The new middle-class hunters usually wanted to conform. Sassoon was anxious at least to look right. ‘A few minutes later I was sitting on a hard, shiny saddle and being ciphered all over with a lump of chalk. The sallow little man who fitted my breeches remarked that buff Bedford cord which I had selected was “a very popular one”. As he put the finishing touches with his chalk, he asked me to stand up in the stirrups. Whereupon he gazed upon his handiwork and found it good.’28 Sassoon’s Master was one of the new breed – ‘a middle-aged man who hunted to hounds himself’ rather than employ a huntsman ‘and did everything as cheaply as possible. He bought the most awful old screws from Tattersalls and made his stablemen ride them all the way down from London to save the expense of a horse box.’29
The middle-aged man so despised for his parsimony by Sassoon displayed another aspect of the way in which sport of every sort was changed during the brief reign of Edward VII. Old money was moving out and new money was moving in. Some of it was the recently earned millions of manufacturers. Most was the gate money paid by the working and middle classes. In the people’s games, Corinthian innocence had passed and was being increasingly replaced by a sterner sort of competition. In more patrician sports, the commercial classes wanted to behave according to their own standards, not the mores of a fading aristocracy. But, however it was financed and organised, sport – whether passively or actively enjoyed – had become an essential feature of the nation’s way of life, a pleasure which could be purchased for a few coppers at football and cricket grounds, athletics tracks and race meetings, all year round.
CHAPTER 16
Gerontius Awakes
In 1901 the Mall was redesigned from end to end. Nothing more typifies the spirit of Edwardian Britain. The layout was to be grand as well as modern, both imperious and suitable to a monarchy which wanted to move closer to the sovereign’s subjects.
The work was given to Sir Aston Webb, commercially the most successful architect of the day. Sir Aston had maintained his supremacy by combining his undoubted talent with an uncanny knack of representing, in brick and stone, the spirit of the age. He had, as a result, become the great exponent of Edwardian baroque. The Mall made slow progress from the Victoria Monument, sculptured by Sir Thomas Brock in 1901, to Admiralty Arch, which was not built until 1911. The new east front to Buckingham Palace came two years later when Webb began to sense a change in mood. The façade is beaux arts classical and the whole scheme is, like the Edwardians themselves, a strange mixture of confidence and uncertainty, the solid and the superficial. For a full decade, Edwardian architects were searching, with mixed success, for a style that represented the age and culture within which they lived.
Artists were equally confused. The Royal Academy, having come late to appreciate the genius of the Pre-Raphaelites, could not believe that anything could replace them. More daring spirits offered a variety of suggestions about the way forward. Walter Sickert had no doubt. His stern injunction mirrored the changing mood of the time. ‘The more our art is serious, the more it will tend to avoid the drawing room and stick to the kitchen. The plastic arts are gross arts, dealing joyously with gross material facts.’1 That was not the spirit in which Sargent and Lavery painted their society portraits. But then, the attitude of Edwardian painters is typified by John Singer Sargent’s artistic ambivalence. The friend of Claude Monet and disciple of Edouard Manet made his reputation and fortune as the Joshua Reynolds of high society.
Edwardian musicians were less anxious to sound a new note. Perhaps, by their nature, they were more instinctive and less intellectual. But they too, consciously or not, produced work that, despite possessing merit which transcended time and place, clearly had its roots in Edwardian England. England, not Britain. The artistic glory of the age was a man who looked, and in many ways was, the archetypal Edwardian country gentleman.
Edward Elgar had the appearance, including the magnificent moustache, of a major-general. Nothing gave him greater personal pleasure than lunch at his local Conservative Club and an afternoon at a county cricket match. And he possessed one of the temperamental weaknesses of the English middle classes. He wanted to obscure his humble origins.
Sir Arnold Bax – who succeeded Elgar as Master of the King’s Musick – complained of his predecessor’s unnatural reserve and contrived hauteur. He attributed both mannerisms to Elgar’s desire to prove that, although he was the son of a music shop owner who had begun his working life as a church organist and jobbing violin teacher, he had become a gentleman. It was a quality which made him the occasional victim of a martial muse and inordinately proud when he received a message of commendation from the Court. His desperate desire to do the right thing sometimes led him into error. On the morning that he was made a freeman of the City of Worcester, he arrived at the ceremony wearing the robes which had been presented to him at Yale when he became Doctor of Music (honoris causa). Elgar’s natural instinct was to side with the Establishment. It was an unusual attribute for an artistic genius. But, in one particular, he remained triumphantly and victoriously an outsider. Edward Elgar was a Roman Catholic.
In the dying days of Victoria’s reign he had begun to make his name for the composition of music which possessed an unusual combination of characteristics – being essentially English and of undoubted high quality. The Enigma Variations (first performed in St James’s Hall, London, in June 1899) had been a huge success. The Musical Times called them ‘effortlessly original’ and J. R. Buckley, Elgar’s contemporary and near-official biographer, wrote that they ‘set the seal’ on his reputation. Sea Pictures (first performed for the Norwich Festival in the same year) had almost as much popular appeal. The poems which Elgar set to music were undoubtedly second-rate. One of them ‘blessed the land where corals lie’. But the music was the sound of the Severn flowing gently into the Bristol Channel, not the blue waters of the Pacific lapping on reef and atoll.
Perhaps it was the confidence that comes from success that made Elgar move on to something more spiritually rewarding. Or it may have been a long-held ambition to use his talent in an expression of his deep Catholic conviction. Whatever the cause, the result was The Dream of Gerontius – the greatest English oratorio since Handel’s Messiah. The work was conceived during the first week of 1900, finished in June of that year and performed in October at the Birmingham Music Festival.
The early twentieth century was the age of music festivals. In the space of six years Elgar wrote commissioned work for Worcester, Norwich, Leeds, Morecambe, Blackpool, Hereford, Sheffield and New Brighton. Birmingham and Gerontius went naturally together. The oratorio set to music John Henry Newman’s poem of redemption. Newman, after he left the Church of England, had accepted voluntary exile from London in Birmingham and founded the community known as the Oratory. Gerontius was inspired not far from the Lickey Hills in which Newman is buried.
At home in Worcester, Elgar encouraged musically inclined friends to help him with the trivial tasks associated with composition. R. P. Arnold (son of Matthew) read proofs. Miss Capel Smith sang parts of unfinished work. Father Bellasis gave general encouragement and relaxed companionship. Elgar’s diary for 14 September 1899 records ‘E walked with Father Bellasis’.2 The result was The Dream of Gerontius. Father Bellasis was the son of one of Cardinal Newman’s closest friends. The work which Newman inspired was a lay miracle – an oratorio which, despite its Catholic mysticism, was acceptable to Protestant audiences assembled in concert halls for entertainment rather than worship.
The complex inspiration of The Dream contributed to the ecumenical spirit of the music. For years Elgar had wanted to write a tribute to General Gordon who had died defending Khartoum in 1865. Gordon – although he had encompassed his own death by ignoring Mr Gladstone’s instructions to withdraw from the Sudan – was regarded as both saint and martyr by Christian imperialists. Gordon, under siege by the Mahdi’s dervishes, had kept a copy of Newman’s poem by his bedside and marked the passages which he found a particular ins
piration and comfort. Reproductions of Gordon’s copy of The Dream were made for the admiration of pious and literary Catholics. When Elgar saw one in the Birmingham Oratory he realised that two ambitions could be realised simultaneously. His walk with Father Bellasis confirmed that a great oratorio should be written in praise of God and General Gordon.
Elgar’s original intention was to prepare the work for the Gloucester, Worcester and Hereford ‘Three Choirs Festival’, but the Enigma Variations intervened. As a result, and appropriately enough, The Dream of Gerontius went to Birmingham. On 1 January 1900 ‘Mr & Mrs G. H. Johnson came to church and arranged for E’s work, Birm. Fest. Deo Gratias.’3 The terms were accepted by telegram the next day and the work was finished in five months.
Newman’s poem is not great literature. It describes the passage of the soul from the body at the point of death and its journey, accompanied by attendant angels and less well-disposed demons, to heaven. It included twenty-nine verses, which repeated, every sixth stanza, ‘Praise to the Holiest in the Height’. The last six verses, sung to Elgar’s music, became a popular hymn. But before the first performance, there were great doubts – in everyone’s mind except Elgar’s – about popular acceptance of the whole piece. The result, an oratorio which was both secular and reverential, astonished even his friends.
August Jaeger, Elgar’s editor at Novello’s publishing house and ‘Nimrod’ of the Enigma Variations, wrote with obvious astonishment of how little it resembled sacred music as generally understood. Indeed, ‘There is nothing to show that the composer considers Gerontius either priest or saint. On the contrary, he seems to look upon him as an ordinary man and sinner who, after leading a worldly man’s life, is near to death and repenting. The music is individual, a personal reflex of the composer’s feelings and filled with full-blooded romantic fervour.’4
The first performance in the Birmingham Town Hall was not a resounding success. The choir master died during the rehearsals and his replacement, although distinguished, was too old to stand the rigours of the necessarily intense preparations. There were some good notices. The Morning Leader wrote of ‘an ingenuity besides which the attempts of other Englishmen seem but clumsy imitations of this or that dead master’. The music ‘had a tone of its own’. But that did not compensate for the poor performance of a piece which Elgar hoped would confirm that Sea Pictures and the Enigma Variations, were, for all their charm, the lighter work of a profoundly serious composer.
Even the critics who were usually well disposed to Elgar found The Dream difficult. The Manchester Guardian’s music critic described it as ‘Dantesque’ and then went on to say, ‘I am more than unusually troubled by the sense of utter inadequacy in these notes and can only hope that I may have some opportunity of doing better justice to a deeply impressive work.’5 Elgar was near to inconsolable and wrote to Jaeger, ‘As far as I am concerned, music in England is dead … I have worked for forty years and, at the last, Providence denies me a decent hearing of my work. Anything obscene or trivial is blessed in this world and has a reward. I ask for no reward, only to live and hear my work.’6
However, worldly recognition – as represented by offers of visiting professorships and the award of honorary degrees – multiplied with the years. But the acclaim was not for The Dream of Gerontius. It was for the Enigma Variations, Sea Pictures and the great body of ‘patriotic’ work which had begun with The Banner of Saint George. Events, as much as Elgar’s choice of themes, conspired to make him the muse of imperial glory. In the autumn of 1901 he began to write a series of marches which were eventually to acquire the title ‘Pomp and Circumstance’. He certainly did not create the imperial mood of the time. It is not even clear that he consciously responded to it. But, either by coincidence or design, he became Master of All the Nation’s Musick.
Pomp and Circumstance No. 1, a March in D, was an instant success. Its first performance in Liverpool, on 19 October 1901, was followed by its inclusion in a concert at Queen’s Hall, London, three days later. The reception was so ecstatic that the conductor, Henry Wood, who had just begun to achieve fame as the originator of the Promenade Concerts, thought it necessary to make a note of the evening’s events. ‘I shall never forget the scene … The people simply rose and yelled. I had to play it again with the same result. In fact they refused to allow me to get on with the programme.’7
Sir Walter Parratt, the Master of the King’s Musick, had already invited Elgar to set some verse by A. C. Benson to what he called a Coronation Ode. The invitation was initially refused on the grounds that the composer had more serious work to do. Then Elgar heard of the royal proposal for setting Benson’s words to the Pomp and Circumstance March in D. The regal origins of the proposed match were confirmed in a letter to Dame Clara Butt. ‘King Edward was the first to suggest that the air from Pomp and Circumstance should be sung and eventually the song as we now know [it] was evolved via the Coronation Ode.’8 Elgar was not a man to refuse a royal request. The song, thus born, was ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.
Jaeger was dubious about the words fitting the music. But a suitable arrangement was made in time for Dame Clara to sing the Ode at the Coronation Gala at Covent Garden on 1 April 1902. The Gala never took place. Like the Coronation itself, it was abandoned because of the King’s appendicitis. So the Ode was sold in sheet music before it was performed. It was a runaway success. Elgar was, however, preoccupied with more serious matters – Caractacus at Liverpool, Lux Christi in Worcester and a minuet to be written for New Brighton.
Despite his ‘popular’ success, Elgar continued his extraordinary output of entirely serious music. Alongside the Concert Allegro, the one sizeable piano work in his whole canon, there was the Cockaigne Overture, a tribute to London and Londoners written after a visit to the Guildhall, when he had ‘seemed to hear, far away in the dim roof, a theme, an echo of some noble melody’.9 It was just one item in a body of work which was as extensive as it was eclectic. The Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (opus 61) was a work of undisputed genius. ‘Great is the Lord’ (opus 67) was unapologetically reverential. The Serenade for Strings (opus 20) was described by Elgar himself as ‘little tunes’ and aimed at the wider public. The Imperial March (opus 32) was Elgar in his high patriotic mood. The breadth of Elgar’s genius made him a revered figure in Edwardian England – all the more loved and admired because of his talent for composing music which, although it transcended national boundaries, remained essentially ‘English’.
Elgar’s status as the spirit of English music was enhanced and extended by the character and conduct of his contemporaries. All the composers with ability which might compare to his had blurred national identities. The most wilfully contrary – though hardly in Elgar’s class as a composer – was Edward German, whose real name was Jones. He assumed the Teutonic sobriquet before writing operettas about Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex. Percy Grainger was almost equally perverse. The composer of ‘Shepherd’s Hey’, ‘Mock Morris’ and ‘Country Garden’ was an Australian who was persuaded to collect English folk songs by Edvard Grieg and only turned to serious music – new structural forms and adaptations of medieval music – when he settled in America in 1914.
At least Percy Grainger’s name seemed appropriate to the horticultural Elysium about which he wrote. Frederick Delius, the Bradford-born composer of the essentially English ‘Brigg Fair’ and ‘On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring’, failed (like Edward German) to proclaim his origins in his name. His father was an immigrant to Britain who could not afford a public-school education for his children. So Frederick was sent to Bradford Grammar School. He began his working life as a travelling salesman for his father’s woollen mill. Neither wool nor the West Riding appealed to him, so he left England, first for Florida (where he became an orange planter) and then for Leipzig where he lived off his American savings while he studied composition. Much of his early music – Fennimore and Gerda, Appalachia and Paris; the Song of a Great City – was better known and more apprec
iated in the Berlin of Kaiser Wilhelm II than the London of King Edward VII. But his work was promoted in England by Thomas Beecham, founder of the New Symphony Orchestra, conductor of Chaliapin’s London concerts, associate of Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet and therefore, himself, something of a figure in Edwardian society. But Delius never returned to Britain and remained, in the public mind, a foreigner.
Gustav Holst was, like Delius, the son of an immigrant to Britain. His life and upbringing were as conventional as was to be expected of a Cheltenham child and a Royal College of Music graduate. During his years as a student his only deviation from the normal was the choice of trombone as his specialist instrument. At first, he accepted the humdrum life of a member of the Carl Rosa Opera Company Orchestra, but in 1905, determined to better himself, he became a music master at St Paul’s Girls’ School, an appointment he celebrated with the St Paul’s Suite for strings. Almost alone amongst the composers of his day he resisted involvement in the folk-song revival and all other manifestations of ‘Englishness’. The London schoolmaster – Morley College after St Paul’s – remained stubbornly continental in interests and attitude. He was the very antithesis of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Charterhouse, Cambridge and the First World War), whose early work included Norfolk Rhapsodies and a folk-song anthology most notable for ‘Linden Lea’.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (born into a very different sort of family in Croydon) made his name in folk music, but it was the folk music of the southern states of America. That, combined with his most famous work – the trilogy Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, The Death of Minnehaha and Hiawatha’s Departure – convinced even some of his most ardent admirers that he was a citizen of the United States, an error encouraged by the fact that he was black. His West African father, prevented by prejudice from becoming a doctor, deserted his wife and son when young Samuel was five. The local Presbyterian church paid for his musical education. It is, perhaps, not surprising that he felt no compulsion to sing the praises of his native land.
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