Edward Elgar and His World (24 page)

Example 1a. Elgar,
Chanson de nuit
, opening, mm. 1–4.

Example 1b. Elgar,
Chanson de nuit
, central climax, mm. 25–33.

If
Chanson de matin
and
Chanson de nuit
point to the use of Continental, rather than English, musical models, as comparison with the
Vesper Voluntaries
and Franck's work suggests, then they also illustrate Elgar's indebtedness to a musical genre with which he has not readily been associated in the critical imagination: French and Italian opera. The mood of innocence and contemplation captured in both works is derived from similar representations of meditative devotion which were common in Romantic opera. The vocal character of the melodic writing in
Chanson de nuit
in particular reinforces the comparison. Elgar had gained firsthand knowledge of the repertoire through membership in the Worcester Glee Club, whose playing list included favorite items from early-nineteenth-century operas, and his correspondence suggests that he was a keen operagoer during his early visits to London in the 1880s and '90s.
²²
Reference to opera is also significant because it helps to collapse the tension between popular and high-brow musical styles identified by Dahlhaus. Opera was among the most readily accessible musical forms in nineteenth-century musical culture, even in England, and as a genre it thrived on precisely the “paradoxical cross between sentimentality and mechanization” that Dahlhaus identifies as a characteristic of
Trivialmusik
. As with other salon works of their type, therefore,
Chanson de matin
and
Chanson de nuit
can be imagined as miniature operatic
scenas,
transposed from the public sphere of the opera house into the domestic space of the drawing room. And despite his subsequent historical reputation as a national symphonist in the Austro-German mold, such pieces suggest that Elgar's creative roots lie in an alternative musical milieu.

The second category of popular music that can be identified in Elgar's work consists of pieces written for civic occasions: symphonic marches and commissioned works intended to celebrate large-scale public events such as
Coronation Ode
and the “Imperial Masque,”
The Crown of India
.
²³
These pieces were often enthusiastically received at their premiere. Henry Wood recalled that, following the London premiere of the
Pomp and Circumstance
March no. 1 in October 1901,

the people simply rose and yelled. I had to play it again—with the same result; in fact, they refused to let me go on with the program. After considerable delay, while the audience roared its applause, I went off and fetched Harry Dearth who was to sing
Hiawatha's Vision
(Coleridge-Taylor); but they would not listen. Merely to restore order, I played the march a third time. And that, I may say, was the one and only time in the history of the Promenade concerts that an orchestral item was accorded a double encore.
²⁴

It is hard at first glance to reconcile the sheer physicality of this audience response with the description of the elevated artistic genius in Edwards's article in
The Musical Times
and its images of pastoral contemplation and meditative companionship. Yet Elgar does not appear to have been uneasy with the prospect of such popular critical appreciation, famously remarking with lip-smacking anticipation to Dora Penny that he had composed “a tune that will knock 'em—knock 'em flat.”
²⁵
Earlier, in a letter to Joseph Bennett dated 17 March 1898, he had declared his ambition to compose “a great work—a sort of national thing that my fellow Englishmen might take to themselves and love.”
²⁶
Arthur Johnstone observed in the
Manchester Guardian
after a performance of
Coronation Ode
that Elgar appeared to have achieved precisely this ambition:

It is popular music of a kind that has not been made for a long time in this country—scarcely at all since Dibdin's time. At least one may say so of the best parts, such as the bass solo and chorus “Britain, Ask of Thyself,” and the contralto song and chorus “Land of Hope and Glory.” The former is ringing martial music, the latter a sort of church parade song having the breadth of a national hymn. It is the melody which occurs as the second principal theme of the longer Pomp & Circumstance march, which I beg to suggest is as broad as
God Save the King, Rule Britannia
and
See the Conquering Hero,
and is perhaps the broadest open-air tune since Beethoven's
Freude Schöner Götterfunken
[
sic
]. Moreover, it is distinctively British—at once breezy and beefy.
²⁷

Generally, such works have suffered—rather than benefited—from their association with a particular time and location: the sense of place and occasion captured in pieces like the
Ode,
for example, has promoted their subsequent critical neglect. Perhaps the assumption is that after they have served their immediate utilitarian purpose such works are not worthy of admittance to the canon of absolute music. But not all of Elgar's civic or ceremonial music has followed this trajectory: the first and fourth
Pomp and Circumstance
marches in particular have assumed a canonic position in British (and American) musical life that easily perpetuates their high historical profile.

The
Pomp and Circumstance
marches focus attention on a central issue in any critical discussion of Elgar and populism: his music's perceived relationship with broader notions of nationalism and empire. For some writers, this presents an unavoidable stumbling block to full appreciation of Elgar's work. As early as 1924, the polemical critic Cecil Gray explicitly made the link by suggesting that it was “necessary to distinguish clearly between the composer of the symphonies and the self-appointed Musician Laureate of the British Empire, always ready to hymn rapturously the glories of our blood and state on the slightest provocation.”
²⁸
Gray's observation embodies in acute form a wider critical turning against imperial modes of thought and expression following the First World War.
²⁹
For Gray “the immortal ‘Land of Hope and Glory'” tune from the first march, supposedly Elgar's most extreme expression of colonial expansionism, “may at some time or other have aroused such patriotic enthusiasm in the breast of a rubber planter in the tropics so as to have led him to kick his negro servant slightly harder than he would have done if he had never heard it.”
³⁰
Such overtly politicized readings of Elgar's music may not necessarily be endorsed by many scholars today, but a sense of unease nevertheless remains. Brian Trowell, for example, has cautioned:

We are so used to Elgar's marches that we regard their nationalistic idiom as equivalent to that of Dvo
ák's Slavonic dances, but they are not so innocent. If we put their glittering orchestral equipage and sheer catchiness to one side for the moment, we realize that they are really a kind of recruitment propaganda, showy street-processions like the example in
Cockaigne.
³¹

Other scholars have proposed radical reinterpretations of Elgar's attitude to empire in such works, either suggesting that his music somehow foreshadows the Empire's decline, or that his commitment to an imperialist cultural project was skin deep at best. Prominent among such revisionists is Bernard Porter, whose broader attitude to the historical status of imperialism is one of skepticism. Porter argues that “there can be no presumption that Britain—the Britain that stayed at home—was an essentially ‘imperialist' nation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” stressing the contingent or anachronistic nature of unified concepts such as “British society” (which Porter regards as a diverse, complex phenomenon stratified by class, religion, and other factors). Rather, “imperialism can be regarded as ubiquitous, if it is defined broadly and loosely; but the more broadly and loosely it is defined, the less useful it becomes as a descriptive and analytical tool.”
³²
The principal thrust of Porter's argument is twofold: on the one hand, a need to deconstruct imperialism as a historical phenomenon in nineteenth-Century British culture, and on the other, the desire to rescue Elgar's historical reputation from the image of the “jingoistic tub-thumper, a manifestation of the worst aspects of late Victorian and Edwardian bombast.” In an essay specifically on Elgar and empire, Porter therefore concludes:

We have not discussed—because the present writer is not equipped to do so—the question of whether “imperial traits” can be inferred from his abstract works. (Is there such a thing as a “jingo” cadence or key?) Judged by his representational pieces, however, Elgar comes over as a pretty toothless sort of imperialist, as these things went; more dolphin, really, than shark.
³³

The strength of Porter's call for a reevaluation of imperialism based on a close scrutiny of the historical evidence is difficult to resist, but his reading of Elgar's music appears to rest on two assumptions. The first is that Elgar's attitude to the Empire was either an anomaly—an enthusiasm only briefly embraced in the heady years (following his marriage) when Elgar's national career first took off, between the premiere of the
Enigma
Variations (1899) and the First Symphony (1908)—or a charade, to some extent playacting in the role of imperial artist. The second assumption is that there is somehow a fundamental qualitative distinction between Elgar's “representational pieces” and his pure absolute music. Porter maintains: “There are no peculiarly imperialist intervals, keys, or even orchestrations. We need words to be sure: either libretti, or the titles of orchestral works.”
³⁴
But though this latter assumption certainly reflects trends in late-nineteenth-century musical politics, the actual boundaries between different musical genres, as we have seen, were more permeable than this reading would suggest.

It is especially difficult to listen to the
Pomp and Circumstance
marches with neutral ears given this highly polarized reception history. And it would be an all too easy interpretative strategy to “rescue” such music, seeking to problematize the works by suggesting that their apparently blithe tunefulness hides deeper and more uncomfortable musical truths. But Elgar's attitude toward the marches appears to have reflected some sense of this ambivalence. The works' title is taken from a passage in Shakespeare's
Othello
(3.3.347–54):

[Othello:] O, now for ever
Farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop, and big wars,
That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!
Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war!

More than one writer has commented on the incongruity of these lines in the context of the music's superficially upbeat character. Moore, for instance, notes Elgar's plans (later abandoned) to set Rudyard Kipling's end-of-empire poem “Recessional” around the time of the composition of the first two
Pomp and Circumstance
marches, and draws a parallel between the poem's sense of ceremonial retreat, withdrawal, or decay, and the reflective character of the trio tune from the first march. For Moore, both poem and melody suggest noble defeat rather than triumphant victory, a mood appropriate perhaps for the end of the Boer War.
³⁵
But the Shakespeare reference is even more poignant than this parallel implies, and represents a moving inward or away from public service, accompanied by a sense of outward betrayal. The speech comes from a crucial turning point in the play when Iago has finally persuaded Othello of Desdemona's supposed unfaithfulness, and it represents the apex of the play's argument—the shift from celebration to tragedy. In this sense, it presents a dialogue between civic duty or obligation and personal feeling or expression that lies at the heart of much of Elgar's music, not simply his “populist” works.