Edward Elgar and His World (22 page)

108. Pauer,
The Beautiful in Music
, 29.

109. Sassoon,
Diaries 1920–1922
, 293.

110. Richard Smith,
Elgar in America: Elgar's American Connections Between 1895 and 1934
(Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 2005), 27.

111. Anderson,
Elgar
, 160.

112. Moore,
Letters of a Lifetime
, 404. Moore mentions here that, according to his daughter's diary, Elgar was “very upset” by Schuster's passing. As Carice Elgar's diary is uncommunicative about her father—her diary is mostly a bland record of quotidian events—this comment assumes an unusual expressivity in its context. Elgar acted thoughtlessly toward Schuster at times, as he did to virtually everybody around him; see Adams, “The ‘Dark Saying' of the Enigma,” 227.

113. Anderson,
Elgar
, 306.

114. Elgar's notes to Pitt are quoted in Anderson,
Elgar
, 306; for the key to the “moods of Dan,” see Aidan J. Thomson, review of
Music as a Bridge: Musikalische Beziehungen zwischen England und Deutschland 1920–1950
, ed. Christa Brüstle and Guido Heldt,
Elgar Society Journal
14, no. 6 (November 2006): 46.

115. For a commonsensical commentary on the “moods of Dan,” see McVeagh, “A Man's Attitude to Life,” 1.

116. Moore,
Elgar: Letters of a Lifetime
, 414.

117. Elgar, who sentimentalized Edward VII, later felt that the royal family did not value this dedication sufficiently; see note 83 above.

118. See Adams, “The ‘Dark Saying' of the Enigma,” 218–19.

119. Anderson,
Elgar
, 332, 338.

120. For an insightful comment, see James Hepokoski, “Elgar,” in
The Ninteenth-Century Symphony
, ed. D. Kern Holoman, (New York: Schirmer, 1997), 336.

121. Brian Trowell has commented extensively on this motto drawn from Shelley, but his conclusions are less than fully persuasive in toto. Trowell does convincingly connect the symphony to an adaptation of lines from Shelley's poem “Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation” that Elgar used in a letter to Frances Colvin, dated 1 February 1911. Trowell ignores the transparently homoerotic nature of Shelley's poem in favor of promoting his own
idée fixe
concerning Elgar's putative obsession with Helen Weaver. See Trowell, “Elgar's Use of Literature,” 256–57, 264–66.

122. Letter to Alfred Littleton, 13 April 1911, in Jerrold Northrop Moore, ed.,
Elgar and His Publishers: Letters of a Creative Life
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 2:741.

123. Moore,
Letters of a Lifetime
, 248, and Aidan J. Thomson, “Unmaking
The Music Makers
,” in
Elgar Studies
, ed. J. P. E. Harper-Scott and Julian Rushton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

124. The complete fifth stanza of O'Shaughnessy's poem reads: “They had no vision amazing/Of the goodly house they are raising:/They had no divine foreshowing/Of the land to which they are going: / But on one man's soul it hath broken, / A light that doth not depart; / And his look, or a word he hath spoken, / Wrought flame in another man's heart.”

125. Moore,
Letters of a Lifetime
, 249–50.

126. Thomson, “Unmaking
The Music Makers.
”

127. Pauer,
The Beautiful in Music
, 25.

128. Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 646.

129. McVeagh, “A Man's Attitude to Life,” 2.

130. There are a plethora of detailed analyses of
Falstaff
, including a remarkably detailed exegesis of the score by J. P. E. Harper-Scott in
Edward Elgar, Modernist
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 107–53.

131. Stephen Greenblatt,
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
(New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2004), 70–71.

132. For Elgar's paradoxical strategy of projection, see Adams, “The ‘Dark Saying' of the Enigma,” 231.

133. In a letter to Charles Buck, 29 October 1885, Elgar wrote: “The old man does not take quite kindly to the Organ biz: but I hope ‘twill be all right before I commence my ‘labours.'” Quoted in Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 113.

134. Pauer,
The Beautiful in Music
, 46–47.

“The Spirit-Stirring Drum”:
Elgar and Populism

DANIEL M. GRIMLEY

Cultural tourists in the South Midlands, tired perhaps of trawling for edification around the well-trodden circuit of Shakespearean sites in and around Stratford-upon-Avon, are now invited to follow a similar but less familiar itinerary. The Elgar Route, devised and promoted by Worcester City and Malvern Hills District Councils, links together forty-eight different locations with various Elgarian associations along a tour signposted throughout southwest Worcestershire. Bounded on the western side by the Malvern Hills, on the eastern by the River Severn, and radiating outward from Worcester cathedral in the northeast corner, the route offers a condensed historical geography of Elgar's life and musical career. The tour is designed, the brochure suggests, so that motorists “may join it at any convenient point,” and though it begins at the Elgar Birthplace Museum in Lower Broadheath, the official numbering of sites along the way cuts across a simple chronological sequence of events in Elgar's biography. Hence, the second location after leaving Lower Broadheath is Birchwood Lodge (the summer cottage Elgar rented between 1898 and 1903, and where he scored
The Dream of Gerontius
), followed by his previous residence, Forli, in Malvern Link (1891–99), where he composed
King Olaf
and
The Black Knight
. The Elgars' somber final resting place, the grave at St. Wulstan's Church, is then passed (site 10), after which motorists double back on themselves disconcertingly and head toward a more cheerful location, Craeg Lea (Elgar's home between 1899 and 1904, while he rented Birchwood Lodge), where he wrote the Variations on an Original Theme, op. 36 (
Enigma
Variations). The route therefore pursues a spatial, rather than linear-temporal, logic. Other sites visited include the Worcester County Cricket Ground at New Road, where “it is
thought
that Elgar was a regular supporter,” and an oddly placed, rather uncanny final destination which lies awkwardly away from the official circuit, the site of the Powick asylum, now “demolished,” where the young composer devised and conducted light music designed to cheer the troubled inmates.
¹

Evocatively billed as “a journey through Elgar's beloved countryside,” the Elgar Route presumably is intended primarily as a means of boosting tourism in the region. It therefore represents a form of commodification, an attempt to package and present Elgar's life so as to generate income from his cultural capital. But it also serves inadvertently to promote an aesthetic ideology that has long lain at the heart of Elgar's historical reception: his music's pastoral associations with western England and with Worcestershire in particular, which in turn can be understood as the iconic representation of a certain kind of idealized Englishness.
²
In this sense, the Elgar Route is highly selective. The brochure tactfully declines to note that many of Elgar's major works, including the symphonies, the concertos, and the “late” chamber music, lie “off route,” composed in Hereford, London, and Sussex. The tour furthermore reinforces the programmatic association of place with Elgar's music. The implication is that by visiting sites such as Longdon Marsh, Birchwood Lodge, or Herefordshire Beacon in the Malvern Hills, listeners can gain privileged access into the meaning and significance of Elgar's music. His work's potentially awkward abstraction, its intellectual or aesthetic content, is sublated within an amenable discourse of picturesque associations that are more immediately containable than absolute music.
³
The Elgar Route thus embodies a kind of historical revisionism. The brochure confidently asserts that “Elgar is universally regarded as a composer of the very first rank,” a retrospective summation which, until recently if at all, has not been reflected by Elgar's relative status in the critical musicological canon. Significantly, there are no comparably elaborate routes for other British composers such as RalphVaughan Williams or Benjamin Britten, whose music has similarly evocative geographical associations.

The Elgar Route simultaneously represents a form of popularization, an attempt to market Elgar's music to a wider audience. And in spite of its uncritical adoption of an ideological context that limits, rather than broadens, the meaning of Elgar's work, such popularization is not necessarily a bad thing. Though it is difficult, from a scholarly perspective, to avoid reinforcing the pejorative connotations that such efforts at commodification evoke, it is surely better to resist objecting to attempts to extend the appeal of Elgar's work. After all, if Elgar's music is to survive in the concert hall, it needs to be able to present itself to such continual reinterpretation and appropriation by new listeners and scholars alike. But more important, this process of popularization is also part of a deeper historical pattern, one that can already be discerned in Elgar's complex relationship with his contemporary audiences, and it can be traced through the ways in which his music invites different levels of interpretation and response. Elgar himself was not a neutral figure in this process. As Tim Barringer has recently explained, the association of place and music subsequently promoted by the Elgar Route was an aspect of the composer's reception from an early stage of his career, and built on Malvern's existing reputation as a spa resort and tourist destination.
⁴
The vision described in 1900 by F. G. Edwards in
The Musical Times,
for instance, is no less ideologically conceived than that subsequently promoted by the Elgar Route itself:

The Malvern uplands are to be seen, not described. No appreciative mind can fail to be impressed with the bold outline, the imposing abruptness, and the verdant loveliness of these everlasting hills. Nature has left the impress of her smile on this favored region. It is a steep climb to the hilltop above Malvern Wells, but it more than repays the wayfarer who has eyes to behold and a soul to satisfy. The enjoyment of a quiet stroll along these grassy heights is greatly enhanced by the companionship of one who habitually thinks his thoughts and draws his inspirations from these elevated surroundings.
⁵

Barringer argues that Edwards's description, presumably endorsed by Elgar, can be read partly as a statement of class aspiration, in which the sense of physical elevation upon the hills reflected Elgar's desire to escape his essentially urban bourgeois tradesman's origins and ascend (“a steep climb”!) to his wife's upper-middle-class status. It also represents the adoption of a familiar Romantic subject position (that of the “wayfarer” or wanderer), in which the position of survey (from the “grassy heights”) marked both control over a lower dominion and proximity to an ethereal realm of divine creative genius. This sense of elevation furthermore suggests an exaltation of artistic value or a heightened aesthetic experience—the domain of high art.

But elsewhere Elgar was no less eager to descend to the valley (both literally and figuratively) in order to ensure the broad popular appeal of his music, either to safeguard revenue (Elgar's correspondence with his publishers illustrate his constant awareness of the need to maximize the commercial value of his work where possible) or perhaps to gain professional esteem in order to justify or validate his occupation as a creative practitioner in a commercial marketplace. The contemporary state of the music profession in Edwardian Britain, as Cyril Ehrlich has observed, was sufficiently precarious for such preoccupation with financial income to be virtually unavoidable, especially for musicians from Elgar's socioeconomic background. As Ehrlich suggests, “A pervasive glut—an excess of supply over any conceivable level of demand—was the prevailing condition of musical life.”
⁶
Indeed, both the early and, arguably, the latter half of Elgar's career attest to some of the difficulties encountered by musicians without a significant independent source of income. “For the majority without such resources,” Ehrlich writes, “ceaseless teaching was the common lot, at home and in institutions which attached images of excellence to mediocre realities,” a fate that Elgar narrowly avoided. But Elgar experienced firsthand the extent to which, as Ehrlich notes, “the cultural environment of London did not nurture musicianship.”
⁷
Each of the composer's attempts to establish a permanent base in the capital proved unsuccessful.

Elgar's creative response to this professional situation, in spite of the lofty image portrayed by Edwards's piece in
The Musical Times
, was to write music that appealed to different kinds of listeners. Hence, popular elements can be found even in his most “serious” high-art compositions (as discussion of
Falstaff
below will suggest). Indeed, such popular gestures do not represent a capitulation to the commercial forces of the marketplace, but an authentic mode of Elgar's compositional voice. The various sites of production and consumption historically associated with Elgar's work (not necessarily the same as those visited along the Elgar Route) point to his desire to address multiple levels of audience. And the need to communicate with his listeners in diverse contexts accounts for the different voices or musics that can be heard within Elgar's work. Understood from this perspective, the popular emerges as a central category in Elgar's music, but it is one that has not hitherto received extensive critical scrutiny. The popular can also be heard as a contested voice. It is represented most directly by a particular mode of civic music, inspired by the sounds of Elgar's contemporary urban environments and opposed to the lone Romantic discourse of high art music that is prevalent elsewhere in Elgar's work (and which in turn is no less prone to commercial appropriation). The remainder of this essay considers how Elgar's music mediates such tensions in a number of brief case studies that exemplify different kinds of popular music in his work.