Edward Elgar and His World (8 page)

St. George's modest commemoration to Elgar paled in comparison to the elaborate expressions of mourning offered to his memory at the Anglican Worcester Cathedral. Indeed, the Elgar Window presents only one facet of such memorials. On March 2, 1934, a week after Elgar's death, the cathedral organized a “national memorial service” using members of the Three Choirs Festival Chorus and included selections from his last three oratorios: Prelude to
Part II
of
The Apostles;
Prelude to
Gerontius
, concluding solo and chorus from
Part I
(“Proficisere Anima Christiana”), selections from
Part II
popularly known as “Angel's Song” and “Angel's Farewell”; and parts of
The Kingdom
, including the Virgin Mary's meditation (“The Sun Goeth Down”) and “The Lord's Prayer.”
⁹⁸
The prayer intoned by Dean Moore-Ede at this occasion was conspicuously ecumenical:

We give thee humble and hearty thanks that it pleased Thee to endow our fellow citizen Edward Elgar with that singular mastery of music, and the will to use it in Thy service, whereby he being dead yet speaketh: now filling our minds with visions of the mystery and beauty of Nature; now by the concert of sweet and solemn sounds telling our hearts secrets of life and death that lie too deep for words; now soaring with Angels and archangels and with all the company of Heaven in an ecstacy of praise; now holding us bowed with the broken and contrite heart before the throne of judgment. We thank Thee for the great place he holds in the glorious roll of England's Masters of Music. We thank Thee for the love and loyalty which ever bound this her son to the Faithful City.
⁹⁹

Aside from being demonstrative about “Nature,” the prayer commends Elgar's music for its power to affirm both a Christian faith and solemn comfort.
¹⁰⁰
Again, this Elgar is “Pan-Christian” and proudly celebrated in the Anglican cathedral as Worcester's “native son.” Yet the musical selections listed above also came from the fertile period of Elgar's full flower into fame, namely, 1899–1906. As a manifestation of Elgar's pan-Christian avatar as well as the changing nature of the times, these works—with their intense yet evanescent Catholic overtones—were wholly welcome in the Worcester Cathedral. In essence, they foreshadowed the presentation of both the memorial plaque with its mystical Latin declaration and the memorial window with its safer English version.
¹⁰¹

The semisacred oratorio selections were not the only items on the program for the memorial concert. Also featured were three movements from Elgar's first major compositional success, the
Enigma
Variations: I—C.A.E., a musical portrait of Alice Elgar, the composer's wife; IX—Nimrod, characterizing Elgar's friend August Jaeger; and XIII—***, Elgar's noble friend and patron Lady Mary Lygon. By luck or by design, Ivor Atkins and W. H. Reed, close friends throughout Elgar's life, chose works that spoke to Elgar's long-standing ideals of domesticity, erotic friendship, and unrequited love.
¹⁰²
Their choices pointed the way beyond public proclamations of Elgar's religion to the increasingly secular world he would inhabit in the years after 1905. The Weak Faith avatar, denuded of Elgar's spiritual beliefs, became dependent on his friendships, not his childhood beliefs, and consequently became safe for consumption by all.

Elgar in his lifetime saw English Catholics move from a marginalized community into the mainstream of society. The composer's successful and honored career was a certain sign of this shift. Yet even so, a backlash of prejudice against Catholics was a pungent memory for Elgar's Catholic friends and contemporaries. Some, like Leicester, chose to delve deeper into their own faith for any public presentation, and Elgar certainly adopted this stance in the early years of his career. Old prejudices die hard within a culture, however, and today's biographers must reexamine Elgar in the light of his Catholic upbringing. Was he a man whose faith was “never that strong,” or did he embody the avatar of an “Old English Catholic” in order to present a publicly acceptable religious facade? Elgar's mixed religious background, inherited from his parents, his own mixed marriage, and his work within a predominantly Anglican profession made being able to speak to both faiths not just convenient, but a necessity for his survival. In such a world, it is no wonder the man did not feel at ease.

NOTES

I would like to thank the staffs of the Elgar Birthplace Museum, Heywood College Library, Worcestershire Local History Center, Worcestershire County Records Office, and British Library, as well as David Morrison, archivist of the Worcester Cathedral, Abbot Paul Stoneham of Belmont Abbey, Steven Plank, and Ari Sammartino for their gracious assistance in my research for this article. Sarah Jean Clemens, Alexandra Monchick Reale, Rebecca Riding, and Christopher White provided additional research; without their kind and timely aid, the final version of this article would not have been possible. All subhead quotations are from Richard Challoner's English-language catechism,
The Catholick Christian Instructed in the Sacraments, Sacrifice, Ceremonies, and Observances of the Church: By Way of Question and Answer
(Philadelphia: C. Talbot, 1786).

1. Anthony Boden,
Three Choirs: A History of the Festivals
(Phoenix Mill, Eng.: Alan Sutton, 1992), 183.

2. It is clear the figure is Christ and not God from the cross that forms part of the halo, the right hand making the sign of benediction, and the left hand holding an orb, which is the symbol of Christ's kingdom on earth. The point is further clarified in a description of the window published in the London
Times
, 5 January 1935: “Dominating the design is the figure of Christ wearing royal and sacerdotal vestments. His right hand is raised in blessing and in His left He holds the starred orb symbolical of universal rule over heaven and earth. Round the throne is the rainbow symbolical of God's covenant with Man.” The masculine gender of the Angel echoes the pronouns used by Elgar in
Gerontius
and by Cardinal John Henry Newman in the original text. See “his ample palm,”
Part II
, rehearsal number 9; and “I will address him. Mighty one, my Lord, my Guardian Spirit, all hail!”
Part II
, rehearsal number 17.

3.
Times
(London), 4 September 1935.

4. Ibid.

5. A critical reaction was already building in the 1920s, but manifestations of it abound in the obituaries and appreciations of Elgar in the April 1934 issue of
The Musical Times.

6. See Charles Edward McGuire, “Vaughan Williams and the English Music Festival: 1910,” in
Vaughan Williams Essays
, ed. Byron Adams and Robin Wells (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2003), 260; and Jerrold Northrop Moore, ed.,
Elgar and His Publishers: Letters of a Creative Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 1:351–52; 371–75.

7. “Alice wrote on June 11: ‘E. very badsley [sic] & dreadfully worried &c.' Carice's confirmation took place that day but neither parent attended, leaving all the arrangements to Miss Burley.” Jerrold Northrop Moore,
Edward Elgar: A Creative Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984; repr. 1999), 407.

8. Carice's letter to the Leicester family is dated “Empire Day, [19]07.” Letter of Carice Elgar to Hubert Leicester, [24 May] 1907, Worcestershire County Records Office, 705:185 BA 8185/1. The confirmation record from Belmont Abbey notes that Carice Irene Elgar “took the Confirmation name Caecilia and her Godmother was Maria Grafton. She was confirmed by Bishop Cuthbert Hedley O.S.B… . on the Feast of Pentecost, 19th May 1907.” A copy of the confirmation register confirms the spelling of her name as “Caecilia.” Letter to author from Abbot Paul Stoneham of Belmont Abbey, 28 April 2006.

9. Elgar Birthplace Museum photostat of Alice Elgar's diary, 19 May 1907. The full entry reads: “E. & A. C. May, Pippa & Mr. Kalisch to Belmont at 10–15. Lovely there & finer. big car—Connelly—Lovely drive afterwards by Callow & Aconbury & Green Crize—most lovely. Saw Plover on road & little ones, E. picked one up & showed us—most darling. To Belmont in car again at 4. Carice confirmed. Very quiet & beautiful ceremony. All to tea with the Bishop Abbot afterwards.”

10. “Elgar—The Man Behind the Music,”
http://www.elgar.org/2theman.htm
(accessed July 11, 2006).

11. See, for instance, the preface to Robert Anderson's
Elgar:
“I came later to
The Apostles
and have never much admired it. Perhaps my strictures about this work and others will seem harsh. Now and again I have been unable to conceal my disappointment when Elgar is obviously below his best.” Robert Anderson,
Elgar
(New York: Schirmer Books, 1993), xii.

12. See 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), 225–26; and Meirion Hughes, “The Duc D'Elgar: Making a Composer Gentleman,” in
Music and the Politics of Culture
, ed. Christopher Norris (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), 41–68.

13. John Butt, “Roman Catholicism and Being Musically English: Elgar's Church and Organ Music,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Elgar
, ed. Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 108.

14. For discussions of Catholic prejudice in the era, see Edward R. Norman,
Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England
(New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968); Walter L. Arnstein,
Protestant Versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982); and D. G. Paz,
Popular Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992). Michael Wheeler's
The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) was in press at the time of writing.

15. Few attempts have been made to reach beyond the surface of Elgar's Catholicism and see it for what it was: a religious, but more important, a cultural heritage that created a parallel world often in sharp relief to the dominant Protestant world around him. Pertinent studies include Geoffrey Hodgkins's pamphlet “Providence and Art: A Study in Elgar's Religious Beliefs” (Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 1979, repr. 2002); John Butt, “Roman Catholicism and Being Musically English: Elgar's Church and Organ Music”; and Byron Adams, “Elgar's Later Oratorios: Roman Catholicism, Decadence and the Wagnerian Dialectic of Shame and Grace,”both in
Cambridge Companion to Elgar
, esp. 81–105. See also Charles Edward McGuire, “One Story, Two Visions: Textual Difference Between Elgar's and Newman's
The Dream of Gerontius,
” in
The Best of Me: A Gerontius Centenary Companion
, ed. Geoffrey Hodgkins (Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 1999), 84–101; as well as McGuire, “Elgar, Judas, and the Theology of Betrayal,” in
19th-Century Music
13, no. 3 (2000): 236–72; and McGuire,
Elgar's Oratorios
(Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2002).

16. The Emancipation Act of 1829 was passed to enable checks on English Catholics' potential power that today seem rather paranoid: “The Emancipation Act [of 1829] as passed prescribed a new parliamentary oath which denied papal deposing powers and any ‘temporal or civil jurisdiction' of the Pope in England. Catholics were also obliged to swear that they would not subvert the Establishment of the Church of England. No Catholic priest was to sit in the House of Commons. Nearly all of the offices were opened to Catholics—only those of Lord Chancellor, Keeper of the Great Seal, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and High Commissioner of the Church of Scotland being still reserved to Protestants. Catholics could become members of corporations. No Catholic bishop was to assume a territorial title traditionally attached to the State Church. The Catholic clergy were not allowed to officiate outside their own places of worship. A clause banning religious orders from the realm—aimed at the Jesuits, whose formal reconstitution in England came in a papal decree which arrived just as the Bill was being formulated in the Cabinet—was never put into effect.” See Edward Norman,
Roman Catholicism in England from the Elizabethan Settlement to the Second Vatican Council
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 63–64. Clauses like these were written into the Emancipation Act because of the great fear that English Catholics would be beholden to Rome—a sadly typical prejudice in the nineteenth century that lingered into the twentieth.

17. Ibid., 69: “The period between 1850 and Gladstone's controversy over the Vatican Decrees of 1874, in fact, was one marked by a rigorous and literate anti-Catholicism in English public life, with periodic petty rioting got up by popular Protestant speakers.”

18. Ultramontanist triumphal histories largely ignore the growing Irish-Catholic population by barely noting the Irish existed, deeming them ineffective except at the extremely local level. See Edward R. Norman,
The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); John Bossy,
The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); and Derek J. Holmes,
More Roman than Rome: English Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century
(London: Burns & Oates; Shepherdstown, Eng.: Patmos Press, 1978).

19. Holmes,
More Roman than Rome
, 22.

20. Ibid., 46.

21. Ibid., 70.

22. “Ultramontanism for England,” in
The Rambler
3, no. 43 (July 1857), ed. John Moore Capes: [1]–2. See also definitions A1b and B1b in the
Oxford English Dictionary
, 2nd ed., s.v. “Ultramontanism.”

23. The sermon was initially preached in 1852 at the First Provincial Synod at Westminster (St. Mary's, Oscott) and published in 1856 as part of
Sermons Preached on Various Occasions.
A later edition commonly available is John Henry Newman, “Sermon X: The Second Spring,” in
Sermons Preached on Various Occasions
(London: Longmans, Green, 1904), 163–82.