Edward Elgar and His World (71 page)

105. Wells,
Mr. Britling Sees It Through
, 432–33. Wells had three sons, the last of whom was born in 1914; none were lost in the First World War.

106. See Herbert Thompson's review in the
Yorkshire Post
, 1 November 1917; Charles A. Hooey, “Spirit Insights,”
Elgar Society Journal
9 (November 1996): 296–302. “The Fourth of August” had been premiered by Elgar three days earlier on October 28, 1917; see Atkins,
Elgar-Atkins Friendship
, 286. On the BBC broadcasts, see n. 17 above.

107. It is worth noting the extraordinary pressure placed on Elgar by Binyon, among others, when Elgar temporarily halted work on
The Spirit of England
over his dispute with Rootham (see n. 23 above): “Think of England, of the English-speaking peoples, in whom the common blood stirs now as it never did before; think of the awful casualty lists that are coming, & the losses in more & more homes; think of the thousands who will be craving to have this grief glorified & lifted up & transformed by an art like yours—and though I have little understanding of music, as you know, I understand that craving when words alone seem all too insufficient & inexpressive—think of what you are witholding
[sic]
from your countrymen & women. Surely it would be wrong to let them lose this help and consolation.” Letter from Binyon to Elgar, 27 March 1915, EBM L6350.

108. John Foulds,
A World Requiem
, op. 60 (London: Paxton, 1923). Foulds's
World Requiem
was recommended for national performance by the British Music Society and adopted by the British Legion for its Festivals of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall, Armistice Days from 1923 to 1926. See Lewis Foreman,
From Parry to Britten: British Music in Letters, 1900–1945
(London: Batsford, 1987), 166–67 and Malcolm MacDonald,
John Foulds: His Life and Music
(Rickmansworth: Triad Press, 1975), 26–31. Inserted in the copy of the score housed in Special Collections at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, is a program for the first of these performances, featuring a white cross on a red background and pronouncing the requiem “A Cenotaph in Sound” (see Music E–2 FOU).

109.
Radio Times
, 7 November 1924, 296.

110.
Radio Times
, 6 November 1925, 300.

111. BBC, Programme-as-Broadcast, National Programme, 11 November 1932, BBC Written Archives.

112. Writing of “For the Fallen” in the 1969 Aldeburgh Festival program book, Britten recalled that Elgar's score “has always seemed to me to have in its opening bars a personal tenderness and grief, in the grotesque march an agony of distortion, and in the final sequences a ring of genuine splendour”; quoted in Michael Kennedy,
A Portrait of Elgar
, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1982), 181.

 

 

 

PART IV

SUMMATION

Transcending the Enigmas of Biography:
The Cultural Context of Sir Edward Elgar's Career

LEON BOTSTEIN

There has been a sustained and growing interest in Edward Elgar and his music since the late 1960s, notably beyond the borders of Britain.
¹
In light of the wealth of distinguished English composers since Elgar's death, the historical question regarding the interplay between musical culture and national identity comes readily to mind. Why—before Elgar achieved international recognition—had England been viewed internally as well as on the Continent as “a land without music”?
²
This phrase, made popular in its German form as part of a derisive anti-English cultural chauvinism, sums up the nearly universal conceit that the English had not, by the late nineteenth century, nurtured a school of musical composition in which regional and local markers of national particularity—even invented ones—could win the affections of a transnational audience and public, much as other “national” traditions and schools (e.g., the Czech and Russian) had throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.
³

Put another way, why had no composer of Elgar's stature emerged among the English since Henry Purcell, despite England's preeminence throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries not only in politics and commerce, but also in literature, science, philosophy, architecture, and painting?
⁴
After all, in terms of concert life and amateurism, nineteenthcentury Britain had one of Europe's most active musical cultures.
⁵
Given the rapid acknowledgment of Elgar as England's leading composer after 1900, this puzzling historical paradox leads to a further question: In what sense was Elgar a distinctly English original? What did he invent and bequeath as a lasting dimension of Englishness to his English successors? Or was Britain's sustained second “renaissance” in music in the twentieth century, after Elgar's death and extending at least through the career of Benjamin Britten, only marginally national (apart from those few composers who pursued an explicitly nationalist agenda)?
⁶
It can be argued that, after an eighteenth century when George Frederic Handel, Joseph Haydn, and Italian opera reigned supreme in public and domestic English musical culture, the revitalization of English music after 1900 was largely derivative of Continental trends, a replay of the pre-Elgar era when English musical life was dominated by Felix Mendelssohn and the music of Continental Romanticism.

In Elgar's music, as Vaughan Williams suggested in a 1935 short article, “What Have We Learnt from Elgar?,” a rhetorical grandiosity coexists with a restrained but intense intimacy and lyricism.
⁷
Using the orchestra and an amalgam of influences, Elgar fashioned a late-Romantic idiom of expression (without resorting to so-called folk traditions that serve as obvious markers of national identity) that came to exemplify both an idealized attachment to the rural landscape and England's bold and confident, if not imperious, spirit. Elgar's melodic sensibility accomplished the former and his mastery of modern orchestral sonority and gesture the latter. One also hears in Elgar's music a moral severity, an approachable melodic clarity, and a restraint and calm that together manage to transform subjective emotion into a compelling didactic engagement with the listener. And the composer's presence, his personality and style, seems not so overwhelming and distinctive as, for example, Richard Wagner's.

Using the forms of both large-scale orchestral majesty and intimate string writing, Elgar gave voice to a proud but personal eloquence in which the musical rhetoric seemed to carry a public moral conceit that was also distinctly English. With self-awareness, Elgar lent carefully framed moments of musical beauty the aspect of ethical gravity. His musical phrases conveyed the personal and intimate but, presented in an elegant and refined manner, avoided the raw intensity of the confessional. Likewise, the dignity and grandeur of his large-scale works, even the most blatantly patriotic and national, while veering toward the pompous, always retained a sense of proportion. Elgar managed to lend imperial conceits not only a sense of propriety but also, through affecting beauty, justification. The composer thereby made it possible for his listeners to identify and appropriate sentiments, if not sentimentality, with an intensity of their own beyond mere admiration or enjoyment. Elgar's music suggested the appearance of accessible objectivity. He provided the room and opportunity for listeners to respond with empathy and identification without a sense of excess, emotional distance, or impersonality.

Elgar's music resonated with his public as both particularly English and attuned to the historical moment. His success depended in part on the disciplined detachment with which sentiment, sweetness, solidarity, community, and confidence took musical form within the practices and vocabulary of late-nineteenth-Century musical rhetoric. Elgar helped fashion the markers and substance of the late-Victorian and early-modern English self-image without subordinating his own individuality.
⁸
His reception as a great composer remains intertwined with his significance and popularity as a representative voice of the spirit and pride of England. His music is understood as expressing something authentic about the modern English character, landscape, and self-image. Because the gesture, rhetoric, and sonority he fashioned have come to locate the unique power, intensity, confidence, and refinement of the English, Elgar's music has retained its role as an embodiment of Englishness, limiting his influence as a model for composers other than his English successors. The fabricated but lasting array of musical signs of a national sensibility, if not tradition, that continue to sound in the work of British composers and British culture is Elgar's distinct and unique legacy.
⁹

Another reason for Elgar's sustained and increased popularity in the concert repertory is that, in the context of twentieth-Century composition, Elgar wrote music that was clearly conservative in style, not unlike that of Richard Strauss (whom Elgar admired and who thought Elgar to be his finest English contemporary). Despite the complexity and adventuresome nature of
Falstaff
, Elgar remained committed to the rhetorical tradition of expressiveness that came under intense critical scrutiny by modernists after World War I and again after World War II. In the development of musical materials, Elgar, like Strauss, adapted Wagnerian harmonic practice and orchestral sonorities with a residual allegiance to classical and traditional technical means. Both Elgar and Strauss (like Brahms and in contrast to Wagner) acknowledged the weight of history and mirrored some degree of awe for the traditions of composition. This is persistently evident in the musical work of both composers. They reconcile in their orchestral music the seemingly competing strategies of so-called absolute music and program music. Despite recent efforts to construe Elgar as a modernist innovator, he remained within the framework of the ideas, conflicts, forms, and vocabulary of the late nineteenth century. A parallel to the case Arnold Schoenberg made in 1933 on behalf of Johannes Brahms as a “progressive” is difficult to make for Elgar.
¹⁰

Was there a connection between Elgar's aesthetic conservatism and his Englishness? Since Elgar, why have so many prominent and successful English composers seemingly continued to resist dominant forms of modernism? Is this a prejudice of reception, where the public expects an Elgarian-invented “Englishness” from English composers the way it expects reductive signs of the Russian, the American, and the Mexican from composers of those nations? Although Elgar was influenced by Wagner and Brahms as well as Robert Schumann and Strauss, his successors—including those who participated in the pastoral and folk revival of the midcentury, composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Frank Bridge, George Butterworth, Arthur Bliss, and Gerald Finzi—were often inspired by the models of Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky. They appropriated Elgarian traits and pursued a synthesis between some English elements and a conservative adaptation of styles from outside of England. Unlike Béla Bartók, Stravinsky, or Debussy, neither Elgar nor his successors transformed national musical attributes as representing the universal (whether those national elements were invented in the nineteenth century or were authentically more historically remote, in the sense of “folk” music).

Precisely on account of its ingratiating character, Elgar's music has benefited from the decline and defeat of modernism after the mid–1970s. That collapse has led musicians and their audiences back to twentieth-Century music that was once derided as old-fashioned. Strauss, as much as Stravinsky or Schoenberg, is now considered a major figure of the twentieth century, a prophetic voice of postmodernism. Ironically, the influence of figures such as Elgar, Dimitri Shostakovich, Aaron Copland, and Jean Sibelius (as opposed to Stravinsky and Schoenberg) on subsequent generations of composers has been limited to their relevant national spheres. Neither Strauss nor Alexander Zemlinsky (whose compositions, for all their variety and commanding quality, never cut free from the aesthetic premises of the later nineteenth century) had significant imitators. In Elgar's case, his musical gestures and rhetoric can be heard in most major English figures that followed him. Consider, for example, William Walton (despite Elgar's reservations concerning the younger composer's music), both in his early and late work. In Walton's 1929 Viola Concerto the first and last movements reveal debts to Elgarian rhetoric, and the 1939 Violin Concerto owes much to Elgar's. As late as the 1962
Hindemith Variations
, one hears echoes of Elgarian lyricism, expressiveness, and particularly the techniques of variation, rhythmic ingenuity, orchestration, and humor.

Few composers have attracted and baffled critics and historians as Elgar has done. The composer is known for his plea on behalf of the primacy of music as “absolute,” a mode of life and expression possessed of its own logic and in no need of narrative or symbolic meaning: