Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  Both Millais and Burne-Jones sought their inspiration in pre-Renaissance painting, but in Burne-Jones’s version the overall aesthetic structure was foregrounded as a vehicle for subjective appropriation rather than minute observation. In Millais’s canvases, the detail is forcefully realized. In Elgar’s music, the melodic material and rhetorical sweep have lent themselves to such disparate readings precisely because of their place in an overwhelming large-scale musical structure. The sections of The Apostles and The Kingdom that have attracted attention (the Virgin Mary’s “The Sun goeth down” in The Kingdom, the scenes with Judas in The Apostles) are more like Millais, while the Prelude to The Apostles and the setting of the Lord’s Prayer in The Kingdom are suggestive of Burne-Jones. Indeed, the realism of Millais finds its analog in the manner in which the characters in Elgar’s later oratorios assume a rich, psychologically powerful specificity and therefore a plausible contemporaneousness, often defined by Elgar’s own autobiographical projections.113

  Figure 4. Edward Burne-Jones, The Golden Stairs, 1880.

  Figure 5. Edward Burne-Jones, Ascension, stained-glass window, St. Philip’s Cathedral, Birmingham.

  This attempt to link Elgar with the strategies of the Pre-Raphaelites leads back to the centrality of Catholic culture in Elgar’s aesthetic. The emphasis on authority and history, and on the community of the faithful, Newman’s vision of the legitimacy of the Catholic Church as a singular and historic vehicle of doctrine, with its priests and emphasis on sacrament, reflect themselves in Elgar’s efforts to create a community of listeners, forge solidarity through art, and use the time-honored historic practices and models of composition as the framework with which to express his personal voice.

  It is ironic that, for all of his Englishness, the one painting Elgar used as a direct religious inspiration for his music was by the Russian painter Ivan Kramskoi. While visiting Charles Vincent Gorton, the Anglican canon who advised Elgar on the texts of The Apostles and The Kingdom, Elgar saw “my ideal picture of the Lonely Christ as I have tried (and tried hard) to realise … the Character” in Kramskoi’s Christ in the Wilderness (figure 6).114 Both Elgar’s comments and the painting reveal the essence of the composer’s Ruskin-like aesthetic transformation of a religious ideal, in a manner consistent with the ideology of the Pre-Raphaelites. Although Kramskoi does not affect a premodern painterly surface and color, as his English contemporaries did (the perspective is indebted to Renaissance and eighteenth-Century practices), the rigorous attention to formal structure and detail is present. As with Millais, the figure is psychologically present as real and human. The face is contemporary. So, too, is the barren landscape. However, the pose of the figure and his gaze represent an aesthetic idealization of suffering, dignity, contemplation, and humility. Elgar recognized in Kramskoi his own usage of modern means—the orchestra, the harmonic practice, and the tradition of nineteenth-Century symphonic and oratorio models, and yet the use of craft and structure, as in Longfellow, to distance the artist’s subjectivity through the artifice of aesthetic tradition. Christ is real, but he seems to be an everyman, a real human figure whom we can personally identify as both human and divine. He is real and ideal, modern and timeless, particular and general. The viewer of the painting, like the listener and participant in Elgar’s music, is elevated by identification, through art, all consonant with a noble, idealistic tradition.

  Figure 6. Ivan Kramskoi, Christ in the Wilderness, 1872.

  In this manner, Arnold’s project and Ruskin’s aspirations found their medium in Elgar. If the ideology was the modern but loyal Catholicism of Newman, the technical strategy of composition was suggested by the example of Longfellow. In the end, Elgar’s ambition was at one with his times. He believed that although a work of music would in some philosophical sense always be “great” if it remained buried and hidden from view, the justification for artistic “inspiration” and the hard work required to realize his plans was to find “its proper place educating, helping and improving mankind.”115 As a public art that demanded participation through composition, performance, listening, and critical debate, music possessed a power to do so. The need for music to join in the larger project of elevating the citizenry through aesthetic means seemed, to Elgar, particularly acute in Britain, where music had for so long ignored them. The object of cultural transformation was, for Elgar, “practical everyday life.” The time had come not only for a musician to “discourse usefully on his time” but also to act as composer and advocate, bringing the authoritative and historic traditions and norms of musical art to bear on that imperative in a distinctively English manner.116

  This synthesis of patriotic fervor, humanitarian idealism, and conceit in the civic power of great art music defined Elgar’s personality and his pursuit of success and fame. But most important, his vision of the vocation of the composer as reformer of society and legislator of community through musical culture shaped the fundamental character of his works. Like Longfellow’s poetry, Elgar’s music (its suppressed autobiographical subtexts notwithstanding) drew his countrymen into a widespread, shared public expression of sentiment that continues to inform the composer’s lasting appeal.

  NOTES

  1. This essay is indebted to the immense literature on Elgar, the history of English music from Elgar’s time forward, and the voluminous scholarship on English history and culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Therefore only a representative sample of the bibliography is possible. As is anyone who writes about Elgar, I am indebted to the scholarship of Jerrold Northrop Moore, particularly Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Spirit of England: Edward Elgar in His World (London: Heinemann, 1984); Elgar: Child of Dreams (London: Faber and Faber, 2004); Letters of a Lifetime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); and Elgar and His Publishers: Letters of a Creative Life, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Robert Anderson’s Elgar (New York: Schirmer Books, 1993); Michael Kennedy’s The Life of Elgar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Diana M. McVeagh’s Edward Elgar, His Life and Music (1955; repr., Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1979) were valuable, as was Stewart R. Craggs’s Edward Elgar: A Source Book (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995). I also wish to thank the following individuals for their help: Byron Adams, Christopher Gibbs, Deirdre d’Albertis, Lynne Meloccaro, Paul De Angelis, Jane Smith, and Irene Zedlacher.

  2. The phrase “das Land ohne Musik” appeared in the title of a book (not about music, ironically) by Oscar Schmitz published in Germany during World War I. Consider the condescending and perfunctory treatments of Elgar and English music in leading German histories of music written in the early decades of the twentieth century, particularly those by Walter Niemann, Die Musik der Gegenwart (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1913); Heinrich Kostlin, Geschichte der Musik im Umriss, ed. Wilibald Nagel (Liepzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1910); and Karl Storck, Die Musik der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Muth’sche Verlagshandlung, 1919); all from the early decades of the twentieth century.

  3. One facile explanation derives from England’s economic and political prominence. The celebratory, self-congratulatory culture that requires public display (that is, the contrast between literature and musical composition and performance) may not lend itself to being seen by subordinate nations as exotic, attractive, or comforting. Furthermore, the position of power renders the imperial power a net consumer, a culture that borrows freely from others as a right without self-doubt.

  4. Charles Villiers Stanford had an international career in the 1890s before Elgar burst on the scene at the end of the decade. See Jeremy Dibble, Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  5. On public music making in midcentury England, see Michael Musgrave, The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Perhaps the best source on the character of concert life from the very end of the nineteenth century through Elgar’s lifetime and well into the late twentieth century is the exhaustive study o
f England’s major artists management firm in Christopher Fifield, Ibbs and Tillet: The Rise and Fall of a Musical Empire (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

  6. See Ralph Vaughan Williams’s early essays, first compiled in the early 1930s under the title National Music, particularly “Should Music Be National?” and “Some Conclusions,” in which the composer squares a circle, so to speak, by arguing for the evolution of distinct national qualities through an analogy to the origin of California wine in French vines, and by claiming that universality in music (e.g., the case of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger) can be achieved only by embracing the particular and inventing a persuasive voice for national sentiment. See Vaughan Williams, National Music and Other Essays, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 1–11, 62–73.

  7. Ibid., 248–55.

  8. See David Cannadine, “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The English Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’, c. 1820–1977,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 130, 136–37, 144. It can be argued that Elgar’s eclectic appropriation of foreign influences reflected a particularly nineteenth-Century English, imperial arrogance, the right of empire to use in a syncretic fashion the achievements of other cultures.

  9. See John Caldwell, The Oxford History of English Music, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 265–66, 291–94, 325–30, 556.

  10. See the elaborate effort in J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Edward Elgar, Modernist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  11. Edward Elgar, A Future for English Music and Other Lectures, ed. Percy M. Young (London: Dennis Dobson, 1968), 207. Young used italics to denote Elgar’s handwritten insertions into the original typescript of the lectures he delivered at the University of Birmingham in 1905.

  12. Elgar’s symphonies need to be placed in the context of the quite astonishing output of English symphonic music, particularly in the early twentieth century. See Jurgen Schaarwachter, Die britische Sinfonie, 1914–1945 (Cologne: Dohr, 1995).

  13. Elgar, A Future for English Music, 207. Elgar probably did not realize that Strauss had tried his hand at symphonic form as a young man. It is not clear what he, writing in 1905, made of the Symphonia Domestica (1903) and might later think of An Alpine Symphony, completed in 1915.

  14. Extensive research by historians and musicologists into the state of England’s musical culture during Elgar’s lifetime makes plain that, owing to the country’s dynamic economic development both at home and throughout the empire, England could boast a middle-class public with levels of literacy and culture sufficient to constitute one of the most important in Europe. The evidence is visible as early as the 1790s when Haydn made his famous trips to London. From that point on, England became a major destination for European artists, performers, and composers. Furthermore, England was a major producer and consumer of musical instruments and during the nineteenth century developed a lively publishing industry for music. By the mid-nineteenth century, as English novels indicate, particularly those by Jane Austen and George Eliot, an admirable level of amateurism and engagement with music was widespread beyond London among both the gentry and the middle class. It is for that reason that Mendelssohn found such a congenial response in England. The English choral tradition, notably in Birmingham, resulted in significant commissions of music, including Mendelssohn’s Elijah and Dvo . rák’s Requiem. The extent of concert life and its attendant audience is what brought Hans Richter to England and made England perhaps the most rewarding venue for a performer of Joseph Joachim’s stature. In short, musical culture was part of the business of culture. For a significant population in England that was literate and had sufficient leisure, a taste for music was integrated into established norms of personal development and domestic life. See Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), chaps. 2, 5, 8, 9, 10; Donald Burrows, “Victorian England: An Age of Expansion,” in The Late Romantic Era: From the Mid–19th Century to World War I, ed. Jim Samson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1991), 266–94; G. R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War, 1886–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), chap. 15; K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), chap. 11.

  15. As the first Richard Peyton Professor of Music, Elgar delivered a course of lectures at the University of Birmingham during 1905–6. See Elgar, A Future for English Music.

  16. See Matthew Riley, “Rustling Reeds and Lofty Pines: Elgar and the Music of Nature,” 19th-Century Music 26, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 155–77.

  17. See Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and Music, England 1876–1953 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), chap. 3; Meirion Hughes, The English Musical Renaissance and the Press, 1850–1914: Watchmen of Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), chap. 7; Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance, 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); and Stephen Hinton’s review of the 1993 first edition of Hughes and Stradling’s book in Journal of Modern History 67, no. 3 (September 1995): 710–12. See also Cannadine, “Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual,” 101–64.

  18. Given Elgar’s energetic dabbling as a chemist and his enthusiasm for recording and broadcasting—let alone his evident patriotism for imperial England—the emphasis on the personal and rural still requires the “other” Elgar to be understood and not merely de-emphasized.

  19. See Byron Adams, “The ‘Dark Saying’ of the Enigma: Homoeroticism and the Elgarian Paradox,” 19th-Century Music 23, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 218–35; and the prologue in Kennedy, Life of Elgar.

  20. See Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The English Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Martha Vicinus, ed., Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972); Richard Dellamora, ed., Victorian Sexual Dissidence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003); Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), chaps. 5 and 6; and David Hilliard, “UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies 25, no. 2 (Winter 1982): 181–210.

  21. Elgar, A Future for English Music, 57.

  22. See Nalini Ghuman Gwynne, “Elephants and Moghuls, Contraltos and G-Strings: How Elgar Got His Englishness,” in “India in the English Musical Imagination, 1890–1940,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2003, 109–86. In this context, one should also note the establishment of the Boy Scouts; see Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts and the Imperatives of Empire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).

  23. For a revision of the claims that Elgar’s place in English music declined, see John Gardiner, “The Reception of Sir Edward Elgar 1918–c. 1934: A Reassessment,” TwentiethCentury English History 9, no. 3 (1998): 370–95.

  24. Byron Adams has noted that for Britten the decade of the 1950s was not an easy time to be homosexual. The real improvement in England came in the mid–1960s. See also chap. 1, “Carrying Music to the Masses,” in Paul Kildea’s Selling Britten: Music and the Market Place (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9–41.

  25. Craggs, Elgar: A Source Book, 58, 60, 61, 64.

  26. For general accounts of the contested issues, see The Mid-Victorian Generation, chaps. 12–13; and Searle, A New England?, pt. 4. With particular respect to religious debates, see Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952); and Michael Wheeler, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in NineteenthCentury English Cultu
re (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Several points need to be made regarding Elgar’s status as a Catholic. First, as Wheeler’s book makes clear, there was no shortage of anti-Catholic sentiment in late-nineteenth-Century England. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that prejudice against Catholics did not prevent Elgar from achieving enormous success. That achievement may be due in part to the success of his oratorios, which at one and the same time celebrated the profoundly Catholic allegiance to the historic community of the body faithful and the traditions with which it was associated. Second, even though Elgar’s career may not have been damaged by his status as a Catholic, he never tired of expressing the belief that his Catholicism was a disadvantage he had to battle constantly. Elgar’s success in communicating with the broad spectrum of the English audience should not in any way minimize the importance of the ongoing tensions that confessional differences generated socially, politically, and culturally in England during his lifetime.

  27. Elgar golfed with one of Arnold’s sons and in 1905 worked on setting the poet’s “Empedocles on Etna,” returning to it briefly in 1927. Dedicated to Muriel Foster, a fragment called “Callicles” survives. See Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life, 177; and Craggs, Elgar: A Source Book, 78.

  28. Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life, 693–94.

  29. On Stanford and Parry and their relationship to Elgar, see Jeremy Dibble’s C. Hubert Parry, His Life and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992), as well as his Charles Villiers Stanford.

  30. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980), 168. On the context of Arnold’s views and his relationship to Newman, see David J. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), chaps. 1–9.