Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  64. Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 586, n. 170. For further discussion of the Lesage quotation that Elgar affixed to the Violin Concerto, see the documents about the concerto presented by Alison I. Shiel in Part II of this volume.

  65. John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1905), 18:61.

  66. Anderson, Elgar, 8. See also letter of E. W. Whinfield to Edward Elgar, 25 November 1886, in Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 17. In his letter to Elgar, Whinfield writes that it “was a real pleasure to me to find out, accidentally, that you cared for Ruskin’s books and had not got any: and I instantly made up my mind that I would set that last deficiency, right.” According to Moore, however, the edition of Sesame and Lilies owned by Elgar was the fourth edition, published by Smith, Elder and Company in 1867. See Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 323, n. 89. Ruskin delivered “Of King’s Treasuries” on December 6, 1864, in the Town Hall, Rusholme. John D. Rosenberg, ed., The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 296.

  67. Charles F. Kenyon [Gerald Cumberland], Set Down in Malice: A Book of Reminiscences (London: Grant Richards, 1919), 86.

  68. Trowell, “Elgar’s Use of Literature,” 230.

  69. Ibid., 229.

  70. John Dixon Hunt, The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin (J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1982), 275.

  71. Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, 104, 106.

  72. Ruskin taught art at the Working Men’s College founded by F. D. Maurice in 1854. Hunt, The Wider Sea, 212. As for Ruskin being revered by the working class, see Rose, Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 49, 119, 191–92, 418.

  73. Edward Elgar, A Future for English Music and Other Lectures, ed. Percy M. Young (London: Dennis Dobson, 1968), 1–8.

  74. Ibid., 86–87.

  75. Ibid., 213. Of his editorial policy in regard to the use of italics, Young writes that “in the alternative versions of passages shown in the textual commentary all insertions, whether marginal or interlinear are italicized.” As for words given entirely in capital letters, Young writes that where “Elgar himself used underlinings such words or passages are in small capitals.”

  76. Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, 104.

  77. The representation of Elgar’s literary taste, and the implications of his taste as revealing of class status, was one of Alice Elgar’s particular concerns. She bullied F. G. Edwards, for example, into dropping a mention of her husband’s devotion to Dickens in an article written in 1900, because Dickens was perceived as a vulgar enthusiasm—that is, working-class. Trowell, “Elgar’s Use of Literature,” 192–93. For the devotion of working-class readers to Dickens, see Rose, Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 111–15. There is yet another possible reason for Elgar eschewing references to Ruskin: to spare the feelings of his friend Alice Stuart-Wortley, who was the daughter of Effie Gray, Ruskin’s unhappy young wife who escaped him to marry the painter John Everett Millais. As the scandal—one of the truly spectacular ones of the Victorian era—still resonated in 1905, Elgar may have been reluctant to have Stuart-Wortley learn he was making approving citations of Ruskin’s work.

  78. Rose, Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 338.

  79. When exposed to Marx, many working-class autodidacts—like many sensible people, then and now—found Das Kapital opaque and dull; few ever made it beyond the first few chapters. Ibid., 305–7.

  80. Anderson, Elgar, 2.

  81. Elgar echoes his mother’s convictions when he states: “The commonplace mind can never be anything but commonplace—& no amount of education no amount of the polish of a university, can eradicate the stain from the low type of mind we call commonplace.” Elgar, A Future for English Music, 155.

  82. A case in point is Edward Dent’s seemingly class-based denigration of Elgar’s lack of formal education, as well as Francis Toye’s gibes at the composer’s supposed “velgarity.” See Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 594, 789–90.

  83. Sassoon, Diaries 1920–1922, 169 (author’s italics). What Sassoon may not have realized is that Elgar’s Second Symphony was dedicated to the memory of the then reigning monarch’s father, Edward VII; thus the composer’s seemingly absurd anger over George V’s putative negligence in requesting the manuscript of that work for the Royal Library at Windsor. Lady Maud Warrender (1870–1945), who, after the death of her husband lived in a lesbian relationship with the singer Marcia van Dresser (occasioning Sassoon’s use of the transparent code word Amazon), was the daughter of the eighth Earl of Shaftesbury and one of Elgar’s loyal patrons and friends. See also Diane Souhami, The Trials of Radcliffe Hall (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 266.

  84. Trowell, “Elgar’s Use of Literature,” 198, 230.

  85. Anderson, Elgar, 157.

  86. Joan Solomon, The Passion to Learn: An Inquiry into Autodidacticism (London: Routledge, 2003), 182.

  87. Ibid., 65, 170.

  88. Elgar, A Future for English Music, 103. At least one working-class family cited by Rose owned an piano arrangement of the Zampa Overture; such popular works appealed to the musical tastes of working-class performers and listeners. See Rose, Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 197.

  89. Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 41. Brian Newbould has thoroughly investigated the impact upon Elgar’s musical development of both Catel’s harmony treatise (1802) and Cherubini’s Counterpoint and Fugue (English translation by Hamilton and Clark, 1854). See Brian Newbould, “Elgar and Academicism 1: The Untutored Genius,” The Musical Times 146, no. 1891 (Summer 2005): 72; and Brian Newbould, “Elgar and Academicism 3: Devices and Contrivances,” The Musical Times 146, no. 1893 (Winter 2005): 31–33.

  90. Rose, Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 376, 372.

  91. “Ernst Pauer,” in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Eric Blom, 5th ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1955), 7:595.

  92. Elgar has underlined the words heights and depths in the penultimate paragraph on page 38. I am grateful to Chris Bennett of the Elgar Birthplace Museum for confirming this information.

  93. John Ruskin, The Queen of the Air in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1905), 19:344.

  94. Ernst Pauer, The Beautiful in Music (London: Novello, Ewer & Co., 1877), 47.

  95. See especially Robert Schumann, “Charakteristik der Tonleitern und Tonarten,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 2 (1835): 43–44.

  96. Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, trans. Gustav Cohen (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 8.

  97. For example, Rimsky-Korsakov tried to distance himself from the program he supplied for Scheherazade as being too pictorial; see V. V. Yastrebtsev, Reminiscences of Rimsky-Korsakov, trans. Florence Jonas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 13; Trowell, “Elgar’s Use of Literature,” 231.

  98. Elgar, A Future for English Music, 171, 173. Percy M. Young, the editor, reprints the English translation of Hanslick’s review of the premiere of Brahms’ Third Symphony to which Elgar refers, see 154. Elgar was once taken to task by Ernest Newman for exactly the same kind of aesthetic waffling that the composer locates in Hanslick. In an article that appeared in Manchester Guardian on 9 November 1905, the day after Elgar’s Peyton lecture on Brahms’s Third Symphony, Newman indignantly writes: “Some of us may well sit up and rub our eyes in astonishment at [Elgar’s] championship of ‘absolute music.’” Later on, Newman goes in for the kill: “If Sir EDWARD ELGAR’S thesis is rickety here, what are we to say when we apply it to his own case? How many pages has he written that are frankly descriptive? What is the prelude to ‘Gerontius,’ for example, or the ‘Cockaigne’ Overture or ‘In the South’ but a series of musical ‘descriptions’? If he really believes now that music is at its height only when it concerns itself with nothing but purely tonal pattern-weaving, he is condemning all his own best work en masse.”
See 105–6.

  99. Pauer, The Beautiful in Music, 3–4, 46.

  100. Johann Philipp Kirnberger, The Art of Strict Musical Composition, trans. David Beach (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 338.

  101. Yastrebtsev, Reminiscences of Rimsky-Korsakov, 31.

  102. Pauer, The Beautiful in Music, 23–24.

  103. Ibid., 19, 21, 22.

  104. Ibid., 24.

  105. Ibid., 25.

  106. Ibid., 25, 43.

  107. For an extended discussion of Jaeger’s place within the Enigma Variations and the Dream of Gerontius, see Adams, “The ‘Dark Saying’ of the Enigma,” 229–31, 233–35. Even the usually unperceptive Dora Penny (the “Dorabella” of the tenth Enigma variation), wrote that “in the sudden piano [at the conclusion of the “Nimrod” variation], may one not see the composer’s love for his friend?” See Mrs. Richard Powell (Dora Penny), Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation, 4th ed., rev. and ed. Claud Powell (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 130–32.

  108. Pauer, The Beautiful in Music, 29.

  109. Sassoon, Diaries 1920–1922, 293.

  110. Richard Smith, Elgar in America: Elgar’s American Connections Between 1895 and 1934 (Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 2005), 27.

  111. Anderson, Elgar, 160.

  112. Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 404. Moore mentions here that, according to his daughter’s diary, Elgar was “very upset” by Schuster’s passing. As Carice Elgar’s diary is uncommunicative about her father—her diary is mostly a bland record of quotidian events—this comment assumes an unusual expressivity in its context. Elgar acted thoughtlessly toward Schuster at times, as he did to virtually everybody around him; see Adams, “The ‘Dark Saying’ of the Enigma,” 227.

  113. Anderson, Elgar, 306.

  114. Elgar’s notes to Pitt are quoted in Anderson, Elgar, 306; for the key to the “moods of Dan,” see Aidan J. Thomson, review of Music as a Bridge: Musikalische Beziehungen zwischen England und Deutschland 1920–1950, ed. Christa Brüstle and Guido Heldt, Elgar Society Journal 14, no. 6 (November 2006): 46.

  115. For a commonsensical commentary on the “moods of Dan,” see McVeagh, “A Man’s Attitude to Life,” 1.

  116. Moore, Elgar: Letters of a Lifetime, 414.

  117. Elgar, who sentimentalized Edward VII, later felt that the royal family did not value this dedication sufficiently; see note 83 above.

  118. See Adams, “The ‘Dark Saying’ of the Enigma,” 218–19.

  119. Anderson, Elgar, 332, 338.

  120. For an insightful comment, see James Hepokoski, “Elgar,” in The Ninteenth-Century Symphony, ed. D. Kern Holoman, (New York: Schirmer, 1997), 336.

  121. Brian Trowell has commented extensively on this motto drawn from Shelley, but his conclusions are less than fully persuasive in toto. Trowell does convincingly connect the symphony to an adaptation of lines from Shelley’s poem “Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation” that Elgar used in a letter to Frances Colvin, dated 1 February 1911. Trowell ignores the transparently homoerotic nature of Shelley’s poem in favor of promoting his own idée fixe concerning Elgar’s putative obsession with Helen Weaver. See Trowell, “Elgar’s Use of Literature,” 256–57, 264–66.

  122. Letter to Alfred Littleton, 13 April 1911, in Jerrold Northrop Moore, ed., Elgar and His Publishers: Letters of a Creative Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 2:741.

  123. Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 248, and Aidan J. Thomson, “Unmaking The Music Makers,” in Elgar Studies, ed. J. P. E. Harper-Scott and Julian Rushton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  124. The complete fifth stanza of O’Shaughnessy’s poem reads: “They had no vision amazing/Of the goodly house they are raising:/They had no divine foreshowing/Of the land to which they are going: / But on one man’s soul it hath broken, / A light that doth not depart; / And his look, or a word he hath spoken, / Wrought flame in another man’s heart.”

  125. Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 249–50.

  126. Thomson, “Unmaking The Music Makers.”

  127. Pauer, The Beautiful in Music, 25.

  128. Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 646.

  129. McVeagh, “A Man’s Attitude to Life,” 2.

  130. There are a plethora of detailed analyses of Falstaff, including a remarkably detailed exegesis of the score by J. P. E. Harper-Scott in Edward Elgar, Modernist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 107–53.

  131. Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2004), 70–71.

  132. For Elgar’s paradoxical strategy of projection, see Adams, “The ‘Dark Saying’ of the Enigma,” 231.

  133. In a letter to Charles Buck, 29 October 1885, Elgar wrote: “The old man does not take quite kindly to the Organ biz: but I hope ‘twill be all right before I commence my ‘labours.’” Quoted in Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 113.

  134. Pauer, The Beautiful in Music, 46–47.

  “The Spirit-Stirring Drum”:

  Elgar and Populism

  DANIEL M. GRIMLEY

  Cultural tourists in the South Midlands, tired perhaps of trawling for edification around the well-trodden circuit of Shakespearean sites in and around Stratford-upon-Avon, are now invited to follow a similar but less familiar itinerary. The Elgar Route, devised and promoted by Worcester City and Malvern Hills District Councils, links together forty-eight different locations with various Elgarian associations along a tour signposted throughout southwest Worcestershire. Bounded on the western side by the Malvern Hills, on the eastern by the River Severn, and radiating outward from Worcester cathedral in the northeast corner, the route offers a condensed historical geography of Elgar’s life and musical career. The tour is designed, the brochure suggests, so that motorists “may join it at any convenient point,” and though it begins at the Elgar Birthplace Museum in Lower Broadheath, the official numbering of sites along the way cuts across a simple chronological sequence of events in Elgar’s biography. Hence, the second location after leaving Lower Broadheath is Birchwood Lodge (the summer cottage Elgar rented between 1898 and 1903, and where he scored The Dream of Gerontius), followed by his previous residence, Forli, in Malvern Link (1891–99), where he composed King Olaf and The Black Knight. The Elgars’ somber final resting place, the grave at St. Wulstan’s Church, is then passed (site 10), after which motorists double back on themselves disconcertingly and head toward a more cheerful location, Craeg Lea (Elgar’s home between 1899 and 1904, while he rented Birchwood Lodge), where he wrote the Variations on an Original Theme, op. 36 (Enigma Variations). The route therefore pursues a spatial, rather than linear-temporal, logic. Other sites visited include the Worcester County Cricket Ground at New Road, where “it is thought that Elgar was a regular supporter,” and an oddly placed, rather uncanny final destination which lies awkwardly away from the official circuit, the site of the Powick asylum, now “demolished,” where the young composer devised and conducted light music designed to cheer the troubled inmates.1

  Evocatively billed as “a journey through Elgar’s beloved countryside,” the Elgar Route presumably is intended primarily as a means of boosting tourism in the region. It therefore represents a form of commodification, an attempt to package and present Elgar’s life so as to generate income from his cultural capital. But it also serves inadvertently to promote an aesthetic ideology that has long lain at the heart of Elgar’s historical reception: his music’s pastoral associations with western England and with Worcestershire in particular, which in turn can be understood as the iconic representation of a certain kind of idealized Englishness.2 In this sense, the Elgar Route is highly selective. The brochure tactfully declines to note that many of Elgar’s major works, including the symphonies, the concertos, and the “late” chamber music, lie “off route,” composed in Hereford, London, and Sussex. The tour furthermore reinforces the programmatic association of place with Elgar’s music. The implication is that by visiting sites such as Longdon Marsh, Birchwood Lo
dge, or Herefordshire Beacon in the Malvern Hills, listeners can gain privileged access into the meaning and significance of Elgar’s music. His work’s potentially awkward abstraction, its intellectual or aesthetic content, is sublated within an amenable discourse of picturesque associations that are more immediately containable than absolute music.3 The Elgar Route thus embodies a kind of historical revisionism. The brochure confidently asserts that “Elgar is universally regarded as a composer of the very first rank,” a retrospective summation which, until recently if at all, has not been reflected by Elgar’s relative status in the critical musicological canon. Significantly, there are no comparably elaborate routes for other British composers such as RalphVaughan Williams or Benjamin Britten, whose music has similarly evocative geographical associations.

  The Elgar Route simultaneously represents a form of popularization, an attempt to market Elgar’s music to a wider audience. And in spite of its uncritical adoption of an ideological context that limits, rather than broadens, the meaning of Elgar’s work, such popularization is not necessarily a bad thing. Though it is difficult, from a scholarly perspective, to avoid reinforcing the pejorative connotations that such efforts at commodification evoke, it is surely better to resist objecting to attempts to extend the appeal of Elgar’s work. After all, if Elgar’s music is to survive in the concert hall, it needs to be able to present itself to such continual reinterpretation and appropriation by new listeners and scholars alike. But more important, this process of popularization is also part of a deeper historical pattern, one that can already be discerned in Elgar’s complex relationship with his contemporary audiences, and it can be traced through the ways in which his music invites different levels of interpretation and response. Elgar himself was not a neutral figure in this process. As Tim Barringer has recently explained, the association of place and music subsequently promoted by the Elgar Route was an aspect of the composer’s reception from an early stage of his career, and built on Malvern’s existing reputation as a spa resort and tourist destination.4 The vision described in 1900 by F. G. Edwards in The Musical Times, for instance, is no less ideologically conceived than that subsequently promoted by the Elgar Route itself: