Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  49. Thompson Cooper and Leo Gooch, “Waterworth, William,” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  50. Until 1871, Catholics, Dissenters, and Jews were not permitted to matriculate from Oxford or Cambridge universities. Some attended as students during the nineteenth century, but they were not allowed to take degrees. Nineteenth-century Catholics could receive higher education at St. Mary’s, Oscott and University College, London. On Waterworth as confessor to Manning, see Young, Elgar, Newman, and Gerontius, 83.

  51. Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 37. Elgar cared enough about this votive picture to save it, and it can be seen at the Elgar Birthplace Museum. An enlarged copy of it is in Jerrold Northrop Moore, Spirit of England: Edward Elgar in His World (London: Heinemann, 1984), 54.

  52. Challoner, The Garden of the Soul (London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1945), 188–89.

  53. Doolan, St. George’s, Worcester, 17. Moore, using quotations from a Jesuit obituary in the magazine Letters & Notices 16 (1883): 150–53, states that “on account of his learning and his kindness and zeal, [Waterworth] was much esteemed by the Catholics and Protestants.” See Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 15.

  54. Initially organized by Fr. Herbert Vaughan (consecrated as bishop of Salford in 1872; made cardinal by Leo XIII in 1893), the Catholic Truth Society was reorganized in 1872 by the convert James Britten, who continued Vaughan’s mission of publishing cheap pamphlets to inform the poor of Britain about elements of the “truth” of Catholicism in the nineteenth century. The organization still exists today, and on its website, http://www.ctsonline.org.uk/CTS_history.htm (accessed April 21, 2006), a largely celebratory history section does not mention the high propaganda value of articles like those written by Waterworth.

  55. William Waterworth, S.J., The Popes and the English Church (London: Catholic Truth Society, [1870]), 1.

  56. Ibid., 19.

  57. William J. Waterworth, S.J., England and Rome: Or, The History of the Religious Connection Between England and the Holy See, from the year 179 to the Commencement of the Anglican Reformation in 1534. With Observations on the General Question of the Supremacy of the Roman Pontiffs (London: Burns & Lambert, 1854), 121, 377–78, 380–81; and Origin and Developments of Anglicanism: Or, A History of the Liturgies, Homilies, Articles, Bibles, Principles and Governmental System of the Church of England (London: Burns and Lambert, 1854), v–vi, 388. See also Waterworth, The Jesuits: Or, An Examination of the Origin, Progress, Principles, and Practices of the Society of Jesus; With Observations on the Leading Accusations of the Enemies of the Order (London: Charles Dolman; Hereford: W. Phillips; Liverpool: P. Hogan, 1852), 51–52.

  58. William Waterworth, S.J., Queen Elizabeth v. The Lord Chancellor; Or, A History of the Prayer Book of the Church of England. In Relation to the Purchas Judgment (London: Burns, Oates and Company, 1871), 3.

  59. See, for instance, George Macaulay Trevelyan, History of England (London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1926).

  60. An example of revisionist history that echoes Leicester’s views is Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992).

  61. See Richard Smith, “Elgar, Dot and the Stroud Connection—Part One,” Elgar Society Journal 14, no. 5 (July 2006): 14–20. Although most biographical sources give Elgar’s sister’s name as “Helen Agnes,” the baptismal register shows her name as “Ellen Agnes.”

  62. Hubert Leicester, “How the Faith Was Preserved in Worcestershire: A Paper Read by Alderman Leicester, K.C.S.G., at the Eucharistic Congress at Droitwich, 2nd of August, 1932” (Worcester and London: Ebenezer Bayliss & Son, [1932]), 4.

  63. Leicester’s own avatar was that of a paternal “Gentleman Catholic.” He gave Carice Elgar a missal upon her confirmation in 1907; letter of Carice Elgar to Hubert Leicester, 24 May 1907. Leicester also mounted and displayed a letter from Bishop W. B. Ullathorne, sent to his father, 28 December 1886. Worcestershire County Records Office, 705:185 BA 8185/1.

  64. Initially a journal owned by the Catholic laity, The Tablet was bought in 1868 by Fr. Herbert Vaughan, later Cardinal Manning’s replacement as head of the English Catholic Church. Under his editorial policies The Tablet became a primary voice in the discussion regarding Ultramontanist topics such as papal infallibility and the immaculate conception. See Norman, English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century, 360–61.

  65. The Tablet, 1 June 1878, 698. See also Young, Elgar, O.M., 42. Young believes that the advertisement might have been placed through the auspices of Fr. Waterworth or the Leicester family.

  66. Hubert Leicester, Notes on Catholic Worcester, Compiled … for the Centenary of the Opening of St. George’s Church, Sansome Place (Worcester: Trinity Press, [c. 1929]), 30.

  67. A general discussion of Elgar’s sacred music, both Catholic and Protestant, may be found in John Allison, Edward Elgar: Sacred Music (Bridgend: Seren, 1994); and in Butt, “Roman Catholicism,” 106–19.

  68. Challoner, Garden of the Soul, 128–35.

  69. “Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” in Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Appleton, 1907–1914).

  70. Heimann, Catholic Devotion, 44.

  71. “Devotions to the Sacred Heart,” in Challoner, Garden of the Soul, 131–32. In a way, this service reads much like the litanies Elgar presented in his redaction of Part 1 of Gerontius (rehearsal number 64).

  72. Allison, Sacred Music, 52–54.

  73. Hodgkins, “Providence and Art,” 6. Since Elgar was new to London, he might have attended church fifty times in order to “try out” the priests at each institution and decide which clerics best suited his idea of doctrine.

  74. Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 352.

  75. See McGuire, “Elgar, Judas, and the Theology of Betrayal,” 271 n. 109.

  76. Reports on all three oratorios preserved at the Elgar Birthplace Museum include discussions of them in the Catholic periodicals The Tablet, Truth, The Catholic News, The Catholic Columbian, and others. Elgar Birthplace Museum, cuttings files, vols. 5–9.

  77. C. V. Gorton, The Apostles, Sacred Oratorio by Edward Elgar: An Interpretation of the Libretto (London: Novello and Company, [1903]); and The Kingdom, Sacred Oratorio by Edward Elgar: An Interpretation of the Libretto (London: Novello and Company, [1906]).

  78. Elgar’s use of Kramskoi’s painting is an interesting case study of cross-cultural reinterpretation of a religious object. The painting is one of several by this late-nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox painter that depicts aspects of great men engaged in the public good, often at odds with their own desires. Grove Art notes that Kramskoi stated that “he wanted to convey to the viewer a sense of Christ’s moral choice as an example applicable to their own lives when torn between serving an ideal or adhering to private concerns.” (Elizabeth K. Valkenier, “Kramskoy, Ivan,” Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.groveart.com, accessed June 30, 2006). Elgar originally acquired a photographic reproduction of the painting from the Anglican canon C. V. Gorton (he compiled the libretto for Elgar’s 1896 oratorio The Light of Life). Gorton may have been attracted to the human-looking Christ making a moral choice, but Elgar, in a letter to the singer David Ffrangçon Davies noted that it was “my ideal picture of the lonely Christ.” Geoffrey Hodgkins, Somewhere Further North: Elgar and the Morecombe Festival (Rickmansworth: Poneke Press, 2003, 36). Thus Elgar equated the painting with similar devotional images of Christ used contemporaneously by Catholics in Great Britain.

  79. Rosa Burley and Frank C. Carruthers, Edward Elgar: The Record of a Friendship (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972), 26.

  80. See, for instance, Catholic Directory, Ecclesiastical Register and Almanac (London: Burns and Oates and Washbourne, Limited, 1932), 65.

  81. Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Oratorio.” In a telling remark, the entry names Elgar’s contemporary Edgar Tinel “the most gifted of composers who have reclaimed the ora
torio from non-Catholic supremacy.” Tinel, a Belgian composer, included a great deal of Gregorian chant and Palestrinian counterpoint in his oratorio St. Francis (1886–88). Elgar may have used Gregorian chant as a basis for his music in The Apostles, but he did not write a book on the subject, as Tinel did in 1890, and his counterpoint is certainly not touched by Palestrina. External and obvious reference to things Gregorian were a particular sign of Ultramontanism. John Butt theorizes that Elgar’s “essentially English” musical style might have come from his work with Gregorian chant while organist at St. George’s. Butt, “Roman Catholicism,” 107–8.

  82. Edward Algernon Baughan, “‘The Apostles’ and Elgar’s Future,” in Music and Musicians (London: Lane, 1906), 202.

  83. One Hundred Ninetieth Thousand: The Explanatory Catechism of Christian Doctrine, Chiefly Intended for the Use of Children in Catholic Schools (London: 1884), 57; quoted in Heimann, Catholic Devotion, 114.

  84. The London marriage of Elgar and Alice Roberts might also have been for reasons of family tradition and lore. The composer’s father, Henry, although he lived in Worcester at the time, married Ann Greening in 1848 in London as well. See Young, Elgar, Newman, and Gerontius, 82; Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 5. The liberal nature of the London Oratory on Brompton Road may have been preserved because at its 1884 dedication, Pope Leo XII proclaimed it to be “the Oratory” in England, much to the chagrin of Cardinal John Henry Newman. The oratory was richly appointed and garnered impressive donations from wealthy Catholics. In contrast, Newman’s oratory in Birmingham was a “patchwork … with its factory roof, painted walls and worn benches.” See Meriol Trevor, Newman: The Pillar of the Cloud (London: Macmillan, 1962), 2: 611. Newman, feeling slighted, did not attend the dedication of the London Oratory in 1884, using old age as his excuse. He did, however, dispatch a gift and several priests of the Birmingham Oratory on his behalf, and attended a funeral at the London Oratory for the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk in 1886.

  85. Hodgkins, “Providence and Art,” 16, 18.

  86. See McGuire, Elgar’s Oratorios, 178–83, for a discussion of the genesis of the compositions from the original grand design to shorter works.

  87. Hodgkins, “Providence and Art,” 20.

  88. Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 479.

  89. Quoted in Doolan, St. George’s, Worcester, 20.

  90. Conversation between Elgar and the Leicester family, 17 June 1908, noted by Philip Leicester and quoted in Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 527.

  91. Rudolph de Cordova, “Interview with Dr. Elgar,” in The Strand Magazine, May 1904, 538–39, quoted in Michael Kennedy, Portrait of Elgar, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987; repr. 1995), 23.

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

  93. Edward Elgar, foreword to Hubert Leicester’s Forgotten Worcester (Worcester: Ebenezer Bayliss/Trinity Press, 1930), 10–11.

  94. Kennedy, Portrait of Elgar, 20–21. The interior quote is from an article by Ernest Newman in the Sunday Times (London), 23 October 1955.

  95. Kennedy, Portrait of Elgar, 328–29.

  96. Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 823. The squabbling over where the dying Elgar should be buried, with Granville Bantock and John Reith attempting to maneuver the composer’s Catholic corpse into the Anglican necropolis of Westminster Abbey, makes for sorry reading; see Michael De-la-Noy, Elgar the Man (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 228–29.

  97. If not sung by both congregations during Elgar’s time, they certainly are today. See Elgar’s Cathedral Music (dir. Donald Hunt; Hyperion: CDA66313, 1988), a compact disc that presents a mixture of Elgar’s Catholic church music composed in Latin for St. George’s along with some of the Three Choirs Festival psalm settings with English texts, sung by the choir of Worcester Cathedral and conducted by Donald Hunt, who was for many years their organist.

  98. Boden, Three Choirs, 179–80. Boden’s description is likely taken from “The Memorial Service in Worcester Cathedral,” in The Musical Times 75, no. 1094 (April 1934): 313.

  99. Ibid.

  100. The capitalization in this passage is a direct transcription. Nature is a telling word in this case, especially since the obituary that precedes it conflates the natural Elgar with the modernists, speaking of a new love for Elgar by the “younger generation” who “are taking to Elgar’s music, amid the dark ways of modernism, as they do to a burst of sunshine in cloudy weather.” “Edward Elgar,” The Musical Times 75, no. 1094 (April 1934): 313.

  101. A similar avatar, bridging Elgar to Anglicanism, appeared with the unveiling in the early 1980s of the Elgar statue, “midway between the High Street site of the Elgar family music shop and the cathedral, scene of so many performances of [Elgar’s] music.” John C. Phillips, “The Elgar Statue,” The Musical Times 121, no. 1649 (July 1980): 440. The statue faces the cathedral, its back to St. George’s Catholic Church. While the popular view of Elgar might acknowledge his Catholicism, the acknowledgment is not important enough to stand in the way of a good metaphor.

  102. In his essay “The ‘Dark Saying’ of the Enigma,” found in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, Byron Adams broadly asserts that the Lygon family was Roman Catholic, noting that Evelyn Waugh based the Catholic Marchmain family of Brideshead Revisited largely on the Lygons (220). Although individual members of family may have partaken of Catholic rituals (Lady Sybil, for instance, was married in the London Oratory on Brompton Road) or even converted to Catholicism (a rumor based on Lord Beauchamp’s repeated attendance at solemn masses), evidence for the family’s supposed Catholicism is ambiguous at best. Generations of Lygons matriculated at Christ Church Oxford; several, including Frederick Lygon (B.A., 1852; M.A., 1856), John Lygon (B.A., 1806; M.A., 1808), and William Beauchamp Lygon (B.A., 1804; M.A., 1808) took degrees at that institution long before Catholics were allowed to do so in 1871. See Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxionienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1715–1886: Their Parentage, Birthplace, and Year of Birth, with a Record of Their Degrees (Oxford and London: Parker and Col., 1888), 3: 885. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Frederick Lygon was known for both his composition of an Anglican hymnal used at the family’s private chapel at Madresfield Court and his Anglican High Church views, which his son William (the seventh Earl Beauchamp) thought were bigoted. William Lygon’s opinion of his father leaves room to speculate about the later Lygons’ Catholic sympathies.

  Elgar the Escapist?

  MATTHEW RILEY

  One of the more serious charges that can be brought against Elgar is that his art is escapist. This criticism can be targeted in several ways. Most obviously, Elgar was committed to a late-Romantic expressive idiom, to overall monotonality (his works usually begin and end in the same key), and to diatonicism as a basic point of tonal reference. These factors meant that during the first two decades of the twentieth century Elgar’s music began to lag behind “progressive” developments in European music. More specifically, some of the literary themes that interested Elgar point to a desire to forget the reality of the present. He embraced the Victorian cult of chivalry and peopled his works with brave knights and heroic kings. As he reached middle age, he wrote music for and about children that echoes a well-known vein of late Victorian and Edwardian literary whimsy (Frances Hodgson Burnett, Kenneth Grahame, J. M. Barrie).1 Finally, in his symphonic works there are moments when Elgar abandons the “musical present” to dwell on thematic reminiscences of earlier movements. At such points the past seems to take on an enchanted quality that the present can never match.

  Since Freud, it is common to associate the notion of escape with regression. In this view, to be an escapist means not just to evade adult responsibilities but to suffer from a psychological disorder in which libido is arrested at an infantile stage of development (the “oral” phase). Furthermore, on a cultural level it could be alleged that escapist impulses are easily manipulate
d (and perhaps originally induced) by commercial or political forces that seek to cement their power and to dilute popular resistance.

  But there is another possible perspective. A long tradition of English radicalism links dream, escape, and protest. Victorian medievalists such as A. W. N. Pugin, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Kingsley, and John Ruskin invoked a distant, alluring past in order to focus their passionate concern for the reform of contemporary society. William Morris’s visual designs took inspiration from a medieval world where, he believed, the division of labor was unknown, the worker free. His utopian News from Nowhere (1890) imagined a future, post-revolutionary England steeped in beauty and innocent of money. These escapists wanted to change the world; they held up their dreams and visions as stimuli to action.2 Perhaps the most eloquent plea for the value of escapism was made in the late 1930s by Elgar’s fellow West Midlands Catholic, J. R. R. Tolkien (a direct literary descendant of Morris). In defending his attraction to “fairy stories,” Tolkien warned against confusing the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter: “Just so a Party-spokesman might have labeled departure from the misery of the Führer’s or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery.” The companions of “escape,” he explained, are “disgust,” “anger,” “condemnation,” and “revolt.”3

  In this light, a reexamination of Elgar’s escapist impulses seems feasible. The present essay sketches an approach to the task. The problem is too large to tackle systematically here: there are too many compositions that could be cited, too many aspects of the late Victorian and Edwardian worlds that are relevant to Elgar’s outlook. Instead, this investigation takes several novel, and perhaps provocative, perspectives on Elgar. The first half examines his personality and attitudes by means of two comparisons. Fiction by Elgar’s contemporary H. G. Wells and historical writings by his friend Hubert Leicester provide lenses through which to view his personal circumstances. They bring into play some sociological issues relevant to Elgar’s escapism concerning class and religion, respectively. The second half of the essay turns to Elgar’s compositions, focusing on his characteristic treatment of sudden tonal shifts and evaluating the specifically musical escapism that becomes possible in his works.