Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  Although Elgar did not go so far as to suggest fixed incomes for the British populace—the very idea would have been abhorrent to him—some of the recommendations he made in the Peyton Lectures are like Ruskin’s in Sesame and Lilies. In the second lecture, “English Composers,” Elgar makes a number of sensible and enlightened suggestions, including his declaration, “I would like to see in every town—a large hall capable of accommodating a large sixpenny audience.” Reporting on this lecture, the Birmingham Post amplified Elgar’s remarks: “Sir Edward wished to see in every town a large hall capable of accommodating a large sixpenny audience, for the working classes, with their education, should be provided for as they were in Germany.”74 In a later lecture, Elgar declared forthrightly, “English working-men are intelligent: they do not want treating sentimentally, we must give them the real thing, we must give them of the best because we want them to have it, not from mere curiosity to see HOW they will accept it. What we do in literature and art, we might do in music.”75 Not only does this passage reflect the covert resentment of a man who had tasted the bitter cup of condescension based on class inequity, but it also represents Elgar’s internalization of the progressive educational reforms posited by Ruskin and other Victorian social reformers. Elgar’s call for inexpensive but dignified concert venues for working-class listeners is strikingly reminiscent of Ruskin’s utopian desire, articulated in Sesame and Lilies (“Of King’s Treasuries,” section 49) that “royal or national libraries will be founded in every considerable city, with a royal series of books in them … their text printed all on leaves of equal size, broad of margin, and divided into pleasant volumes, light in the hand, beautiful and strong.”76

  Several reasons may account for the absence of references to Ruskin in the Peyton Lectures, the most obvious of which is that they have survived only as a series of fragmentary drafts: given the often incomplete and at times inchoate form of his lecture notes, it is impossible to assert that Elgar did not spontaneously invoke Ruskin at some point, as he did when speaking with Gerald Cumberland. (However, Ruskin’s name does not appear in any of the detailed accounts published in the Birmingham Post or any of the other reports included in Young’s painstaking, indeed heroic, edition of the Peyton Lectures.) But there may have been another reason why Elgar would have not felt altogether comfortable quoting Ruskin. By 1905, Ruskin may have been too obviously associated with the aspirations of workingmen and women and even too politically radical for Elgar, the former piano tuner’s son, to quote without suffering a queasy twinge of unsought self-revelation; in other words, Elgar may have suspected that citing Ruskin directly might recall to some minds the modest circumstances of his own birth and thus a declaration of literary and political allegiances to a lower class.77

  Elgar was a consistent and devoted Tory in his political affiliations, and he strongly identified with the ruling classes whose ranks he sought to join, but a closer inspection of the seemingly impermeable facade of his con servatism reveals it to be riddled with small, almost reflexive, caveats. Elgar’s political sympathies were not unusual for a working-class autodidact of the Victorian and Edwardian periods: many members of the British working class during Elgar’s youth were conservative in their mores, cultural preferences, and often in their political views as well. Rose quotes Robert Roberts, who described British industrial laborers of this period as “Tory, royalist and patriotic.”78 Of those workingmen and women who leaned leftward in their political convictions at the beginning of the twentieth century, most might well have been described as Ruskinian socialists—only a highly vocal minority described themselves as communists.79

  Elgar was hardly adverse to upward mobility, profiting as he had from the tenacious ambitions of his mother. Robert Anderson has noted that Ann “illustrated her teachings with an extract on ‘Vulgar People’: ‘Being poor is not of itself a disqualification for being a gentleman. To be a gentleman is to be elevated above others in sentiment rather than situation.’”80 This extract voices a conviction held by many working-class autodidacts: the elevated sentiment often achieved by a refinement of the intellect was not just a monopoly of the upper classes but could be cultivated by any questing mind, regardless of birth.81 To succeed among the wealthy, however, it was best to combine elevated sentiment with either dim perception or unlimited generous forgiveness, neither of which attributes Elgar possessed in any degree. His incessant social climbing, often unfairly laid at the feet of his wife, who was born into a markedly higher class than her husband, may have been an attempt to mitigate feelings lacerated by a thousand small but precisely remembered indignities. Despite his bent for self-pity and exaggeration, Elgar’s vexation at perceived cuts and insults may often have had a tangible basis, as such social checks were the main machinery that kept the Victorian and Edwardian hierarchy in working order, besieged as it was by newcomers.82 Elgar was a prime candidate for expulsion on at least three counts: his working-class origins, his circumscribed formal education, and his Roman Catholicism. Any of these factors might have barred him from assuming the prerogatives that were jealously guarded by the Victorian and Edwardian upper classes, but Elgar had a card up his sleeve to trump the social game so evidently stacked against him: his prodigious talent. And though Elgar’s talent did in fact help him into a higher class status, its magnitude could never entirely allay the composer’s insecurity about his new social standing—especially among those so entirely devoid of talent themselves.

  From early years, Elgar was possessed by a longing for reassurance that could never be assuaged fully, even by his patient wife. No honor was ever enough to mitigate his feelings of exclusion from the upper classes—even when, to all appearances, he had joined them. Elgar’s simmering class-based anger was always on the verge of boiling over. Asked in 1922 to contribute toward a frivolous project—a dollhouse for Queen Mary—Elgar responded with a tirade. As Sassoon recorded in his diary:

  The subject provoked an outburst from Elgar; he delivered himself of a petulant tirade that culminated in a crescendo climax of rudeness aimed at Lady M[aud Warrender] (who is a fashionably-attired Amazon with a talent for singing and archery; quite a noble creature, and extremely amusing). “I started with nothing, and I’ve made a position for myself!” ejaculated the Order of Merited composer who masquerades as a retired army officer of the conservative club type. “We all know that the King and Queen are incapable of appreciating anything artistic; they’ve never asked for the full score of my Second Symphony to be added to the Library at Windsor. But as the crown of my career I’m asked to contribute to—a DOLL’S HOUSE for the QUEEN!! I’ve been a monkey-on-a-stick for you people long enough. Now I’m getting off the stick.”83

  Though this outburst makes for sorry reading, it contains a distant echo of Ann Elgar’s wholly admirable resistance to discrimination based on rank, contained in her opinion, similar to that of Cardinal Newman, that the status of “gentleman” is independent of birth or wealth and can be acquired through self-improvement. Sassoon, an outsider himself in British society due to his Jewish father and homosexuality, but nevertheless born to privilege, snickered at the idea of a famous composer who “masquerades as a retired army officer” making such a fuss over a dollhouse. But Sassoon missed the tension that lay beneath Elgar’s truculence: an insult to his honor, his talent—the reason for the composer’s almost Ruskinian contempt of the inartistic hereditary aristocracy and his impassioned cry, “I started with nothing, and I’ve made a position for myself!”

  Brian Trowell has described Elgar as “a progressive” Conservative whose “politics were instinctive and emotional, not intellectual, and appear to have sprung from a romantic and escapist identification with the great Tory families of Queen Anne’s reign, many of whom were Catholic and even Jacobite in their sympathies.”84 Trowell neatly encapsulates the paradox of Elgar’s political convictions by modifying his characterization of the composer’s Tory allegiances with the appellation “progressive.” While surely most polit
ical convictions are “instinctive and emotional, not intellectual,” to suggest that Elgar’s political beliefs had their origins solely in an “identification with the great Tory families of Queen Anne’s reign” is to court oversimplification. Elgar was far from “progressive” on occasion, as when he shamefully resigned from the Athenaeum to protest the election to that select establishment of Ramsey MacDonald, a working-class autodidact much like himself and the first Labour prime minister.85 Elgar was capable of behaving in a patronizing manner to members of the working class, but he is hardly the only man who—having struggled past the doorman—has to turn and defend the door by which he has just entered. Despite his penchant for weaving a potent mythology about his origins, Elgar was never so deluded as to deny his past, however much he may have embroidered it. Even when he assumed the borrowed plumage of an “English gentleman,” which for a piano tuner’s son from Worcester may have ineluctably led to Tory convictions, Elgar never tried to efface the basic outlines of his youth, which he retailed often, in detail and publicly. Elgar sought to eat his cake and have it: not only did his natural gifts allow for spectacular upward mobility from his working-class origins (“I’ve made a position for myself”), but his internalization of his mother’s definition of a “gentleman” may have convinced him that he was entitled to that exalted position by right, thus transcending the otherwise intractable barriers of birth and formal education. Elgar’s Ruskinian progressivism, which doubtless assumes poignancy when viewed in light of his own history, had little to do with the Tory politics worn like an expensive tweed suit by this English gentleman. Rather, Elgar’s politics testified to his status as an autodidact whose origins were firmly rooted in working-class soil.

  On the Beautiful in Music

  Every object that emerges into the focus of attention has meaning

  beyond the “fact” which it figures.

  —Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 1942

  Viewing Elgar’s literary taste and political affiliations from the perspective provided by the traditions of working-class autodidacts illumines both his psychological development and his choice of texts. In addition, a study of Elgar’s instrumental music and aesthetics benefits from an investigation of the peculiar ways in which memory functions for self-learners. Cognitive scientists have conducted surprisingly little research into autodidacticism. However, a recent book edited by the British educational researcher Joan Solomon, A Passion to Learn: An Inquiry into Autodidacticism, sheds some light on this unaccountably neglected subject. Consisting of fourteen case studies of self-learners, Solomon’s book touches upon such topics as the effect of emotion upon learning, the importance of self-motivation, and, crucially, the sense of a life mission that often is manifested early in life. Solomon eloquently describes autodidacts as “frequently emotional, strongly autonomous, passionate, and future-orientated”—traits that were conspicuous facets of Elgar’s personality as well.86

  As Solomon carefully documents, learning acquired by autodidacts early in life exercises a peculiarly strong influence throughout their later lives; ways of remembering are thus of paramount importance to later success. Citing the research of the Canadian psychologist Endel Tulving, Solomon writes: “The present understanding of memory defines it in three quite different modes of operation.” She later summarizes the three modes of memory:

  The semantic memory relies on remembered abstract conceptual words that need to be applied in a new context. Procedural memory is remembered non-verbally in our bodies where it was first practiced. Tulving’s special new contribution was episodic memory. This is the familiar way in which we recall a whole incident complete with perceptions (including smells), cognition (if we were learning or experiencing) and emotional reactions which make up motivation (horror, delight, curiosity, etc.)… Looked at in another way we may see that emotion and cognition are, after all, not so very different.87

  All of these ways of remembering might be relevant to a study of Elgar’s musical life. Procedural memory—lodged in the somatic memory—allowed Elgar to learn to play the violin and become a celebrated conductor. Episodic memory is exemplified by the way in which the young violinist in Worcester who played Hérold’s Zampa Overture fastened it in his memory well enough so that hearing a passage from Brahms’s Third Symphony enabled him to recall Hérold’s score and thus make a telling connection between overture and symphony in the third Peyton lecture delivered in Birmingham.88 The mode that will be the primary focus of this line of investigation, semantic memory, permitted Elgar to remember in minute detail certain abstract concepts learned early in life that he would transform over the course of his career: an abstract concept such as a system of key symbolism, for example, may well have become a building block for his formal procedures as well as a stylistic trait. In semantic memory, an abstract concept once learned may be reinterpreted, but retains something of the integrity of the first encounter.

  As is clear from Rose’s study and Elgar’s biography, autodidacts are voracious readers whose exceptional memories retain an astounding amount of what they have read in remarkable specificity. Equally evident from Elgar’s Peyton Lectures is that he shared an unfortunate characteristic common to many autodidacts, a problem that surfaces frequently throughout their lives. Because autodidacts teach themselves without outside guidance, the knowledge they amass often contains odd lacunae even within an otherwise detailed body of information about a subject that interests them passionately. Misconceptions that could have been corrected easily by more systematic pedagogy can persist well into middle or even old age. Elgar became an expert violinist due in part to his lessons with the noted virtuoso and pedagogue Adolphe Pollitzer. In contrast, after a few lessons in childhood, his exploration of the piano was essentially unguided. Violinists praise his expert writing for strings, but many pianists who have performed Elgar’s music remark that his writing for the instrument is often idiosyncratic and cannot be characterized as “pianistic.”

  Although Elgar expressed a healthy skepticism concerning the texts he used to educate himself as a boy—and he dismissed the textbooks of Charles-Simon Catel and Luigi Cherubini as “repellant”—the influence of the books in his youthful library cannot be overestimated.89 As previously noted, indigent autodidacts read and remembered the driest of texts if those books were the only ones available; Rose quotes working-class readers who testified that they read avidly such unappetizing tomes as algebra treatises, “back numbers of the Christian World,” and, in one dire instance, “a Post Office Directory for 1867, which volume I read from cover to cover.”90 Next to these, textbooks by Cherubini, John Stainer, and Catel seem alluring, if not downright racy. These volumes, which the composer kept over the course of his life and which are now housed in the collection at the Elgar Birthplace Museum, are the pillars upon which rests the edifice of Elgar’s musical self-education: he devoured them, read them critically, annotated them, and tenaciously stored them in his memory.

  The adolescent Elgar must have turned with relief from the strictures of Cherubini and Stainer to Berlioz’s enthralling Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration as well as to the invitingly poetical books by Ernst Pauer. Pauer was an Austrian composer, pianist, and pedagogue who settled in England in 1870, teaching piano first at the Royal Academy and then, in 1876, at the National Training School for Music, the precursor of the Royal College of Music. Noted for presenting a series of historical recitals that spanned keyboard music from 1600 to the present—he used a harpsichord for the earlier items—Pauer was a respected presence on the British musical scene until his retirement to Germany in 1896.91 Elgar possessed two of Pauer’s little books, which are primers rather than textbooks, both published by Novello. Pauer’s Musical Forms (author’s preface dated 1878) is a brief general survey of basic formal designs such as the sonata and the variation; The Elements of the Beautiful in Music (author’s preface dated 1877) is an exuberantly Romantic exegesis of music aesthetics.

  The Ele
ments of the Beautiful in Music is the sole treatise on aesthetics that has survived from the young composer’s library and may well have had an even greater impact on his compositional development than Pauer’s admirably lucid explanation of musical form. The title page is stamped “Elgar Brothers Music Sellers, Worcester,” so it was in Elgar’s hands early. That the adolescent Elgar, who signed the title page with his customary bold script, attentively read The Elements of the Beautiful in Music is evident in two instances of penciled underlining.92 Pauer’s book would have been attractive to Elgar for several reasons, not the least of which is its exalted tone, strongly reminiscent of Ruskin in passages—not to mention of Longfellow’s Paul Flemming. Pauer shares with Ruskin a philosophical viewpoint that might be termed “Romantic Platonism,” an aesthetic whose emphasis on striving for the ideal and espousing high moral values chimed with the young Elgar’s musical and literary predilections. Ruskin writes in The Queen of the Air (section 42) that music is “the teacher of perfect order and is the voice of the obedience of angels and the companion of the course of the spheres of heaven.”93 He surely would have agreed with Pauer’s assertion that “it is evident that religion and art are closely connected,” not to mention the Austrian’s belief that “art has to exhibit to humanity the ideal picture of what perfect human beauty can be.”94