Edward Elgar and His World (7 page)

Besides proactive presentations of his Catholicism, Elgar also exhibited some reactive ones, such as when he complained to the unsympathetic Rosa Burley about his perception of prejudice against Catholics:

[Elgar] replied that I little knew how seriously his career had been hampered by his Catholicism. He told me of post after post which would have been open to him but for the prejudice against his religion, of golden opportunities snatched from his grasp by inferior men of more acceptable views. It was a subject on which he evidently felt very bitter for he embroidered it at great length.
⁷⁹

Again, the question here is not necessarily one of faith: in this period, Elgar complained to Burley that he had suffered because those in power around him identified him as
Catholic
, which was a negative public definition instead of the positive one Elgar strove to present to the world during this time.

Other signs of the Publicly Faithful avatar are external to Elgar. Even though his Catholic faith may have been “never that strong,” English Catholicism's faith in Elgar remained steadfast. The
Catholic Directory
, an organizational compendium of Catholic parishes within England, proudly named Elgar in a list of “Catholic Knights.”
⁸⁰
The
Catholic Encyclopedia
gushingly noted the fame of
Gerontius
.
⁸¹
But his Catholicism could and did often expose Elgar to various sorts of criticism, even after he became famous. The prominent critic Edward Algernon Baughan stated in 1906, when
Gerontius
's fame was assured by many successful performances, that it “is almost groveling in its anguish of remorse, and it has the peculiar sentimentality that is characteristic of the later Roman Catholic Church.”
⁸²

Even during this era, though, cracks in the Publicly Faithful avatar are apparent. Elgar's marriage to Alice Roberts is a good example. When the two were married, on May 8, 1889, Alice was still a Protestant and practicing Anglican, thus making the union to a Catholic a “mixed marriage.” Such a marriage would have seemed eminently reasonable to the young Elgar; his parents maintained a “mixed” liaison from the time of Ann Elgar's conversion to Catholicism in 1856 until William Henry Elgar's deathbed conversion in the first decade of the twentieth century. Yet by 1884 Ultramontane doctrine, taught to all English Catholics through the process of catechism, said that “mixed marriages” were forbidden in the Catholic Church except “for very grave reasons and under special conditions.”
⁸³
This prohibition may have caused Elgar and Alice Roberts some difficulty, since they chose not to marry in Malvern or Worcester, where Elgar's Catholic roots were strongest, but at the London Oratory on Brompton Road.
⁸⁴
That Alice Roberts converted to Catholicism after her marriage to Edward Elgar is immaterial, and it would not have mitigated the delicacy of the situation; under the proscribed rubrics of the time, had Elgar's Catholicism been the conservative Ultramontane variety expected of a midcentury convert's child, Alice would have had to become a Catholic convert herself, before the marriage.

Long after the end of the Publicly Faithful period, professions of Elgar's faith were continued by others on his behalf, but in the years after he completed
The Kingdom
, the composer's testimonies to his religious beliefs decreased steadily. Geoffrey Hodgkins notes that at this time “Elgar abandoned what we may call orthodox religious belief … and turned to a more humanistic outlook, which gradually became embittered and sceptical.”
⁸⁵
The culprit, besides Elgar's general depression and hypersensitivity, may well have been his growing fame: the acclaim garnered by the
Enigma
Variations and
Gerontius
placed him firmly in the spotlight as a public figure and musician with many more conducting opportunities and a brief, tumultuous professorship at the University of Birmingham. Such recognition came at the expense of lost time for composing, and both
The Apostles
and
The Kingdom
were much smaller works than originally planned.
⁸⁶
Once complete, they did not become the obvious successors to
Gerontius
, and the difficulty of composing them to his own satisfaction turned Elgar away from completing another oratorio—the composition with which he would publicly proclaim his faith—for the rest of his life. Although incandescent during its duration, Elgar's Publicly Faithful phase lasted only a few years of his life.

The “Weak Faith” Avatar: 1905–1934, or “What Is the Faith of the Catholic Church Concerning the Eucharist?”

In the last period of Elgar's religious development, from 1905 while he composed
The Kingdom
to the end of his life, Elgar's faith seemed only to falter. As Hodgkins notes, he did keep up appearances, attending a succession of churches in Hereford (until 1910), London and Sussex (from 1910 to 1923), and Worcester (from 1923 until his death in 1934). Certain biographers tell us that Elgar attended these churches because Alice wished him to do so—even ordering him a regular Sunday morning cab in Hereford for this purpose—or because he particularly admired a priest in one parish or another.
⁸⁷
In this period he also indulged in hobbies as an amateur scientist, perhaps as a countermove against religion, first with chemistry and later with microscopes.
⁸⁸
During these years, in public and semipublic pronouncements, the composer began to project aspects of the “Weak Faith” avatar. He allowed himself to be modern and skeptical regarding religion in the face of new scientific discoveries and tied himself more closely to elements of the land and nature.

Elgar's skepticism came out most clearly when describing his young life in Worcester. When he received the Freedom of the City of Worcester from then-mayor Hubert Leicester in 1905, Elgar reminisced about his days working at St. George's as an organist, when Leicester was his choirmaster. At the time they were both in a wind quintet, and in the process of his own mythmaking, implied that composing music for the quintet took precedence over religion: “We met on Sunday afternoons, and it was an understood thing that we should have a new piece every week. The sermons in our church used to take at least half an hour, and I spent the time composing the thing for the afternoon.”
⁸⁹

Further skepticism occurred in letters to Leicester, criticizing the material elements of Catholicism in Rome following a trip there in 1908:

If you have any religious feeling whatever, don't go to Rome—everything money—clergy gorgeous & grasping… . “Special music” (bombardon & side drum & Gounod's Ave Maria). Present Pope a good holy simple man but knows nothing … should be replaced by permanent Commission with secretary who could be dismissed.
⁹⁰

Through such observations and actions, Elgar began to distance himself from elements of Catholicism both in private and public communication for the last three decades of his life. Further, he publicly presented himself as someone who, though Catholic, could appreciate the art and cultural offerings of Protestants, as was the case in an interview with Rudolph de Cordova:

I attended as many of the [Anglican] Cathedral services as I could… . The putting of the fine organ into the Cathedral at Worcester [1874] was a great event, and brought many organists to play there at various times. I went to hear them all. The services at the Cathedral were over later on Sunday than those at the Catholic church, and as soon as the voluntary there was finished at the church I used to rush over to the Cathedral to hear the concluding voluntary.
⁹¹

The quotation still locates Elgar as a practicing Catholic (ever important for the composer of semisacred oratorios in the first decade of the twentieth century) and gives him an innocent reason to go to the cathedral (to hear music), but places him in a category of valuing art over dogma—thus helping him appear more universal.

Aside from doubt of Rome and publicly valuing music over Catholicism, Elgar made a self-conscious attempt to link himself with nature and thus create a sort of proto-naturalistic spirituality. This is what Elgar would be remembered for, as others have noted, since the historiography of the composer is largely one of associating him with the pastoral impulse.
⁹²
In a preface he wrote in 1930 for Hubert Leicester's
Forgotten Worcester
, Elgar romanticized his life as a child in the small city by transforming all that was important into the glorious image of a country sunrise:

It is pleasant to date these lines from an eminence distantly overlooking the way to school; our walk was always to the brightly-lit west. Before starting, our finances were rigidly inspected—naturally not for me, being, as I am, in nothing rigid, but quite naturally, by my companion, who tackled the situation with prophetic skill and with the gravity now bestowed on the affairs of great corporations whose accounts are harrowed by him to this day. The report being favourable, two pence were “allowed” for the ferry. Descending the steps, past the door behind which the figure of the mythical salmon is incised, we embarked; at our backs “the unthrift sun shot vital gold,” filling Payne's meadows with glory and illuminating for two small boys a world to conquer and to love. In our old age, with our undimmed affection, the sun still seems to show us a golden “beyond.”
⁹³

The “golden beyond” was the neighborhood of Worcester where Reeve's Littleton House was located, separated from the main section of the city by an easily traversed river.

Elgar's compositions became part of the nostalgic enterprise that eventually valued nature over faith.
Gerontius
is a case in point, and many scholars have been so captivated by Elgar's imagery that they ignore the larger ramifications of the transference from works of faith to works of nature. Michael Kennedy is a case in point:

From 1866 to 1868, young Edward attended a Roman Catholic school at Spetchley. This was under the patronage of the Lord of the Manor, Robert Berkeley. Many years later Elgar told Ernest Newman that “as a boy he used to gaze from the school windows in rapt wonder at the great trees swaying in the wind; and he pointed out to me a passage in
Gerontius
in which he had recorded in music his subconscious memories of them.” Although Newman did not enlarge upon this, it is fairly reasonable to suppose that the passage concerned is in
Part II
, rehearsal cue [68] at “the summer wind among the lofty pines.”
⁹⁴

Belief in the divinity of nature was easily transferred into doubts about the veracity of the afterlife, as can be seen from Kennedy's collection of anecdotes about the composer's latest articulated beliefs:

[In his last years Elgar] expressed a wish that he should be buried at the confluence of Severn and Teme, without religious ceremony. He had for many years avoided going to church and while dying and still lucid he refused to see a priest, none other than the son of Gervase Elwes. He objected to the church's “mumbo jumbo,” he said. His consultant, Arthur Thomson, was impressed by his “magnificent courage.” Elgar told him he had “no faith whatever in an afterlife. I believe there is nothing but complete oblivion.”
⁹⁵

Such private admissions were entirely in keeping with his skeptical nature and, private as they were, suited the image of Weak Faith well. Yet just before he died, the legacy of Elgar's cultural Catholicism reaffirmed itself strongly. On his deathbed, Elgar received last rites from Fr. Reginald Gibb of St. George's parish, probably at the instigation of Carice and Philip Leicester (Hubert Leicester's son), since Elgar was almost certainly unconscious from doses of morphine. Moore notes that Gibb later claimed in newspaper reports he had obtained a confession of faith from Elgar, but this testimony may have been exaggerated.
⁹⁶

In Memoriam (II): The Old English Catholic Avatar, or “What Do You Mean by Extreme Unction?”

Elgar always identified himself with the country, preferring it to life in London. Even before he was knighted, he dressed like a member of the gentry and took up aristocratic sports such as golf (and later games like billiards). He showed a predilection for chivalry and things Gothic; he was a political conservative. With the exception of
Gerontius
, most of his sacred works were compositions of appeasement, easily sung by either Catholic or Anglican congregations.
⁹⁷
He composed a number of pieces for the Three Choirs festivals that were quickly taken up by Anglican choirs throughout England and have remained a part of the Anglican choral tradition. In short, Elgar became the embodiment of an Old English Catholic: with a set of beliefs more reserved than mystical; a readiness to appease the dominant Protestant majority; and a readiness to act his part as a gentleman when needed. Indeed, if this was the case, it makes Elgar's lack of a permanent memorial at St. George's understandable. For a church whose tradition within English Catholicism was to stress the public propagation of the Ultramontane tenets proclaimed by Waterworth and other like-minded parish priests, Elgar's distinctly non-Ultramontane pronouncements may well have discouraged his boyhood parish from celebrating or memorializing him.

St. George's may never have had the opportunity. Elgar was buried in a grave beside his wife at St. Wulstan's Catholic Church in Little Malvern; at his request, the requiem was said as a Low Mass, so no music was performed. Doolan notes, however, that St. George's celebrated a High Mass (sung) in his honor around this time, performing an early version of Elgar's 1902
Ave Verum Corpus
with its original “Pie Jesu” requiem mass text. This is an interesting substitution, since it associates a hymn that celebrated Christ's suffering (identified in the nineteenth century with the Ultramontanes) with the traditional Lacrymosa text.