Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  It is hard at first glance to reconcile the sheer physicality of this audience response with the description of the elevated artistic genius in Edwards’s article in The Musical Times and its images of pastoral contemplation and meditative companionship. Yet Elgar does not appear to have been uneasy with the prospect of such popular critical appreciation, famously remarking with lip-smacking anticipation to Dora Penny that he had composed “a tune that will knock ’em—knock ’em flat.”25 Earlier, in a letter to Joseph Bennett dated 17 March 1898, he had declared his ambition to compose “a great work—a sort of national thing that my fellow Englishmen might take to themselves and love.”26 Arthur Johnstone observed in the Manchester Guardian after a performance of Coronation Ode that Elgar appeared to have achieved precisely this ambition:

  It is popular music of a kind that has not been made for a long time in this country—scarcely at all since Dibdin’s time. At least one may say so of the best parts, such as the bass solo and chorus “Britain, Ask of Thyself,” and the contralto song and chorus “Land of Hope and Glory.” The former is ringing martial music, the latter a sort of church parade song having the breadth of a national hymn. It is the melody which occurs as the second principal theme of the longer Pomp & Circumstance march, which I beg to suggest is as broad as God Save the King, Rule Britannia and See the Conquering Hero, and is perhaps the broadest open-air tune since Beethoven’s Freude Schöner Götterfunken [sic]. Moreover, it is distinctively British—at once breezy and beefy.27

  Generally, such works have suffered—rather than benefited—from their association with a particular time and location: the sense of place and occasion captured in pieces like the Ode, for example, has promoted their subsequent critical neglect. Perhaps the assumption is that after they have served their immediate utilitarian purpose such works are not worthy of admittance to the canon of absolute music. But not all of Elgar’s civic or ceremonial music has followed this trajectory: the first and fourth Pomp and Circumstance marches in particular have assumed a canonic position in British (and American) musical life that easily perpetuates their high historical profile.

  The Pomp and Circumstance marches focus attention on a central issue in any critical discussion of Elgar and populism: his music’s perceived relationship with broader notions of nationalism and empire. For some writers, this presents an unavoidable stumbling block to full appreciation of Elgar’s work. As early as 1924, the polemical critic Cecil Gray explicitly made the link by suggesting that it was “necessary to distinguish clearly between the composer of the symphonies and the self-appointed Musician Laureate of the British Empire, always ready to hymn rapturously the glories of our blood and state on the slightest provocation.”28 Gray’s observation embodies in acute form a wider critical turning against imperial modes of thought and expression following the First World War.29 For Gray “the immortal ‘Land of Hope and Glory’” tune from the first march, supposedly Elgar’s most extreme expression of colonial expansionism, “may at some time or other have aroused such patriotic enthusiasm in the breast of a rubber planter in the tropics so as to have led him to kick his negro servant slightly harder than he would have done if he had never heard it.”30 Such overtly politicized readings of Elgar’s music may not necessarily be endorsed by many scholars today, but a sense of unease nevertheless remains. Brian Trowell, for example, has cautioned:

  We are so used to Elgar’s marches that we regard their nationalistic idiom as equivalent to that of Dvoák’s Slavonic dances, but they are not so innocent. If we put their glittering orchestral equipage and sheer catchiness to one side for the moment, we realize that they are really a kind of recruitment propaganda, showy street-processions like the example in Cockaigne.31

  Other scholars have proposed radical reinterpretations of Elgar’s attitude to empire in such works, either suggesting that his music somehow foreshadows the Empire’s decline, or that his commitment to an imperialist cultural project was skin deep at best. Prominent among such revisionists is Bernard Porter, whose broader attitude to the historical status of imperialism is one of skepticism. Porter argues that “there can be no presumption that Britain—the Britain that stayed at home—was an essentially ‘imperialist’ nation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” stressing the contingent or anachronistic nature of unified concepts such as “British society” (which Porter regards as a diverse, complex phenomenon stratified by class, religion, and other factors). Rather, “imperialism can be regarded as ubiquitous, if it is defined broadly and loosely; but the more broadly and loosely it is defined, the less useful it becomes as a descriptive and analytical tool.”32 The principal thrust of Porter’s argument is twofold: on the one hand, a need to deconstruct imperialism as a historical phenomenon in nineteenth-Century British culture, and on the other, the desire to rescue Elgar’s historical reputation from the image of the “jingoistic tub-thumper, a manifestation of the worst aspects of late Victorian and Edwardian bombast.” In an essay specifically on Elgar and empire, Porter therefore concludes:

  We have not discussed—because the present writer is not equipped to do so—the question of whether “imperial traits” can be inferred from his abstract works. (Is there such a thing as a “jingo” cadence or key?) Judged by his representational pieces, however, Elgar comes over as a pretty toothless sort of imperialist, as these things went; more dolphin, really, than shark.33

  The strength of Porter’s call for a reevaluation of imperialism based on a close scrutiny of the historical evidence is difficult to resist, but his reading of Elgar’s music appears to rest on two assumptions. The first is that Elgar’s attitude to the Empire was either an anomaly—an enthusiasm only briefly embraced in the heady years (following his marriage) when Elgar’s national career first took off, between the premiere of the Enigma Variations (1899) and the First Symphony (1908)—or a charade, to some extent playacting in the role of imperial artist. The second assumption is that there is somehow a fundamental qualitative distinction between Elgar’s “representational pieces” and his pure absolute music. Porter maintains: “There are no peculiarly imperialist intervals, keys, or even orchestrations. We need words to be sure: either libretti, or the titles of orchestral works.”34 But though this latter assumption certainly reflects trends in late-nineteenth-century musical politics, the actual boundaries between different musical genres, as we have seen, were more permeable than this reading would suggest.

  It is especially difficult to listen to the Pomp and Circumstance marches with neutral ears given this highly polarized reception history. And it would be an all too easy interpretative strategy to “rescue” such music, seeking to problematize the works by suggesting that their apparently blithe tunefulness hides deeper and more uncomfortable musical truths. But Elgar’s attitude toward the marches appears to have reflected some sense of this ambivalence. The works’ title is taken from a passage in Shakespeare’s Othello (3.3.347–54):

  [Othello:] O, now for ever

  Farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content!

  Farewell the plumed troop, and big wars,

  That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!

  Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,

  The spirit-stirring drum, the ear piercing fife,

  The royal banner, and all quality,

  Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war!

  More than one writer has commented on the incongruity of these lines in the context of the music’s superficially upbeat character. Moore, for instance, notes Elgar’s plans (later abandoned) to set Rudyard Kipling’s end-of-empire poem “Recessional” around the time of the composition of the first two Pomp and Circumstance marches, and draws a parallel between the poem’s sense of ceremonial retreat, withdrawal, or decay, and the reflective character of the trio tune from the first march. For Moore, both poem and melody suggest noble defeat rather than triumphant victory, a mood appropriate perhaps for the end of the Boer War.35 But the Shakespeare reference is even more poig
nant than this parallel implies, and represents a moving inward or away from public service, accompanied by a sense of outward betrayal. The speech comes from a crucial turning point in the play when Iago has finally persuaded Othello of Desdemona’s supposed unfaithfulness, and it represents the apex of the play’s argument—the shift from celebration to tragedy. In this sense, it presents a dialogue between civic duty or obligation and personal feeling or expression that lies at the heart of much of Elgar’s music, not simply his “populist” works.

  The marches also rest upon a tension between archaic and modern elements. In part, this can be explained through reference to Elgar’s interest in chivalry. In an interview with Rudolph de Cordova in The Strand Magazine in 1904, for example, Elgar is recorded as saying:

  I like to look on the composer’s vocation as the old troubadours or bards did. In those days it was no disgrace to a man to be turned on to step in front of an army and inspire the people with a song. For my own part, I know that there are a lot of people who like to celebrate events with music. To these people I have given tunes. Is that wrong? Why should I write a fugue or something which won’t appeal to anyone, when the people yearn for things which can stir them—?36

  As Aidan J. Thomson and others have shown, chivalry is a prominent feature of Elgar’s earlier music, from the concert overture Froissart to cantatas such as The Black Knight, and it represented at least in part an attempt to imagine the modern world according to a sense of renewed moral and aesthetic order.37 But it also embodied Elgar’s notion of music as a form of spectacle or display. In an obituary in the Sunday Times, Ernest Newman remarked that Elgar “saw the outer world as a magnificent pageant, every line and colour of which thrilled him,” an interpretation that reinforces the sense in much of Elgar’s work of ceremony as both entertainment and ritual.38 Elgar’s interview in The Strand Magazine, however, also suggests that the marches assumed an anti-institutional quality, Elgar juxtaposing popular appeal (a good tune) against more conventionalized academic standards (fugue). Elgar thus draws attention to his own sense of isolation from formal centers of musical practice while simultaneously pointing to his wider public acclaim. The idea of a chivalric mode of musical discourse, or of Elgar portraying himself as an ancient bard in modern dress, may have been one means of addressing this potential imbalance between popular success and academic critical esteem.

  The formal layout of the marches reflects these tensions and dualisms. Even the dedication of the first march, to Elgar’s close friend Alfred Rodewald “and the members of the Liverpool Orchestral Society,” suggests a bringing together of private and public spheres.39 The introduction begins with hard-edged modernist linear counterpoint in contrary motion—one of the most famous Neapolitan openings in the repertoire. The initial emphasis on E is enharmonically reinterpreted by the chromatic rise in measure 7 so as to lead upward to the dominant A. The main section of the march proper is characterized by a motoric energy: it is modern urban music that evokes the sounds of commerce or manufacturing industry as much as military activity. If, as James Hepokoski and others have suggested, the driving rhythms in the second half of Sibelius’s tone poem Finlandia can be heard as a representation of a steam engine, thrusting into the future, it is possible to imagine a similar machine-like momentum with the sounds of pistons and valve gear in the outer sections of Elgar’s march.40 The heavy pesante tread of the poco allargando measures therefore becomes a sudden application of the brakes that attempts to bring the rolling musical locomotive under control. In contrast, the largamente first appearance of the trio is presented as an idealized tune or processional, a “national hymn” according to Arthur Johnstone’s review of Coronation Ode in the Manchester Guardian, which suggests a ritualized space or mood of civic dignity even without the references to national pride and territorial expansion later supplied by A. C. Benson’s text. If the emphasis in the main sections of the march is on a forward vector, constantly pushing onward in a spirit of modernist progress, the emphasis in the trio (even in its transformed molto maestoso apotheosis) is on circularity and repetition, and the tune ultimately avoids closure.41 As a whole, therefore, the march combines two fundamentally opposed musical impulses, one forward-looking and progressive, and the other circular and retrospective.

  If not universally acclaimed by critics, the first Pomp and Circumstance march can reasonably lay claim to being Elgar’s most popular work. But, as the above analysis suggests, its populism is contingent and contested. Though for many commentators, such as Michael Kennedy, the march represents the elevation of empire and a particular (for some, problematic) vision of Englishness, it can equally be heard as a vivid illustration of contemporary urban life. This allusion to processes of mass production and industrialization foreshadowed the work’s early reception history: Elgar recorded the complete march on gramophone no less than four times, and “Land of Hope and Glory” three times, and in these forms the piece reached its widest possible audience, most poignantly during the First World War.42 The catalogue entry for Elgar’s first wartime recording, of a truncated version of the march, proclaimed:

  That thrilling broad march melody, now known to every British ear, “Land of Hope and Glory,” is played with unspeakable breadth of tone and majesty by these fine players directed by Elgar. No one can listen without experiencing feelings of noble patriotism, such is the nature of its immediate appeal. Every Britisher should possess this unique record.43

  Though we are now able to listen to Elgar’s recording on CD transfer, it is hard to imagine exactly how the piece would have originally sounded played on a gramophone in the trenches or on the home front. Surely at no other time would the music’s tensions between its different modes of expression, active and static, modern and retrospective, have seemed quite so stark and polarized: the “spirit-stirring drum” must have beaten hollow indeed.44

  The third and final category of popular music in Elgar’s work relies on a similar tension between modern and retrospective modes of musical discourse. But the works in this category construct the popular in a manner diametrically opposed to the contemporary urban sounds of the first Pomp and Circumstance march. In these pieces, the popular is heard as a lost voice, the image of an idealized Arcadian past that is fleetingly recaptured or momentarily regained as though from a considerable musical or historical distance. It therefore becomes the trace of a vanished presence or loss, rather than an affirmation (as in the outer sections of the march) of a modern civic identity. Paradigmatic examples of works in this category include the “canto popolare” (literally, “popular song”) in the concert overture In the South, and the so-called Welsh tune in Introduction and Allegro. In both cases, the popular melodies have the character of folk songs, and are symbolic of a preindustrialized pastoral idyll or former natural wholeness.45 This symbolic content is foregrounded through sharp juxtaposition of these “popular” melodies with music of a more overtly modernist character. As Matthew Riley has observed, such gestures are motivated by “a sense that ‘reality’—determined by the conventional frame and form of a movement—gives way, in a sudden moment of transformation, to a magical ‘inner’ world of pastoral simplicity, childlike innocence, or imaginative vision.”46 Therefore the impression that the tunes are musically unprepared or unmotivated by their context lends them their sense of enchantment or bewitchment. In other words, they act as Proustian gateways: moments of intense sensory awareness (heightened musical expressivity) that give way to fragmentary glimpses of lost time.

  Elgar’s symphonic study Falstaff is a challenging final case study in this third category of popular music expressive of lost innocence or Arcadian nostalgia. Elgar himself suggested, “I have, I think, enjoyed writing [Falstaff] more than any other music I have ever composed, and perhaps, for that reason, it may prove to be among my best efforts.”47 Despite his estimation, however, Falstaff remains among the most problematic of Elgar’s major works. Contemporary reviews of early performances dwelled on the work’s comp
lex formal layout, the relationship between the music and its literary program, and the music’s perceived academicism: the general impression was that the music was “clever” rather than intrinsically beautiful. The Pall Mall Gazette complained after the London premiere on November 3, 1913, for example:

  Perhaps it is because there is a need for a good deal of pictorial delineation and incident that “Falstaff” strikes one as being aesthetically unsatisfactory. Putting aside the question of the construction of the work, a lengthy composition without a measure of sensuous charm, of intrinsic beauty of theme, can hardly fail to give the impression of something lacking. “Falstaff” truly is rather forbidding in this respect, and the amazing cleverness is but a poor substitute. One feels, indeed, that, however closely the subject-matter may be said to represent the intended idea, not enough is gained when music’s greatest power, its emotional appeal, is so seldom called into play.48

  Such critical misgivings may have reflected a deeper disquiet concerning the work’s complex and at times contradictory response to its Shakespearian source. Elgar’s preliminary generic designation of “character study” is significant, since the piece is structurally and gesturally defined by its critical engagement with the character of Falstaff himself. Elgar’s music is interpretative, in the sense that it presents a number of different and often conflicting aspects of Falstaff’s stage character: chivalrous, pompous, fat, recalcitrant, comic, and, above all, populist. Falstaff, more than any other Shakespearean character, craves an audience and plays to the crowd. It is the closing bars of Elgar’s work that are therefore the most problematic. The manner in which Elgar responds to the dramatic denouement of Shakespeare’s plays, the rejection of Falstaff by the new king, Henry V, at the end of Henry IV Part 2, suggests an anxiety about the state of social order or civic authority that adds a new dimension to Elgar’s relationship with the popular in music.