughter and fled the battlefield to roam the forests, had been offered by him to Elgar as the basis for an opera several years before work began on The Spirit of England; see letter from Binyon to Elgar, 11 July [1904/9], EBM L2312.
25. Sidney Colvin considered Ruskin the “idol of my boyhood”: “I used to devour my Scott and Shakespeare, and Faery Queene and Modern Painters and Stones of Venice … and learn long screeds of them, both verse and prose, by heart.” As a student at Cambridge he sought out and was befriended by the Ruskins, and aspired to become “something like a Ruskin and a Matthew Arnold rolled into one.” Sidney Colvin, Memories and Notes of Persons and Places, 1852–1912 (London: Edward Arnold, 1921); and retirement speech (1912), quoted in E. V. Lucas, The Colvins and Their Friends (London: Methuen, 1928), 5, 8.
26. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 3, last chapter, quoted in Sidney Colvin, letter to the editor, “1855 and 1915,” Times Literary Supplement, 31 December 1914, 590.
27. Cannadine, “War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain,” 195.
28. Hatcher, Laurence Binyon, 192. Colvin was not the only one to push Elgar to write a “requiem.” Later that year, on November 25, Percy Scholes wrote an “Appeal to Elgar” in the pages of the Evening Standard and St. James’s Gazette, in which he lamented the overreliance on Brahms’s German Requiem at military funerals and called for Elgar to write a “British Requiem”: “In ‘Gerontius,’ Elgar was able to take us into the chamber of death, and the places that lay beyond, to show us death and judgment, to stir us with dread and sooth us with comfort, to move us to sorrow and to final joy. In ‘Carillon,’ by certain means of the utmost simplicity, he has expressed the feelings of a nation mourning the woes of the present and rejoicing in the hopes of the happiness to come again, and has done so in a way that has given his work an appeal to audiences in this country such as no other work at present before us enjoys. Elgar is a sincere Catholic, as ‘Gerontius’ testifies; but he is a Briton, too. Cannot he write a choral piece which shall be wide enough in its verbal utterance to express the feelings of us all, whatever our faith, something vocally not too difficult for our choral societies … ? Something we would have that can be sung in Westminster Abbey and [the Roman Catholic] Westminster Cathedral, in church, in chapel and in concert-room, which can be sung here and in Canada and Australia and South Africa.”
29. Paul Rodmell, Charles Villiers Stanford (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2002), 192–93. For Scholes, Stanford’s “fine” Requiem did not meet the criteria for a “national death song” (see preceding note), because it represented “a ritual not understood by a majority of our countrymen” and the text was in Latin. Stanford had played through the whole of his new Requiem for Elgar while on a visit to Malvern. It is not known how Elgar responded to this performance. Jeremy Dibble, “Elgar and His British Contemporaries,” in Cambridge Companion to Elgar, 20–21. On earlier attitudes to musical settings of Roman Catholic texts in England, see Rachel Cowgill, “‘Hence, Base Intruder, Hence’: Rejection and Assimilation in the Early English Reception of Mozart’s Requiem,” in Europe, Empire, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century British Music, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Julian Rushton (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2006), 9–27. On other British “requiems” from the war years, see Foreman, “The Winnowing-Fan: British Music in Wartime,” 113–14.
30. For extensive investigation of the deep-seated divisions between Catholics and Protestants in nineteenth-Century English culture, see D. G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), John Wolffe, God & Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland 1843–1945 (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); and Michael Wheeler, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). These divisions also extended to matters of musical style, as is apparent in Herbert Thompson’s review of a Hull Harmonic Society performance of Gounod’s Messe solonnelle, Yorkshire Post (23 March 1918): “One can understand its popularity as a concert piece, for it is highly attractive music, tuneful and effective, and expressive, in a rather superficial way, of its theme. But that it should have been accepted so much as it has been in the service of the English Church is more remarkable, for one would think its perfumed exotic quality strangely at variance with the Anglo-Saxon temperament, at least in matters of religious observance.” Anglican music should be dignified and sober in comparison, he explains, but not dry or overly erudite. See press-cuttings collection, dated and annotated by Thompson himself, Leeds University, Brotherton Library Special Collections, MS 164.
31. Adams, “Elgar’s Later Oratorios,” 83.
32. Transcribed by Jerrold Northrop Moore from a conversation with Elgar’s doctor, Arthur Thomson, in Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 818.
33. From conversations between Moore and members of the Leicester family in Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life,823. See also Charles Edward McGuire’s essay in this volume. Though legalized in 1902, cremation remained a controversial choice in British society until well after the First World War, mainly because of widespread belief in the resurrection of the material body. The Church of England officially accepted cremation in 1944, but it was not until 1965 that the Vatican Council reversed its 1886 ban on cremation for Catholics. See Death in England: An Illustrated History, ed. Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 249–51, 264–66.
34. Butt, “Roman Catholicism and Being Musically English,” 107; Philip Leicester, manuscript account of Elgar’s visit, 2 June 1914, in Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 269–74. For more on the Leicester family, see Charles Edward McGuire’s essay in this volume, as well as that of Matthew Riley.
35. For accounts of Elgar’s sacred music composition, see Butt, “Roman Catholicism and Being Musically English”; and John Allison, Edward Elgar: Sacred Music (Bridgend: Seren, 1994). Elgar turned down an invitation to compose a mass for the Leeds Festival in 1903–1904 in order to continue his work on the First Symphony and The Apostles; see letter from Frederick Spark to Elgar, cited in Cecil Bloom, “Elgar—The Leeds Connection, Part I,” Elgar Society Journal 9 (1995): 75.
36. Quotation from Butt, “Roman Catholicism and Being Musically English,” 117.
37. From 1906 Elgar’s interest in The Last Judgement fluctuated, but the project was on his mind in the early years of the war: Atkins offered him a commission if he finished the trilogy for the Three Choirs Festival in 1914, and in 1915 Elgar told Henry Embleton of the Leeds Festival Committee that he might complete the projected oratorio after the war. He would continue to gather relevant reading matter until around 1923, including R. H. Charles, Lectures on the Apocalypse (1922) and other material on the Antichrist. See Charles Edward McGuire, Elgar’s Oratorios: The Creation of an Epic Narrative (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2002), 293–301.
38. E. Wulstan Atkins, The Elgar-Atkins Friendship (Newton Abbot, London, and North Pomfret, Vt.: David & Charles, 1984), 165, 169–70.
39. Charles Edward McGuire, “One Story, Two Visions: Textual Differences be
tween Elgar’s and Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius,” in The Best of Me: A Gerontius Centenary Companion, ed. Geoffrey Hodgkins (Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 1999), 84–101.
40. The excised passage reads: “Now let the golden prison ope its gates, / Making sweet music, as each fold revolves / Upon its ready hinge. And ye great powers, / Angels of Purgatory, receive from me / My charge, a precious soul, until the day, / When, from all bond and forfeiture released, / I shall reclaim it for the courts of light.” Elgar’s deletions in Newman’s poem are detailed in Hodgkins, Best of Me, 41–55.
41. Lewis Foreman, “Elgar and Gerontius: The Early Performances,” in Hodgkins, Best of Me, 211–13.
42. Jerrold Northrop Moore, ed., Elgar and His Publishers: Letters of a Creative Life, Vol. I, 1885–1903 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 351–52, 354–55. See also Atkins, Elgar-Atkins Friendship, 70–73.
43. Anthony Boden, Gloucester, Hereford, Worcester—Three Choirs: A History of the Festival (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992), 142–43, 148. At the 1910 Three Choirs performance of Gerontius in Gloucester Cathedral, Elgar’s oratorio was preceded by the premiere of Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, which may have been an attempt to create a Protestant cordon sanitaire around the Roman Catholic oratorio. See Charles Edward McGuire, “Vaughan Williams and the English Music Festival,” in Vaughan Williams Essays, ed. Byron Adams and Robin Wells (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2003), 260–61.
44. Adams, “Elgar’s Later Oratorios,” 95.
45. Elgar may have intended to call this movement “England”; see “Performances of ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ and New Choral Work by Sir Edward Elgar: A Remarkable Scheme,” The Musical Times, 1 April 1916.
46. Elgar repeats this stanza at the conclusion of the first movement.
47. A sketch of this passage carries the note “aeroplanes stanza III.” See British Library Add. MS 47908, fol. 142.
48. Stanzas three, four, and six here were omitted when Elgar reworked “For the Fallen” two years after the war for the dedication of the Cenotaph in Whitehall, giving this the title With Proud Thanksgiving. See Robert Anderson, Elgar (New York: Schirmer, 1993), 205–6.
49. This and the following stanza formed part of the section marked Marziale in the manuscript vocal score (British Library, Add MS. 58040), described by Elgar in a letter to Ernest Newman of 15 April 1916, as “a sort of idealised (perhaps) Quick March,—the sort of thing which ran in my mind when the dear lads were swinging past so many, many times.” See Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 297.
50. Elgar altered this line to read: “They shall not grow old.”
51. Robert Bridges, Preface, The Spirit of Man: An Anthology in English & French from the Philosophers & Poets Made by the Poet Laureate in 1915 (London: Longmans Green, 1916); the month of publication is given in Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War (London: SPCK), 171. The Binyon settings are not referred to as “The Spirit of England” in the Elgars’ journals and correspondence until the later stages of composition: The Musical Times announced the projected title on April 1, 1916. Bridges’ “preface” conveys much the same message as Binyon’s “The Fourth of August,” condemning Prussian aggression unequivocally, stating: “Common diversions divert us no longer; our habits and thoughts are searched by the glare of the conviction that man’s life is not the ease that a peace-loving generation has found it or thought to make it; and it is in their abundant testimony to the good and beautiful that we find support for our faith, and distraction from a grief that is intolerable constantly to face, nay impossible to without that trust in God which makes all things possible. We may see that our national follies and sins have deserved punishment; and if in this revelation of rottenness we cannot ourselves appear wholly sound, we are still free and true at heart, and can take hope in contrition, and in the brave endurance of sufferings that should chasten our intention and conduct; we can even be grateful for the discipline: but beyond this it is offered us to take joy in the thought that our country is called of God to stand for the truth of man’s hope, and that it has not shrunk from the call. Here we stand upright, and above reproach: and to show ourselves worthy will be more than consolation; for truly it is the hope of man’s great desire, the desire for brotherhood and universal peace to men of good-will, that is at stake in this struggle. Britons have ever fought well for their country, and their country’s Cause is the high Cause of Freedom and Honour. That fairest earthly fame, the fame of Freedom, is inseparable from the names of Albion, Britain, England: it has gone out to America and the Antipodes, hallowing the names of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; it has found a new home in Africa: and this heritage is our glory and happiness. We can therefore be happy in our sorrows, happy even in the death of our beloved who fall in the fight; for they die nobly, as heroes and saints die, with hearts and hands unstained by hatred or wrong.” Another prompt may have been the publication in 1915 of the R. Hon. George William Erskine Russell’s The Spirit of England, in which Russell discussed the conduct of a nation in wartime: “I have often been accused of being unjust to the military spirit. In reply, I point to the spirit which animates the present conduct of Germany, and if that is the military spirit, I am perfectly just to it, for it is, and I have called it, damnable. It has absolutely nothing in common with the spirit which fights for freedom and national existence, or sacrifices itself for the salvation of the weak.” George William Erskine Russell, The Spirit of England (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1915), 84–85, quoted in The Bookman 48 (August 1915): 142–43. As this was the same issue in which a wartime sonnet by Alice Elgar appeared, her husband may well have read the review that contained this quotation. See note 62 below.
52. Figures cited here are the rehearsal numbers printed in Novello’s vocal scores and the full scores of these works in the Elgar Complete Edition. For discussion of the “Novissima hora est” motif and its significance for interpretations of The Dream of Gerontius, see Aidan Thomson, “Rereading Elgar: Hermeneutics, Criticism and Reception in England and Germany, 1900–1914,” Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 2002, 182–247, esp. 193. It should be noted that the tags for these motifs were supplied by Elgar’s friend August Jaeger, with the composer’s acquiescence. See Hodgkins, Best of Me, 86–87.
53. Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 303, 305.
54. Elgar points out this reuse of the passage from “The Fourth of August” in a letter to Ernest Newman, 17 June 1917, quoted in Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 307.
55. Elgar drew Newman’s attention to this thematic link between the movements, admitting to feeling “a certain connection in the spirit of the words ‘BUT not to fail’ and ‘To the end they remain.’” See letter from Elgar to Newman, 15 April 1916, Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 296–97. Newman communicated this in his article “‘The Spirit of England’: Edward Elgar’s New Choral Work,” The Musical Times (1 May 1916): 235–39.
56. Maine, Elgar, 2:240.
57. Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 307. Elgar wrote to Binyon on April 17 to tell him that he had completed The Spirit of England, see EBM L3738.
58. See, for example, Andrew Neill, “Elgar’s War,” 45; John Norris, “Spirit of Elgar,” 249; Anderson, Elgar in Manuscript, 149.
59. See British Library, Add. MS 47908, fols. 132–35; Anderson, “Sources,” Elgar Complete Edition 10:xxi.
60. Theo Barker, “Speyer, Sir Edgar, Baronet,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, accessed August 28, 2006. Binyon had met Elgar on at least one occasion courtesy of the Speyer household. See letter from Binyon to Elgar, 4 June 1909, EBM L2300 (“I hope you will not have forgotten, though it is a good long time ago now, meeting me at Mrs Speyer’s”). See also Sophie Fuller’s essay in this volume, 231.
61. Elgar Diaries (photostatic copies), 13:1914–15, EBM.
62. Letter from Streatfeild to Lady Elgar, enclosing a copy of her typewritten sonnet, 9 July 1915, EBM L6362; the sonnet was published in The Bookman 48 (August 1915): 121.
&
nbsp; 63. According to Trevor Wilson, this was “a special time of hate in Britain”; see his The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), 182. On the Bryce Report and its impact on the home front, see esp. 182–91; also Read, Atrocity Propaganda.
64. See also William Thompson Hill, The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell: The Life Story of the Victim of Germany’s Most Barbarous Crime (London: Hutchinson, 1915).
65. Elgar to Newman, 15 April 1916 in Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 296–7.
66. Musical Times (1 June 1916): 235–9.
67. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography, trans. Cedar and Eden Paul (London: Cassell, 1987), 180. Ernst Lissauer, Worte in die Zeit: Flugblätter 1914, Blatt I (Göttingen, 1914). Exemplars of the following German editions of musical settings are held at the British Library: “Gott strafe England” (Munich: Simplicissimus Verlag, [n.d.]); and Guido Hassl, “Gott strafe England!” Militär- und andere Humoresken (Regensburg: Pustei, 1915). The third stanza was considered the most extreme, concluding with “Sie lieben vereint, sie hassen vereint, / Sie haben aller nur einen Feind. / England.” A passage from Lissauer’s poem is read aloud in English to Mr. Britling, who listens in utter bewilderment, in H. G. Wells, Mr. Britling Sees It Through (London and New York: Cassell, 1916), 271–72.