Edward Elgar and His World (56 page)

83. Similarly, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's
Bamboula
represented South Africa in the pageant, along with Hamish McCunn's
Livingstone Episode
, Elgar's “The Cape of Good Hope,” “Dutch Boat Song,” and “Old ‘Hottentot' Melodies,” et al. Uday Shankar came to London in 1920 to study art; his father, Shyam Shankar produced an Indian ballet in London in 1924 in which Uday danced. Ravi Shankar,
My Music, My Life
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), 63.

84. “Elgar's New Masque,”
Daily Telegraph
, 24 February 1912, EBM Cuttings, 15.

85. Michael Kennedy, “Elgar the Edwardian,” in Monk,
Elgar Studies
, 116–17; and Kennedy, notes to CD Hamburg Deutsche Grammophon 413 490–2 (1982) that includes the
Enigma
Variations,
Pomp and Circumstance
March, op. 39, along with the
Crown of India
Suite, Leonard Bernstein.

86. Stanley Sadie, ed.,
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 2001), 8:125.

87.
Hindu Marches
by Raymond Roze and Sellenick, 1899. Many other pieces are “Indian” marches in all but name, such as Edward Clarke's “Song of the Indian Army” to words by B. Britten (London: F. Moutri, 1859). Carl Bohm's
Miniature Suite
for piano includes an “Indian March” (Leipzig: Arthur P. Schmidt, 1907). See also Austin C. Ferguson's
Indian Wedding March
for piano (London: West & Co., 1914); and John Faulds,
The Indian: Grand March
for piano (London: E. Marks & Sons, 1913). The spelling of the composer's name here is not one John Foulds (1880–1939) seems ever to have used, unless it is an error. Foulds scholar Malcolm MacDonald states that, as far as he is aware, there is no mention of such a piece in Foulds's work lists, and that no work of Foulds is known to have been published by Marks & Son (personal correspondence, 25 May 2006). Foulds did, however, write a “Grand Durbar March” in 1937 when he was in India, which is a suggestive parallel.

88. Along with other Indian exotica, this piece is discussed in Derek B. Scott,
The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour
(Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989), 177–78.

89. John Pridham,
The Prince of Wales Indian March
(London, 1876) and
General Roberts' Indian March
(London, 1879). Other examples include Stephen Glover's
The Fall of Delhi
“characteristic march for the pianoforte” (London, 1857) BL h.745 (5), and
The Oriental March of Victory
(London, 1858), BL h.745 (9).

90. Thomas Boatwright,
Indian March: The Diamond Jubilee
(London: Klene & Co., 1898): BL g.605.k (1). See also Richard F. Harvey,
The Royal Indian March
for piano (London: Francis Day & Hunter, 1901).

91. “March of the Mogul Emperors” no. 5,
The Crown of India
Suite, op. 66, full score (Miami: Edwin Kalmus & Co.), 35–53. For an artistic and political study of Mughal court culture, see Bonnie C. Wade,
Imaging Sound: An Ethnomusicological Study of Music, Art and Culture in Mughal India
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), which includes an extensive bibliography for further reference.

92. Quotation from Delhi's speech, First Tableau; Hamilton,
Crown of India:
libretto, 12–13. These are four of the great Emperors of the Mughal Dynasty: Akbar (reign: 1556–1605), Jehanghir (r.: 1605–27), Shah Jahan (r.: 1627–58), and Aurangzeb (r.: 1658–1707). After the last Mughal emperor, Bhadur Shah Zaffar, was exiled to Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar) in 1858 following his post-Rebellion capture by the British, a formal end was declared to the Mughal Dynasty (that began with Babur in 1526). The title of Emperor of India was eventually taken over by the British monarch (in 1877), in the person of Queen Victoria, and held until India won independence from Britain in 1947.

93. The Kipling quotation, from his poem “A Song of the White Men,” reads: “Oh, well for the world when the White Men tread / Their highway side by side!”
Verse
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954), 280.

94. A five-movement orchestral suite was extracted from
Mlada
in 1903 and published the next year. Including a suggestively titled “Indian Dance,” Rimsky-Korsakov's suite concludes with the grand “Procession of the Nobles.”

95. For a detailed tracing of the history of the polonaise in Russia, see Richard Taruskin,
Defining Russia Musically
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 281–91.

96. Elgar certainly knew Rimsky-Korsakov's music: he had conducted the
Fantasia on Serbian Themes
and the suite from
The Snow Maiden
in 1899. Monk,
Elgar Studies
, App. 2, 25.

97. “India,” part of “Greater Britain,”
The Sketch
17, no. 221 (21 April 1897): 556–57. Images of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of the Hindu pantheon, also contributed to
The Sketch
's representation of India.

98. Such imagery endures: the cover of Sony's 1992 recording of
The Crown of India
Suite (SBK 48265) features a painting of finely decorated elephants carrying Akbar and his cohorts who are engaged in military activities using ornate swords and shields. The painting
Akbar, Grossmogul von Indien (1542–1605)
, is in the Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin.

99.
Musical Times
53, no. 836 (1 October 1912): 665–66;
The Referee
similarly spoke of “a touch of the barbaric appropriate to the situation” in the “March of the Moghul Emperors” (17 March 1912), EBM Cuttings, 19.

100. Cecil Gray,
A Survey of Contemporary Music
(London: Oxford University Press, 1924), 78–79.

101. F. H. Shera,
Elgar: Instrumental Works
(London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 6.

102. Ronald Taylor, “Music in the Air: Elgar and the BBC,” in
Edward Elgar: Music and Literature
, ed. Raymond Monk (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 337.

103. Ibid., 336.

104. Alex Cohen, “Elgar: Poetic Visions and Patriotic Vigour,”
Radio Times
, 2 December 1932, 669.

105. Ibid., 669.

106. Crump, “Identity of English Music,” 184.

107. Ibid., 184.

108. Ibid., 181.

109. Ernest Newman in the
Sunday Times
(25 February 1934); quoted in Crump, “Identity of English Music,” 180.

110. Frank Howes, “The Two Elgars,”
Music and Letters
16, no. 1 (January 1935): 26–29.

111. A. J. Sheldon,
Edward Elgar
with an introduction by Havergal Brian (London: Office of “Musical Opinion,” 1932), 16.

112. Howes, “Two Elgars,” 26–29.

113. A recent manifestation of this is Roger Scruton's
England: An Elegy
(London: Chatto and Windus, 2000), which, as its title suggests, mourns the loss of “traditional values” associated with Victorianism while celebrating “the virtues of England” (preface). Elgar's music, along with that of other supposed purveyors of English pastoralism, is called on as a witness of the now-lost Golden Age: “Hardy, Housman and Edward Thomas; Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Holst, offer the last united invocations of a regional England, in which people were united by the history that divided them… . Theirs was a country of varied agriculture and localised building types, of regional accent and folk song, of local fairs and markets and shows.” (183).

114. Jeffrey Richards, “Elgar's Empire,” in
Imperialism and Music: Britain 1876–1953
(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), 44–87; 45. Richards goes on to reveal his desire to exculpate imperialism from its driving force: profit. Thus, like those Elgar scholars he so readily criticizes, he tries to save Elgar from himself, in this instance by claiming that (British) imperialism was “altruistic,” (53) and that it was “the noble vision at the heart of British imperialism” (84) that inspired Elgar: “The problem is that people have misunderstood the meaning of imperialism, equating it with jingoism and exploitation. To apply the term ‘jingoistic' to Elgar's work is to misunderstand his view entirely. His critics should have had more confidence in Sir Edward. Elgar's vision of Empire was clearly set out at the end of
Caractacus:
it is a vision of justice, peace, freedom and equality, of the pax Britannica—and of the fulfillment by Britain of its trusteeship mission, to see the countries in its charge brought safely and in due course to independence—a far from ignoble dream.” (51). Actually, the facts are quite to the contrary—far from other people having misunderstood imperialism, it is Richards himself who has failed to grasp the driving force of imperialism, concentrating merely on the pillars of arguments that were constructed to support the colonial enterprise, and which have been laid bare by a generation of postcolonial scholars. Moreover, far from Britain “bringing [them] safely and in due course to independence,” all colonized peoples have fought for their independence, many for over half a century and with considerable loss of life, before forcing the British to leave (especially India, which fought for over fifty years for its freedom).

115. The most recent volume that contributes to the revisionist Elgar-bild is
The Cambridge Companion to Elgar
, ed. Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), see esp. the editors' introduction, 1–14. See also the two books edited by Raymond Monk,
Elgar Studies
and
Edward Elgar: Music and Literature;
Charles Edward McGuire, “Functional Music: Imperialism, the Great War, and Elgar as Popular Composer,” in
Cambridge Companion to Elgar
, 214–24; Byron Adams, “The ‘Dark Saying of the Enigma: Homoeroticism and the Elgarian Paradox,” in
Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity
, ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 216–44; Stephen Banfield, “Three of a Kind: Elgar's Counterpoint,”
Musical Times
140 (Summer 1999): 29–37; Michael Allis, “Elgar and the Art of Retrospective Narrative,”
Journal of Musicological Research
19 no. 4 (2000): 289–328; Crump, “Identity of English Music,” and John Gardiner, “The Reception of Sir Edward Elgar, 1918–1934: A Reassessment,”
Twentieth Century British History
9 (1998): 370–95.

116. Alain Frogley, “Rewriting the Renaissance: History, Imperialism, and British Music Since 1840,”
Music and Letters
84, no. 2 (May 2003): 241–57, 252.

117. Said,
Culture and Imperialism
, 39. An entirely contrary tendency, involving the celebration of imperialism and its orientalist works, is visible in the recent work of a number of writers including Richards, “Elgar's Empire” (see n. 117 ); MacKenzie, who tries to resurrect a respectable face for orientalists of all kinds in his book
Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts;
James Day, who celebrates the “noble” empire he hears in Elgar's music, in his book
“Englishness” in Music: From Elizabethan Times to Elgar, Tippet and Britten
(London: Thames Publishing, 1999); David Cannadine, who attempts to erase race from the imperial equation in his book
Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire
(London: Allen Lane, 2001); Bernard Porter, who concludes that “imperialism was a veneer,” not only for Elgar but, he suggests, also for Britain in general, in his “Elgar and Empire: Music, Nationalism and the War,” in
“Oh My Horses!”: Elgar and the Great War
, ed. Lewis Forman (Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 2001), 133–73, 162; and Scruton, who, in his recent article “Islam and Orientalism,” claims that “we” should acknowledge that “Eastern cultures owe a debt to … those noble orientalists [who undertook] the task of rescuing a culture other than their own.”
The American Spectator
, May 2006, 10–12. This tendency began in the 1980s: Salman Rushdie has argued that the vogue of “Raj revivalism” in that decade—the period of such films as
A Passage to India
and
Gandhi
, and of the televised serialization of M. M. Kaye's
The Far Pavilions
and Paul Scott's
Raj Quartet
—was an attempt to restore the prestige, if not the reality, of the British Empire; see his “Outside the Whale,” in
Granta
11 (1984): 125–38; repr. in
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991
(New York and London: Granta Books, 1991), 87–101.

118. Francis G. Hutchins analyzed the orientalizing of India in his
The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967).

119. Even though Elgar, along with many of his generation, may have resisted this reality, India had been engaged in a dynamic of opposition to colonial rule from the First War of Independence in 1857, with the first Indian National Congress established in 1885 and the Swadeshi, or home rule movement, in 1905.

Working the Crowd:
Elgar, Class, and Reformulations of Popular Culture
at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

DEBORAH HECKERT

Opened in 1904 by the visionary impresario Oswald Stoll, the London Coliseum was arguably the most opulent of the Edwardian music halls. It had a particularly unusual feature: an enormously expensive conveyance christened the “King's Car.” This clumsy, elephantine contraption was a lavishly decorated anteroom on wheels that ran for twenty-six yards on a series of tracks; it was designed to whisk the king and his guests from their carriages directly through a special Royal Entrance to the door of his box. Thus His Majesty would not have to mingle with—or indeed, so much as glance at—any of his subjects. Instead, unsullied by propinquity to the lower classes, the monarch could partake of an entertainment only recently beginning to distance itself from working-class associations. In his lively history of the London Coliseum,
The House That Stoll Built
, Felix Barker relates the tragicomic fate of the King's Car: