Edward Elgar and His World (78 page)

15. As the first Richard Peyton Professor of Music, Elgar delivered a course of lectures at the University of Birmingham during 1905–6. See Elgar,
A Future for English Music.

16. See Matthew Riley, “Rustling Reeds and Lofty Pines: Elgar and the Music of Nature,”
19th-Century Music
26, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 155–77.

17. See Jeffrey Richards,
Imperialism and Music, England 1876–1953
(Manchester: Manchester University Press), chap. 3; Meirion Hughes,
The English Musical Renaissance and the Press, 1850–1914: Watchmen of Music
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), chap. 7; Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling,
The English Musical Renaissance, 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music
, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); and Stephen Hinton's review of the 1993 first edition of Hughes and Stradling's book in
Journal of Modern History
67, no. 3 (September 1995): 710–12. See also Cannadine, “Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual,” 101–64.

18. Given Elgar's energetic dabbling as a chemist and his enthusiasm for recording and broadcasting—let alone his evident patriotism for imperial England—the emphasis on the personal and rural still requires the “other” Elgar to be understood and not merely de-emphasized.

19. See Byron Adams, “The ‘Dark Saying' of the Enigma: Homoeroticism and the Elgarian Paradox,”
19th-Century Music
23, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 218–35; and the prologue in Kennedy,
Life of Elgar.

20. See Ronald Hyam,
Empire and Sexuality: The English Experience
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); Richard Dellamora,
Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Karen Chase and Michael Levenson,
The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Martha Vicinus, ed.,
Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972); Richard Dellamora, ed.,
Victorian Sexual Dissidence
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Graham Robb,
Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2003); Thomas Laqueur,
Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), chaps. 5 and 6; and David Hilliard, “UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality,”
Victorian Studies
25, no. 2 (Winter 1982): 181–210.

21. Elgar,
A Future for English Music
, 57.

22. See Nalini Ghuman Gwynne, “Elephants and Moghuls, Contraltos and G-Strings: How Elgar Got His Englishness,” in “India in the English Musical Imagination, 1890–1940,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2003, 109–86. In this context, one should also note the establishment of the Boy Scouts; see Michael Rosenthal,
The Character Factory: Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts and the Imperatives of Empire
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).

23. For a revision of the claims that Elgar's place in English music declined, see John Gardiner, “The Reception of Sir Edward Elgar 1918–c. 1934: A Reassessment,”
TwentiethCentury English History
9, no. 3 (1998): 370–95.

24. Byron Adams has noted that for Britten the decade of the 1950s was not an easy time to be homosexual. The real improvement in England came in the mid–1960s. See also chap. 1, “Carrying Music to the Masses,” in Paul Kildea's
Selling Britten: Music and the Market Place
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9–41.

25. Craggs,
Elgar: A Source Book
, 58, 60, 61, 64.

26. For general accounts of the contested issues, see
The Mid-Victorian Generation
, chaps. 12–13; and Searle,
A New England?
, pt. 4. With particular respect to religious debates, see Duncan Forbes,
The Liberal Anglican Idea of History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952); and Michael Wheeler,
The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in NineteenthCentury English Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Several points need to be made regarding Elgar's status as a Catholic. First, as Wheeler's book makes clear, there was no shortage of anti-Catholic sentiment in late-nineteenth-Century England. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that prejudice against Catholics did not prevent Elgar from achieving enormous success. That achievement may be due in part to the success of his oratorios, which at one and the same time celebrated the profoundly Catholic allegiance to the historic community of the body faithful and the traditions with which it was associated. Second, even though Elgar's career may not have been damaged by his status as a Catholic, he never tired of expressing the belief that his Catholicism was a disadvantage he had to battle constantly. Elgar's success in communicating with the broad spectrum of the English audience should not in any way minimize the importance of the ongoing tensions that confessional differences generated socially, politically, and culturally in England during his lifetime.

27. Elgar golfed with one of Arnold's sons and in 1905 worked on setting the poet's “Empedocles on Etna,” returning to it briefly in 1927. Dedicated to Muriel Foster, a fragment called “Callicles” survives. See Moore,
Edward Elgar: A Creative Life
, 177; and Craggs,
Elgar: A Source Book
, 78.

28. Moore,
Edward Elgar: A Creative Life
, 693–94.

29. On Stanford and Parry and their relationship to Elgar, see Jeremy Dibble's
C. Hubert Parry, His Life and Music
(Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992), as well as his
Charles Villiers Stanford.

30. Matthew Arnold,
Culture and Anarchy
, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980), 168. On the context of Arnold's views and his relationship to Newman, see David J. DeLaura,
Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), chaps. 1–9.

31. Arnold,
Culture and Anarchy
, 169.

32. Ibid., 168, 165.

33. Ibid., 167.

34. See Max Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1958).

35. Arnold,
Culture and Anarchy
, 165.

36. Ibid., 167.

37. Ibid., 169.

38. Ibid., 181. See also the account of Arnold in Martin J. Weiner,
English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1860
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 35–37.

39. Arnold,
Culture and Anarchy
, 184.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid., 173.

42. Ibid., 140.

43. On the Oxford Movement, see Peter B. Nockles,
The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

44. See Bernarr Rainbow,
The Choral Revival in the Anglican Church, 1839–1872
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

45. Arthur Sullivan, “About Music,” in
Sir Arthur Sullivan: Life Story, Letters and Reminiscences
, ed. Arthur Lawrence (New York: Herbert S. Stone, 1899), 271.

46. Sullivan, “About Music,” 271–72.

47. Elgar,
A Future for English Music
, 163.

48. In this sense Elgar exploited the residues of an eighteenth-Century notion of the naive artist, whose gift and artistry were somehow superior by being spontaneous and bereft of culture and cultivation. By the mid-nineteenth century this sympathy had largely vanished, rendering that judgment either condescending or derogatory. See Hughes,
The English Musical Renaissance and the Press
, 162–89.

49. Bernard Shaw, “Sir Edward Elgar,” in
Shaw's Music
, vol. 3 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1981), 727. The essay was originally published in 1920.

50. As Anderson points out, Elgar consciously crafted the first 1896 oratorio,
The Light of Life
, to appeal to the established tastes of the audience. At the same time, in the spirit of Arnold, he used fashion to edify. A fugue was required and Elgar produced one that was “not a ‘barn-door' fugue, but one with an independent accompaniment. There's a bit of a canon, too, and in short, I hope there's enough counterpoint to give the real English religious respectability!” Quoted in Anderson,
Elgar
, 207–8. See also the extensive discussion of the oratorio culture, narrative structures, and Elgar's approach, from
The Light of Life
onward, in Charles Edward McGuire,
Elgar's Oratorios: The Creation of an Epic Narrative
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), particularly the first three chapters.

51. Elgar,
A Future for English Music
, 33.

52. Ibid., 49, 51.

53. Consider Elgar's lavish praise for the leaders and citizens of Düsseldorf in contrast to their English counterparts. “Our public men” he wrote, “are unmusical” whereas in Düsseldorf, an orchestra is viewed as an “asset,” and the “annual loss” is not minded since music “is a feature of the town life.” Ibid., 257.

54. Ibid., 211, 225.

55. Ibid., 223.

56. Ibid., 133–43.

57. On Elgar's relationship to the BBC and recording, see Ronald Taylor, “Music in the Air: Elgar and the BBC,” in
Edward Elgar: Music and Literature
, ed. Raymond Monk (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 327–55. See also Timothy Day, “Elgar and Recording,” 184–94; and Jenny Doctor, “Broadcasting's Ally: Elgar and the BBC,” 195–203, both in
The Cambridge Companion to Elgar
, ed. Daniel Grimley and Julian Rushton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

58. See Moore,
Elgar: Child of Dreams
, 10–11; Moore,
Edward Elgar: A Creative Life
, 43, 45, 57, 60–62, 64, 70–72; Kennedy,
Life of Elgar
, 13–17; Anderson,
Elgar
, 4–13; and Shaw, “Sir Edward Elgar,” 725–28.

59. Elgar,
Letters of a Lifetime
, 81. Elgar's Germanophilism was pronounced, as was his debt to Richter. Both sentiments suffered during World War I. On the Elgar-Richter relationship, see Christopher Fifield,
True Artist and True Friend: A Biography of Hans Richter
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

60. Elgar,
Letters of a Lifetime
, 39.

61. Elgar,
Elgar and His Publishers: Letters of a Creative Life
, 2:828–29.

62. Quoted in Moore,
Edward Elgar: A Creative Life
, 795.

63. Ibid., 65.

64. Ibid.

65. See Michael Beckerman's “Dvo . rák's ‘New World' Largo and ‘The Song of Hiawatha,'”
19th-Century Music
16, no. 1 (Summer 1992): 35–48; and his
New Worlds of Dvo . rák: Searching in America for the Composer's Inner Life
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).

66. Christoph Irmscher,
Longfellow Redux
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

67. Ibid., 3.

68. Ibid., 50.

69. Interestingly, Longfellow had a portrait of Liszt and parts of Dante's coffin in his study in Cambridge.

70. On Longfellow's connection to Catholicism, see Horace Scudder, ed.,
The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(1922; repr., Cutchogue, N.Y.: Buccaneer Books, 1993), 361–62.

71. See Burrows, “Victorian England: An Age of Expansion”; and Musgrave,
Musical Life of the Crystal Palace.

72. Much of Alice's poetry was written before she became Lady Elgar. See Moore,
Edward Elgar: A Creative Life
, 124–27, 141, 181–82, 185, 190, 205, 222, 277–81, 522.

73. Mary Louise Kete, quoted in Irmscher,
Longfellow Redux
, 26.

74. It bears repeating, as an encomium, that this account is indebted to Irmscher's brilliant book.

75. See the similar argument made by Michael Pope in
“King Olaf
and the English Choral Tradition,” in
Elgar Studies
, ed. Raymond Monk (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990), 58–60.

76. Quoted in Brian Trowell, “Elgar's Use of Literature,” in
Edward Elgar: Music and Literature
, 197.

77. See Glenn Watkins,
Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 42–45. Although Elgar wrote a considerable body of patriotic work before World War I, one thinks of “Carillon” (1914),
Polonia
(1915),
The Spirit of England
(1916), and the Kipling settings,
The Fringes of the Fleet
(1917).

78. Trowell, “Elgar's Use of Literature,” 182–326.

79. For a discussion of Ruskin with respect to issues of the redefinition of masculinity and the aesthetic in Elgar's generation, see Dellamora,
Masculine Desire
, chap. 6.

80. See Frank M. Turner,
John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002); and John Henry Newman,
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
, ed. David J. DeLaura (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968).

81. See John Henry Newman's
Grammar of Assent,”
pt. 2, chap. 9, “The Illative Sense,” 270–99; and his
The Idea of University
(Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), esp. 161–81. See also Ian Ker,
John Henry Newman
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 122.

82. See, for example, Hilliard, “UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality.”

83. The doctrinal implications of the poem were the subject of lively debate, including the necessity of concessions regarding changes to permit performances in Anglican contexts. See Moore,
Edward Elgar: A Creative Life
, 316–37; Esther R. B. Pese, “A Suggested Background for Newman's ‘Dream of Gerontius',”
Modern Philology
47, no. 2 (November 1949): 108–16; and Mrs. Richard Powell, “The First Performance of ‘Gerontius,'”
The Musical Times
100, no. 1392 (February 1959): 78–80. On
Gerontius
, see also Percy M. Young,
Elgar, Newman, and the Dream of Gerontius: In the Tradition of English Catholicism
(Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995).