Edward Elgar and His World (23 page)

Problems of defining the popular in music have been extensively discussed in the critical literature and need not be reiterated here.
⁸
At least three distinct categories of popular music can be tentatively identified in Elgar's work, each of which represents a different musical style or genre: salon music, music for civic occasions, and music expressive of an Arcadian nostalgia or lost innocence. The first category, salon music, consists of works such as
Chanson de nuit
(discussed in greater detail below) or the earlier hit
Salut d'amour,
pieces of moderate or “graded” difficulty suitable for performance by nonprofessional players in a range of informal contexts or venues. Elgar composed this music partly for his own use: works such as
Very Easy Melodious Exercises in the First Position
, op. 22 for violin and piano were generated initially as teaching material, though it is striking how the hymnic texture of these pieces resembles later works, such as the famous trio from the
Pomp and Circumstance
March no. 1. The category of salon music also includes the various dances (polkas, waltzes, and quadrilles) and chamber pieces composed for performance by members of Elgar's own semiprofessional circle. Here, some of the links with Worcester promoted by the Elgar Route can be justified: such works were part of the staple repertory of the Glee Club to which Elgar belonged as a young man. Likewise, the larger-scale
Harmoniemusik,
or “Sheds,” that Elgar wrote for domestic use by a group of amateur wind players link the composer with Worcester.
⁹

Salon music represents a musical equivalent of the early-nineteenthcentury category of
Trivialliteratur
identified by Peter Börger—an early Romantic genre of mass-market literature of supposedly lesser aesthetic value directed toward a broad “popular” (meaning urban middle class) readership. As a species of
Trivialmusik
, salon music is problematic for the music historian because its very availability threatens to undermine the autonomous status of the artwork and its associated figure of creative genius. As Carl Dahlhaus has suggested, the mode of reception that such music engenders, which he terms “trivialized listening,”

ignores or violates one of the major theoretical premises of classical-romantic art: the principle of self-absorption in the work as an aesthetic object. It does this by side-stepping the dialectic of form and content in music, extracting from it a topic or subject matter (mistaken for the work's “contents”) and withdrawing from the acoustic phenomenon into the listener's own frame of mind. In this way, the music, instead of constituting an aesthetic object, degenerates into a vehicle for associations and for edifying or melancholy self-indulgence.
¹⁰

Much of Elgar's salon music works in this way, and the manner in which it conforms to these strictures has important implications for the critical reception of his work. As for Sibelius, another late-nineteenth-century composer who wrote many salon pieces, including hit tunes such as
Valse Triste
from his incidental music to Arvid Järnefelt's play
Kuolema
(
Death
, 1903), the aesthetic value of works such as
Salut d'amour
has often been regarded as being in inverse proportion to their mass-market appeal.
¹¹
This was a view that Elgar partly held himself. In a letter addressed to his publishers at Novello & Co., dated 27 October 1897, Elgar articulated his concerns over the publication of the
Chanson de nuit
, recalling his recent experience with
Salut d'amour:
“I
wish
you could arrange terms for it which would leave me some interest in it: the last Violin piece I wrote [
Salut d'amour
], which unfortunately I sold some years ago for a nominal sum, now sells well—I understand 3,000 copies were sold in the month of January alone.”
¹²
Barely a year later, when Elgar was still struggling to establish himself as a freelance composer, he wrote to August Jaeger at Novello about his aborted plans for a symphony based on the life of General Gordon: “I like this idée but my dear man
why
should I try?? I can't see—I have to earn money somehow & it's
no good
trying this sort of thing even for a ‘living wage' & your firm wouldn't give 5£ for it—I tell you I am sick of it all: why can't I be encouraged to do decent stuff & not hounded into triviality.”
¹³

For Elgar, in his less optimistic moments, salon music did become merely a means to an end: a potential source of income (sadly unrealized in the case of
Salut d'amour
) that detracted from his supposed “higher calling,” the composition of large-scale instrumental works such as symphonies. Yet Elgar cannot have maintained this view unequivocally, since he continued to compose similar salon pieces even after achieving a measure of financial security in the early 1900s, and such works evidently provided a certain amount of creative, as well as economic, satisfaction. In this sense alone, Elgar's populism is an ambivalent category.

This ambivalence can be explained partly by tensions within the genre itself. Dahlhaus argues that
Trivialmusik
in the nineteenth century played on the dialectic between autonomy and mass production. Hence, works such as Louis Lefébure-Wely's
Les cloches du monastère
, directly comparable in tone and content to many of Elgar's salon pieces,

emerged as a paradoxical cross between sentimentality and mechanization, this being the aesthetic reflection of a sociohistorical clash between a philanthropical tradition and a drive toward commercialization and industrialization. It is deliberately bland, but with the pretense of being emotional. It wishes to be direct and intelligible to all, and for this reason remains within the narrowest confines of convention at the same time that it tries to appear as a spontaneous outpouring of feeling. It is banality masquerading as poetry, if only in the form of its title, for the simple reason that the nineteenth century discovered the effect of the poetical in a world that was becoming more and more prosaic.
¹⁴

At first reading, Dahlhaus's analysis appears overly negative, reinforcing the boundaries between high and low art that much recent scholarship has sought to dismantle. It is hard to attach positive value to the suggestion that such works are “banality masquerading as poetry,” or that
Trivialmusik
is “deliberately bland” (the implication being that high art—meaning absolute music—is not). But underpinning Dahlhaus's point is a more subtle one, which concerns aspects of musical process as well as reception. Here, salon music is of more intrinsic interest because it occupies a precarious aesthetic position:

The mechanics behind its power to “touch,” though half-submerged, are nevertheless half-visible. The listener is permitted at once to enjoy and despise it. He is spared the exertions of immersing himself in the work, as required of him by great art. The cynicism of the popularmusic industry, which converts sentimentality into capital, is answered by a sentimentality which threatens at any moment to turn into cynicism and is not about to stand any nonsense.
¹⁵

This balancing point, at which the music's sensibility just resists the commercial cynicism Dahlhaus associates with the “popular-music industry” in late-nineteenth-Century musical culture, accounts for the work's poignancy and freshness. Elgar's salon music is not simply trivial, therefore, but belongs partly within the high-art category of the Romantic miniature. This is a generic divide bridged also by many of Grieg's
Lyric Pieces,
another significant body of work whose salon associations have perhaps prevented substantial critical appreciation.
¹⁶
The hybrid genre to which both Grieg's and Elgar's works belong contains pieces whose structural brevity hints at hidden depth or obscurity of meaning.

Chanson de nuit
belongs in exactly this category. Its outer sections articulate a hymnic melody of the kind that provides the basis for Elgar's most obviously “popular” tune, the trio from the
Pomp and Circumstance
March no. 1. Musical signs of this hymnic discourse include the subdued dynamic level, the melody's carefully graded profile and registral range (gradually unfolding over an octave and a half while avoiding successive angular leaps), the predominantly diatonic harmonic treatment, and the direction
espress. e sostenuto
over the violin's initial entry. The piano's organ- or harmonium-like accompanying chords suggest that the piece can be heard as a march or a solemn ritualized processional, similar to those in the
Vesper Voluntaries
for organ, op. 14 (1890), which Elgar may have modeled on César Franck's pieces for harmonium (many titled “Offertoire”), music likewise intended for either chapel or domestic consumption. As John Butt observes, the
Vesper Voluntaries
owe their origins to Elgar's employment at the Roman Catholic St. George's church in Worcester, and the individual numbers “doubtlessly reflect something of the experimentation that service accompaniment fostered. [Elgar] clearly followed continental models rather than the traditional Anglican organ style.”
¹⁷
Though it is not obviously a religious piece,
Chanson de nuit,
which was originally titled “Evensong,” shares this sense of liturgical context.
¹⁸
The idea of communion suggested by the more urgent and impassioned middle section of the piece is arguably a spiritualized rather than an eroticized one. In that sense, the piece crosses the sacred-secular divide in a manner typical of the genre. As Dahlhaus remarks of Lefébure-Wély's
Les cloches du monastère:

If the piece is sufficiently “characteristic” to be perceived at all (and selected from the vast oversupply of “musical commodities”), its harmony, rhythm, and melody nevertheless remain so simple that it poses not the slightest obstacle to a mode of listening that glides across the musical structure and loses itself in an imaginary vision of monastic quietude, or in melancholy self-indulgence in the listener's own need for repose.
¹⁹

It is precisely this sense of quietude—of the convent rather than the monastery, perhaps, given the character piece's conventionally feminine-gendered associations in the nineteenth century—which
Chanson de nuit
evokes.
²⁰
But this spirit of pious kitsch (a designation intended here without pejorative connotations) does not prevent the employment of musical figures that imply a greater degree of abstract musical thinking than the work's title might otherwise suggest. The unstable harmonic progress of the middle section, for instance, is prefigured by the descending chromatic contour of the bass in the opening phrase (mm. 1–8,
Example 1a
), and the central climax in E-flat major from letter B (mm. 26ff.,
Example 1b
) is anticipated by the first chromatic intrusion in the work, at measure 2. Elements of this motivic chromaticism influence the coda (marked
più lento
, mm. 46ff.), particularly the music's emphasis on A#, an enharmonic transformation of the pivotal B
s that had launched the earlier climax from letter B. In
Chanson de nuit
, Elgar succeeds, therefore, in applying the most upto-date sophisticated harmonic techniques without compromising the genre's essential directness and accessibility of expression. The companion piece of
Chanson de nuit,
the
Chanson de matin,
composed slightly later (1899), achieves a similar state of balance.
²¹
The melodic design of the outer sections again suggests a chaste innocence characteristic of the genre, but the coda here leads to a sudden moment of inwardness (mm. 93–97) in which Elgar dwells on the juxtaposition of two diatonic seventh chords in first inversion, vi
⁷
and vii
⁷
/V, in a manner that temporarily suspends any firm sense of modality.