Edward Elgar and His World (18 page)

The adolescent Elgar must have turned with relief from the strictures of Cherubini and Stainer to Berlioz's enthralling
Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration
as well as to the invitingly poetical books by Ernst Pauer. Pauer was an Austrian composer, pianist, and pedagogue who settled in England in 1870, teaching piano first at the Royal Academy and then, in 1876, at the National Training School for Music, the precursor of the Royal College of Music. Noted for presenting a series of historical recitals that spanned keyboard music from 1600 to the present—he used a harpsichord for the earlier items—Pauer was a respected presence on the British musical scene until his retirement to Germany in 1896.
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Elgar possessed two of Pauer's little books, which are primers rather than textbooks, both published by Novello. Pauer's
Musical Forms
(author's preface dated 1878) is a brief general survey of basic formal designs such as the sonata and the variation;
The Elements of the Beautiful in Music
(author's preface dated 1877) is an exuberantly Romantic exegesis of music aesthetics.

The Elements of the Beautiful in Music
is the sole treatise on aesthetics that has survived from the young composer's library and may well have had an even greater impact on his compositional development than Pauer's admirably lucid explanation of musical form. The title page is stamped “Elgar Brothers Music Sellers, Worcester,” so it was in Elgar's hands early. That the adolescent Elgar, who signed the title page with his customary bold script, attentively read
The Elements of the Beautiful in Music
is evident in two instances of penciled underlining.
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Pauer's book would have been attractive to Elgar for several reasons, not the least of which is its exalted tone, strongly reminiscent of Ruskin in passages—not to mention of Longfellow's Paul Flemming. Pauer shares with Ruskin a philosophical viewpoint that might be termed “Romantic Platonism,” an aesthetic whose emphasis on striving for the ideal and espousing high moral values chimed with the young Elgar's musical and literary predilections. Ruskin writes in
The Queen of the Air
(section 42) that music is “the teacher of perfect order and is the voice of the obedience of angels and the companion of the course of the spheres of heaven.”
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He surely would have agreed with Pauer's assertion that “it is evident that religion and art are closely connected,” not to mention the Austrian's belief that “art has to exhibit to humanity the ideal picture of what perfect human beauty can be.”
⁹⁴

Despite the similarity of their titles, Pauer's book has little in common with Eduard Hanslick's 1854 volume,
Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Beautiful in Music
). Sharing only a broad debt to German philosophy, Pauer is closer to the critical writings of Schumann than the austere Hegelianism of Hanslick.
⁹⁵
Indeed, Hanslick poured scorn on the very writers, such as Schumann, who served Pauer as exemplars; the Viennese music critic castigated such authors—and doubtless would have included Pauer in this company—as deluded Romantics who wrapped discussions of music “in a cloud of high-flown sentimentality.”
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Judging by an excursus found in the fifth Peyton lecture, titled “Critics,” Elgar had read at least some Hanslick with care and, as Trowell has observed, shared with the Viennese music critic an unease, common to certain other composers of the period, about music's “‘poetical-pictorial' associations.”
⁹⁷
But Elgar shrewdly deconstructs Hanslick's seemingly uncompromising aesthetic stance by pointing out an inconsistency. Elgar quotes the critic's assertion, embedded in a review of Brahms's Third Symphony—“Spoken language is not so much a poorer language as no language at all, with regard to music, for it cannot render the latter”—but then remarks, “Hanslick allows himself to call the opening theme of the last movement ‘a sultry figure' foreboding a storm.”
⁹⁸

Unlike Hanslick, however, Pauer was perfectly at ease making sweeping generalizations about such high-toned but vague concepts as “tone-painting,” “ideal beauty,” “truth,” and the “infinite.” Pauer's frequent evocations of the “ideal” put him squarely in the tradition of German Romantics; he quotes from both Schelling and Schiller and cites Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Kant, Ferdinand Hand, and Hegel in his preface. Such vocabulary would have set Hanslick's teeth on edge and seems quaint today. But some of Pauer's statements—such as “uneducated intellects will never reach the pure heights of perfection”—may have deeply resonated in a boy with aspirations, trapped in modest circumstances with few obvious prospects, who was doggedly reading Pauer in pursuit of the “mystery” of music.
⁹⁹

Pauer does not stop at exhortation: in detailed affective descriptions of each of the major and minor keys he posits a theory of keys. By so doing, Pauer is part of a long tradition that includes Kirnberger and other eighteenth-century German theorists who speculated on the relationship of keys and temperament within the context of
Affektenlehre
.
¹⁰⁰
Berlioz compiled a description of keys in his
Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration
, a text well-known to Elgar, but Berlioz is exclusively concerned with the intersection of keys with instrumental technique. Rimsky-Korsakov's unsystematic association of key areas with color would seem at first to be close to Pauer's characterizations, but there is a crucial difference between the two: Pauer uses an affective vocabulary while the Russian composer veers into the realm of synesthesia. Rimsky-Korsakov's disciple V. V. Yastrebtsev recorded in his diary that “the various keys suggest various colors, or rather shades of color, to Rimsky-Korsakov… for example, E major seems tinged with a dark blue, sapphire-like color.”
¹⁰¹
The point is not whether Kirnberger's theory, or Rimsky-Korsakov's system, or Pauer's associations for key centers are objectively “correct,” or that they may contradict other such systems, but that Pauer's theories may have meant something to Elgar and may have influenced, consciously or unconsciously, his choice of keys in certain of his scores. If Pauer's designations for keys did influence Elgar—and there is reason to suggest they did—then surely this is a powerful instance of semantic memory, as the English composer would have constantly returned to a set of abstract ideas throughout his life, reinterpreting them while still retaining something of their original import.

Through Pauer's descriptions, the various keys evoke certain moods and mental states such as innocence (C major), sadness (C minor), and dreamy melancholy (G minor).
¹⁰²
Pauer's hypotheses are presented with a peculiarly Teutonic mixture of thoroughness and sentiment as he asserts: “In music, the innermost feelings of the composer are displayed; and in so far as the characteristic is founded on the individual or personal feeling, an original composition must in itself be characteristic… . The characteristic shows itself by means of the tones and intervals, and finds expression through the minor and major keys, through the time and movement, through the accent, the rest, the figures, and passages and last, but not least, through the melody.” Pauer declares that “the proper choice of key is of the utmost importance for the success of a musical work; and we find that our great composers acted in this matter with consummate prudence and with careful circumspection.” Pauer is careful to offer a caveat to his characterizations of the different tonalities by noting: “It cannot be denied that one composer detects in a certain key qualities which have remained entirely hidden from another… . We lay down a rule which admits many exceptions… . All we can safely do is to name the characteristic qualities of the keys as we deduce their characteristic expression from universally admired and accepted masterpieces: and thus we need not fear to misstate or to misapprehend the bearing of the subject.” Further, he takes the precaution of recommending variety through modulation: “When the composer has chosen his key, he will be careful to handle it in such a manner that it does not attain too great a prominence, which would result in monotony, and cause fatigue and lack of interest in the listener; but he will manage to suffuse his work with the special characteristics of the key, which is thus made to glimmer or shine through the piece without asserting itself with undue strength.”
¹⁰³

Pauer's assertions, including his descriptions of each key, might seem a charming but inconsequential byway of Romantic aesthetics were it not for the autodidact from Worcester with the fantastically retentive memory. For those who have even a glancing acquaintance with Elgar's music, Pauer's descriptions are suggestive. According to Pauer, “D major expresses majesty, grandeur, and pomp, and adapts itself well to triumphant processions, festival marches and pieces in which stateliness is the prevailing feature.”
¹⁰⁴
After the first
Pomp and Circumstance
March—famously in D major—ceases to ring in the reader's ears, the question naturally arises: How often do Pauer's discussions of keys tally with Elgar's music? Such a study would be informative if one bore in mind that not even a slavish dedication to Pauer and his ideas would result in a complete match between Elgar's key selection and Pauer's characterizations, since Pauer left room for inventiveness and creativity—and that the ambitious young Elgar would have felt he possessed both. The point is not whether Elgar consciously planned out his works to conform to Pauer's descriptions—an improbable hypothesis at best, as there are instances where Elgar's music contradicts the Austrian's characterizations—but rather how his tenacious memory may have colored certain musical decisions as a result of his early reading.

So, though it is certainly too fanciful to suggest that Elgar designed the complex key relationships of
The Dream of Gerontius
so that the supernal opening of the second part would conform to Pauer's description of F major as a key full of “peace and joy … but also express [ing] effectively a light, passing regret … [and], moreover, available for the expression of religious sentiment,” it is, however, worth remarking that this is the only extended passage in F major in the entire score.
¹⁰⁵
Was Elgar's reading of Pauer a seminal factor in the composer's choice of key? Nothing in the elaborate key structure of
Gerontius
, which, Elgar's sketches show, was planned early in the score's genesis, required that this particular crucial moment be cast in F major. In other words, tonal logic alone cannot explain why Elgar selects keys for certain expressive contexts.

A striking instance of a key that seems to act as a particularly potent signifier for Elgar is that of E-flat major, which Pauer describes as a “key which boasts the greatest variety of expression.” Pauer continues, remarking, “At once serious and solemn, it is the exponent of courage and determination, and gives to a piece a brilliant, firm and dignified character. It may be designated as eminently a masculine key.” Pauer often draws his examples from Beethoven, whom he praises as “the composer whose works may be taken pre-eminently as a type of ideal beauty.”
¹⁰⁶
That Beethoven's
Eroica
Symphony in E-flat Major looms large behind Pauer's characterization of this key cannot be doubted, although as a pianist, Pauer may have also had in mind the
Emperor
Concerto, cast in the same key as the symphony.

To follow Elgar's use of E-flat throughout his mature music would be a revealing exercise, but discussion here will be restricted to five major works composed over thirteen years: the
Enigma
Variations; the concert overture
In the South (Alassio)
(1903–4); the Second Symphony (1911);
The Music Makers
(1912); and, finally, his “symphonic study,”
Falstaff
(1913). Of these scores,
In the South
and the Second Symphony share E-flat major as the dominant tonality; the “Nimrod” variation from the
Enigma
Variations is cast solely in that key; the fifth stanza of
The Music Makers
begins in E-flat; and a single theme from
Falstaff
cast in E-flat will be discussed. All of these scores have masculine associations; four of these works specifically evoke two of Elgar's closest male friends.

The “Nimrod” variation, the climactic ninth of thirteen, is the emotional and structural climax of the
Enigma
Variations, and portrays Elgar's loyal friend August Jaeger.
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One of the curiosities of Pauer's book that could be related to the use of E-flat major for this heartfelt music is that the Austrian author does not merely characterize key centers, but time signatures as well. Pauer thus declares triple time to be expressive of “longing, of supplication, of sincere hope, and of love… . It possesses a singular tenderness and a remarkable fund of romantic expression.”
¹⁰⁸
Inquiry into a composer's creative process can only be speculative, but it is striking that Pauer's descriptions of key and time signature constitute a virtual recipe for the “Nimrod” variation, surely one of the most moving evocations of the intense tenderness that can lie at the heart of male friendship.