“I am ready for the next phase of my life, Watson,” Holmes said, although his words had a hollow ring to them as they seemed to echo around a room largely stripped of personal possessions. He picked up the book on bee-keeping that was still resting by the side of the occasional table. “In particular,” said Holmes, “my recent studies of apiculture have shown me that according to the laws of science, the bee should not be able to fly. I am anxious to investigate something which the laws of aerodynamics proclaim is an impossibility, but where, by some contrivance, these laws are overturned. I trust the explanation for that breach of the laws of physics will not be as footling as that for the breach of the laws of economics which the insurance companies have organised for themselves.”
I am bound to confess that I felt desolate to see the room in Baker Street, where I had spent so many of my happiest hours and years, suddenly stripped of all its familiar items. As the room was full of partially filled containers of one sort or another, the only way I could face Holmes was by leaning on the edge of the dining table. As I did so I could feel my old Afghan war-wound throbbing painfully.
“So Holmes,” I asked at length, “what prevailed upon you to take this monumental decision?”
“A munificent grant from Mr Lawler’s offices made it viable for me to pursue my new interest and I have bought a cottage on the South Downs to enable me to carry out my researches.”
I was scarcely able to believe that financial considerations should have swayed my friend in this way. “Holmes, I thought you only sought cases to defray your costs. The only case I have published to the world where you made more than that was The Priory School. Are you too now as biddable as so many other people seem to be, so that your silence may be bought by the provision of a grant to enable you to study the flight of bees?”
“My friend, the flight of bees will not be the only thing I shall be studying when I head down to the South Downs although I am not, alas, able to confide to you, my biographer and confidant, on everything that will be a subject of my investigations.” He patted me kindly on the shoulder. “I would implore you to banish the thought that this will be the last time you hear from me.”
At his bidding, we went over to the window and looked down at a darkening Baker Street below. “There will be more and greater cases, my friend,” he continued, “on which I shall need your assistance. It may not be apparent to you now, but, in the not too distant future, I can see the lamps going out all over Europe. If we are to avoid this fate or, should we fail in that, if we wish to see those lamps relit at some future point in our lifetimes, then I must dedicate myself to these greater investigations. This case on consistent luck will not, I would assure you, constitute my last bow.”
Variations on an Enigma
When the case that forms the main part of this narrative was brought to the attention of Holmes in 1898, I assumed that it would remain unique among those matters which I have chronicled.
In my view, this assumption proved justified but, when I mentioned to Holmes my intention to pass on my case notes so that they can be published after our deaths, he insisted that I include another entirely unrelated matter which arose in 1910. This second matter is not so much unresolved as a failure to explain the meaning of something that everyone who discussed the matter knew to be a fiction.
My friend is notoriously reluctant to grant his permission for me to pass on my works. When I pointed out this departure from his normal practice to him, he opined, “Each matter, good Doctor, casts light on the other. Indeed, the two matters are variations on a common theme.”
Accordingly, I set before the public these two independent matters which Holmes perceives as being closely related. I will confine my own comments to expressing my gratitude for this rare instance of a case that Holmes is insistent for me to put in the public domain.
1. The Transfiguring Melody
On Friday, 21 October 1898, a lull in my friend’s caseload had occasioned one of our periodic walks through London and it was nearly dark by the time we got back to Baker Street at just after six o’clock.
“There’s a gentleman to see you, Mr Holmes,” said the boy in buttons as we came through the street door. “He’s waiting for you upstairs. Wouldn’t say his name.”
“An arresting challenge,” said Holmes to me as we went up the stairs and opened the door to our living room. Our visitor rose as we entered the room and, as he extended his hand to greet us, Holmes commented, “How excellent to have a musician in our room although I note that your composing is not particularly remunerative. What can I do to assist you?”
Our tall, moustached visitor froze at Holmes’s remark. “This exceeds all I have heard about you, Mr Holmes. I am indeed a musician and the lack of recognition for my works is the reason why I am here to consult with you. What led you to make your extraordinarily penetrating observations?”
“One observation and one deduction, my good Sir. The skin on the outside of your right hand, just where it emerges from your cuff, bears the mark of stave lines. This can only have happened because, in your eagerness to write music, you set down some notes on a sheet where the staves had been added in by hand, in ink onto plain paper, and the ink of those staves had not yet dried when inspiration struck you. You would only have used paper with staves marked in by hand if the incremental cost of buying pre-printed manuscript paper was a significant one to you. Hence my observation that you compose and my deduction that your writing does not bring in much money.”
“Your twin remarks are entirely accurate,” said our visitor with a sigh. “I follow in the long and all too often glorious line of impecunious composers which reached its apogee when Mozart was put into an unmarked grave just over one hundred years ago, but which has continued to the present day. The Germans talk of hunger artists or Hungerkünstler and, while I would not wish to sound so self-pitying as to describe myself as such, I can say, to address your comments precisely, that my dear wife, Alice, takes plain paper each morning and marks it with the lines of staves. Proper music manuscript paper is very dear.”
We sat down in our chairs and our visitor continued.
“My name is Edward Elgar. I am from Worcester and am, as you say, a musician. My father had musical talent, tuned pianos, and ran a music shop in the town. He was able to make a reasonable living on this. I, by contrast, make my money through teaching, running bands of local musicians, and some composing. I am able to make little financial headway with the latter and it is only through the first two activities that I am able to keep my head above water.”
“Pray continue.”
“There is not much more to add. I have had choral works performed at some of this country’s music festivals and my Serenade for Strings has achieved a minor following, but I remain unknown and impecunious.”
“Do you have a list of your works that have been performed?”
“I have it here,” said Elgar.
“It is a pleasure to have so well-prepared a client,” said Holmes with the amiable tone he could adopt so easily when he chose. He read out aloud as he scanned down the list: “The Black Knight, King Olaf, Light of Life, and Caractacus. You have quite a range of titles, Mr Elgar, though I see your Serenade for Strings on here as well, which seems rather a bland name for a piece in the exotic company of your other works.”
“I originally called it Three Pieces for Strings but felt the new title would encourage more people to play all three movements, as well as making clear that my work follows in the tradition of serenades established by the Viennese masters.”
“And what would you like me to do to help you?”
“Your reputation as one of the great minds of the age goes before you, Mr Holmes. I would ask you to see the request I am about to make as a puzzle out of the run of your normal work with criminals. I want your advice on what I can do to achieve greater recognition - both reputational and fin
ancial - for my music.”
I looked at my friend to see how he would react to this request which was, as Elgar stated, quite unlike anything I had heard before. There was a brief pause as Homes considered his response. I have commented elsewhere that Holmes is accessible on the side of flattery, and I think it was Elgar’s description of him as one of the great minds of the age as well as the lull in his practice that persuaded him to look favourably on the musician’s petition.
“Tell me about how a composer may build a career path today,” invited my friend as he lit his pipe. “Beethoven and Mozart produced symphonies, concertos, operas and sacred works. Is that not a progression that you would like to follow? I note that in what you describe yourself as having written, you do not mention any of these genres.”
“There are formidable obstacles in the way of making a reputation or money out of any of them, much though I would like to write precisely the sorts of work that you suggest,” said Elgar and lit a cigarette of his own. “Let us take your suggestion that I write religious works. You may think you see before you a pillar of this country’s establishment and that the Anglican Church would be eager to give me commissions. I am, however, a practising Roman Catholic and my wife, who comes from a well-to-do family, was disinherited when she did me the honour of marrying me. My faith means that Anglican commissioners of religious works are reluctant to give me any sort of preference.”
“So do you feel that your faith makes you something of an outsider in British society?”
“That is indeed how I see myself - certainly as regards sacred music,” said Elgar. He continued after he had drawn on his cigarette: “Production of opera does not have the same obstacles as sacred music, but it is vastly expensive to stage and so impresarios are very reluctant to commission anything new. They are much more comfortable putting on a small range of works by well-known names such as Mozart, Wagner, Verdi and Rossini.”
“And orchestral music?”
“For a concerto, I would need either to perform it myself - and I am no more than a modest performer on any instrument - or to obtain a commission. To achieve the latter, I would need to attract the ear of one of the great instrumental soloists of our day and it is hard to obtain this while I am still so little known.”
“And a symphony?”
“You don’t know how soul-destroying it is to be dogged by a giant.”
I think Holmes had been expecting a similarly matter-of-fact response to his questions about a symphony as Elgar had given about the other genres, so there was a pause while my companion considered his next response. Elgar saw Holmes’s reaction and smiled before he clarified what he had said:
“Not my words, Mr Holmes. That is what the great German composer, Johannes Brahms, who died last year, said when he was asked about writing symphonies. He felt that Beethoven had said all that there was to say in the form. Brahms took until he was forty-four - three years older than I am now - to write one. It is a magnificent score but, even then, people said it sounded like Beethoven. Some even called it Beethoven’s tenth. You can imagine how difficult it will be for me to tread in Beethoven’s footprints, especially now that Brahms has trodden in them too.”
“I am certainly learning something this evening about how a composer makes his way,” said Holmes, as though thinking aloud. “It is not unlike the travails of becoming a consulting detective. Long were the hours I spent on my own in Montague Street waiting for my practice to build up. In the end, I could no longer afford the quarters I occupied on my own, and that is how Dr Watson and I first came to share these lodgings in Baker Street.”
He paused and drew on his pipe before continuing.
“And yet the specialism where I have made my name lies in following the tracks of others rather than advising on how to make fresh tracks. It will indeed be a fresh departure for us to lay tracks for someone else - in this case in the direction of how to make reputation and money out of composing. If then, Mr Elgar, I may summarise your commission, it is that you would like me to find a way of giving a boost to your music’s profile.”
“That is so.”
“And have you any works in gestation at present?”
“I have none, but I never know when inspiration will strike me - hence the notes I penned on freshly staved paper before I got the train from Worcester this afternoon. Although my muse ended up leading me nowhere when she prompted me to write earlier today, I always have fair hopes for more inspirations.”
“Very good,” said Holmes. “Mr Elgar, my normal modus operandi is to establish what has happened in the past, so your commission to seek the elixir of success for a musician would indeed be a new and substantial departure for me. I shall give the matter some consideration and revert to you in a few days when I have arrived at a conclusion.”
After Elgar’s departure, Holmes sat in his armchair staring into space and deaf to any of my attempts to discuss the new petition with him. Eventually I gave up the effort and sat down to read a book on improving the medical outcome for sufferers of brain fever. Holmes was still there when I retired to bed.
The next morning, our breakfast was interrupted by a furious banging on the street door followed by pounding footsteps on the stairs. The door to our living room was flung open and our visitor from the previous day stood panting before us. In his right hand was a violin case.
“I have a new idea, Mr Holmes!” he exclaimed. “I have a new idea!”
Our client was beside himself with excitement and he reached down into his violin case to draw out his fiddle, which he placed under his chin. Just before he placed the bow to the strings he commented:
“I found our interview yesterday evening a most inspiring and educative experience, Mr Holmes. When I got back late to Worcester I felt in a strange humour and sat at the keyboard improvising. My wife was occupied ruling stave lines on paper while I played. Suddenly, there emerged from under my fingers, wholly unbidden by me, the following strain.”
And he played an air which my reader will probably now recognise, although Holmes and I were on that morning of Saturday, 22 October 1898, the first people outside the Elgar household to hear it. The melody started: “Di, di, dum dum - pause - dum, dum di, di”. Below, it is produced in full, in the form in which it became famous.[1]
To my unschooled ear, the tune sounded pleasant but perhaps wanting in any great distinction. Holmes also seemed unimpressed. “Is it not, Mr Elgar, a bit obvious what it is? It is a rhythmic formulation of your name.” Holmes drew his own violin out of its case and played the first eight notes that Elgar had just played. As Holmes played, he said the words, “Edward Elgar - pause –Edward El-gar.”
The composer’s face dropped at Holmes’s words. “Is it so obvious?” he asked dolefully. “I didn’t think anyone would notice it straightaway.”
“I fear that it is,” replied my friend. “Although to my ears, the melody is just as obviously a variant form of another well-known tune.”
“Is it?” asked Elgar, looking perplexed. “What?”
Holmes paused. “But the other tune is so well known, I should have thought that it is self-evident.”
When there was no look of recognition on Elgar’s face, Holmes continued.
“Well, perhaps it could be my own dark secret for the moment, though I shall be surprised if it remains unguessed. But none of this advances our central quest to make your music more widely known. What do you propose to do with the melody?”
“I quoted Brahms to you yesterday. Before he wrote a symphony, he wrote a set of variations on a theme attributed to Joseph Haydn although there are many reasons for thinking that it may have been written by Haydn’s pupil, Pleyel, and that Pleyel himself was quoting an old hymn tune. But in fact, Brahms’s variations are a symphony in disguise. You can spot an opening movement, a slow movement, a scherzo and a finale in the progression of the variati
ons. But they are known as the Haydn Variations and as Variations on the St. Antony Chorale - the name of the hymn to which I referred.”
“You make yourself plain.”
“For Brahms, the work served as a stepping stone to writing his own first symphony. I thought I might write variations on my own theme, put them into the rough outline of a symphony and call the piece Variations on an Original Theme. The work can serve as my own stepping stone before I follow in the great symphonic tradition.”
“I think the title has much to commend it,” said Holmes, perhaps a trifle drily. “You could hardly call a piece Variations on the Name of the Composer, unless you want to run the risk of being considered completely self-obsessed. It does, however, seem to me to be a little non-descript. St. Anthony as chosen by Brahms for his variations, or Goldberg and Diabelli as applied to variation pieces written by Bach and Beethoven, all seem much more persuasive.”
“From the writings of Dr Watson, Mr Holmes, I am not sure that you yourself can be entirely absolved of the charge of self-absorption,” said Elgar, with a slightly sly look on his face.
“My dear Sir, you are doubtless thinking of my regular charge to Watson that he romanticises the matters that we investigate and my thesis that he should focus his chronicler’s lens on pure reasoning rather than on the extraneous exotica in which he delights.”
“That is so.”
“But for all that I feel my friend misdirects his focus, his works nevertheless have a merit that has an appeal among the public. If you must produce a work based on your own name, you must do the same. And if you call it Variations on an Original Theme, listeners may not think to look for the tune from which I think your theme derives.”
Holmes’s words hung in the air. Both Elgar and I waited for him to continue - either to talk further about the title or to reveal the second tune - but my friend stared inscrutably ahead.
The Redacted Sherlock Holmes - Volume 4 Page 6