Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  Terry’s regular attendance at festivals and other musical events in England encouraged his varied musical undertakings, and the resulting acquaintances with the musicians he met at such venues were of signal importance, including a close friendship with Elgar. In 1906, at Terry’s instigation, Elgar traveled to Aberdeen to receive an honorary doctorate from the university, the first musician to be so honored; Terry’s gesture appears to have further deepened the relationship between the two men.4 In 1908 Terry was invited for the first time to be a member of the Elgars’ Three Choirs Festival house party. Terry’s charm and congeniality (and perhaps his academic status) quickly endeared him to Lady Elgar, and he soon became an “approved” friend. When Terry attended the premiere of The Music Makers in Birmingham, Alice Elgar was glad that the professor from Aberdeen was there to take care of her husband; she wrote in her diary on September 16, 1912, “Prof. Terry with him which made A. happy about him.” The diaries also record the many occasions when Terry acted as a companion for both Lady Elgar and her daughter Carice, tactfully taking them off Elgar’s hands when the composer was involved with rehearsals and other musical matters. Terry enjoyed an especially warm and friendly relationship with the young, often lonely Carice Elgar, and indeed, was affectionately referred to by Carice as “uncle.” The Elgar diaries reveal the extent to which Terry was to become supporter, defender, mentor, and ally to all three members of the Elgar family.5

  By 1910, Terry had become a regular visitor to the Elgar household. He arrived for a visit on Friday, October 7, 1910, the same day that Lady Elgar recorded the arrival of an important parcel in her diary: “Large parcel of proofs. E. very busy.” Over the weekend, Terry helped considerably with the intensive and detailed labor of checking the proofs. Saturday, October 8, was a “Stuffy day. Prof. helping E. with proofs etc … Heavy air and damp,” and the following day, “E. & Prof. comparing parts in score. Much good work.”6 As a token of thanks, Elgar presented Terry with the proof score, sending it to Aberdeen later that month. Writing to Alice Stuart-Wortley on October 11, Terry was enthusiastic:

  The Concerto grows more and more Dunteresque!7 It is bound to create an enormous sensation on Nov. 10, and thereafter be acclaimed the compeer of those of Beethoven and Bach. It is a glorious work, and what a glorious man he is! When I leave Plas Gwyn I always feel like a schoolboy facing the awful blackness of a return to school.8

  This letter indicates the extent of Terry’s devotion to Elgar and explains the great care he subsequently took in preserving the full score that Elgar had given him out of “his goodness and to my vast pride and pleasure.”9 (Terry was not the only person to receive a gift in connection with the proofs of the concerto: Charles Stuart-Wortley, Alice’s husband, and Ivor Atkins also received similar gifts.) With typical foresight, and in a fashion reminiscent of the large scrapbooks he assembled for each of Aberdeen’s competitive music festivals, Terry assembled all the materials he had collected in connection with the Violin Concerto: the first-proof full score, his own typewritten comments, concert tickets (including his own and Carice’s tickets for the premiere, suggesting that he escorted Carice to the event), photographs, newspaper cuttings, and letters from Sir Edward and Lady Elgar.10 These assembled documents were among his treasures.11

  Terry felt moved to record his unique association with the Violin Concerto in a series of informative typewritten sheets that are bound in the British Library volume with the rest of the material. As a friend—but clearly also as a music historian—Terry obviously felt a responsibility “for the benefit of posterity” to “place on record the facts and details” known to him in relation to the concerto. Having been an eyewitness to Elgar’s uncertainty when inscribing the dedication on the score, Terry recorded his version of this event in the clearest of terms; but being a discreet person of unswerving loyalty to Elgar, he makes no reference whatever to any private history the dedication may have had, writing only that “there are matters too sacred and too intimate for even the biggest friendship to pry into.” Terry’s firm opinion is that it is Elgar’s own soul that is enshrined in the work, and he perceives “a particular intimate relation between the Concerto and its creator.”12 In wholly characteristic fashion, Elgar seems to have relished the mystery surrounding the dedication. Writing to his friend Nicholas Kilburn on 5 November 1910, Elgar adds a tantalizing footnote that is unrelated to the rest of the letter:

  Aqui está encerrada el alma de… . .

  Here, or more emphatically in here is enshrined or simply enclosed—

  buried is perhaps too definite—the soul of… ?

  The final “de” leaves it indefinite as to sex or rather gender.

  Now guess.

  In a set of notes dated 11 November 1910, Terry, ever the historian, records in detail his role in the publication of the concerto and reveals the pride he took in his involvement:

  The subject of the Concerto had long been in the composer’s mind, and I remember his playing the opening theme to me at Mr Schuster’s house in Old Queen Street on January 7th, 1909, after conducting a performance of his first Symphony at Queen’s Hall, London, that evening. He brought the whole work completed for Violin and Pianoforte to the York Festival in July 1910, and it was played to him, I think for the first time, by Mr W. H. Reed of the London Symphony Orchestra at Plas Gwyn, Hereford, on Tuesday July 26th, 1910. As appears from a letter dated August 5th, 1910, bound herewith, the scoring of the Concerto was completed at Plas Gwyn on that date. Herr Fritz Kreisler accepted in [blank] the composer’s invitation to produce the work, and on Friday, September 2nd, 1910, he played the Concerto for the first time to the composer in the Board Room of Messrs Novello at 160 Wardour Street, London. The only other person present was myself, whom the composer had asked to turn over for him the pages of the piano score. During the Gloucester Festival, Kreisler again went through the work at a house in the Close taken for the Festival by Sir Edward and Lady Elgar. After a long rehearsal which lasted through the afternoon and part of the evening of Thursday September 8th, 1910, Elgar inscribed Kreisler’s name on the work.

  The letters to Terry from Elgar and Lady Elgar in the volume provide fascinating insights into the progress of the Violin Concerto and the circumstances surrounding its creation. Shining through all the letters is the pleasure that Alice and Edward Elgar took in Terry’s company; as well as their disappointment when he was unable to be with them on occasions of celebration.

  In view of his proud association with the concerto, it is rather surprising that in June 1919 Terry gave away the proof score bound with this precious memorabilia. The recipient of Terry’s handsome gift was Sir John Marnoch, a keen amateur musician, professor of surgery at Aberdeen University, and, as such, one of Terry’s colleagues. One can only speculate that Terry felt indebted to Marnoch in some way, possibly in relation to his own health. The volume is bound in cream-colored leather with JM from CST June 4 1919” embossed in gold on the cover. In his prefatory letter to Marnoch, Terry expresses the accurate opinion that the volume is “a real historical document” and that “some day it will have to be recorded.”

  After Marnoch died in 1932, Terry regained possession of the volume. In 1934 when Fritz Kreisler visited Aberdeen as part of a concert tour of Scotland, he visited the now elderly Terry, and was invited to inscribe the volume—“In kind remembrance of Fritz Kreisler, March 22, 1934”—under a photo of the violinist that Terry had pasted into the book after the first performance of the Violin Concerto in 1910. One can only imagine the shared memories that this reunion brought back for both virtuoso and musicologist, especially since Elgar had died less than a month before Kreisler inscribed Terry’s precious volume.

  Terry died two years later, in November 1936. His distinguished contributions to historical research in the fields of Scottish history and musicology, especially dealing with Bach and his world, are set out in an extensive publications list. Less evident, but nonetheless extraordinarily valuable, is the information that Terry
scrupulously preserved, in this bound volume and elsewhere, concerning his friendship with Edward Elgar.

  NOTES ON THE INTRODUCTION

  1. See Michael Kennedy, The Life of Elgar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 120–21. Oddly, Kennedy does not mention Lady Elgar’s speculation to Dora Penny (enshrined as “Dorabella” in the Enigma Variations) that an inspiration for the Violin Concerto was Julia Worthington. See Michael De-la-Noy, Elgar the Man (London: Allan Lane, 1983), 149.

  2. L. G. Wickham Legg, ed., Dictionary of National Biography: 5th Supplement: 1931—1940 (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), 851–52.

  3. See Alison I. Shiel, “Charles Sanford Terry and Aberdeen University Choral Society,” Aberdeen University Review 49, no. 206 (Autumn 2001): 122–33; and “Aberdeen’s Competitive Music Festivals 1909–13,” Northern Scotland, 22 (August 2002).

  4. See Alison I. Shiel, “Elgar’s Visits to Aberdeen,” Elgar Society Journal 13, no. 1 (March 2003): 36–40.

  5. Alison I. Shiel, “Charles Sanford Terry in the Elgar Diaries; the Chronicle of a Friendship,” Elgar Society Journal 12, no. 5 (July 2002): 193–96.

  6. Alison I. Shiel, “Charles Sanford Terry and the Elgar Violin Concerto,” Elgar Society Journal 12, no. 6 (November 2002): 254.

  7. Elgar, writing to Terry on 5 August 1910, described the Violin Concerto as “a Dunter,” referring to the powerful nature of the work. The Oxford English Dictionary gives two definitions for “dunt”: the first is “to knock with a dull sound, as with the fist in the back or ribs”; the second is “of the heart: to beat violently.” Either is apposite to the concerto, as Elgar may have used “dunter” to suggest that the score would be a “knock-out.”

  8. Hereford and Worcester Record Office 705:445, parcel 22 (i) 7916.

  9. Charles Sanford Terry, “Notes on Elgar’s Violin Concerto,” in British Library Add. MS 62000.

  10. Aberdeen University Library, MS 3237/1–5.

  11. 1919 letter from Charles Sanford Terry to Sir John Marnoch, in British Library Add. MS 62000.

  12. Terry, “Notes on Elgar’s Violin Concerto.”

  Notes on Elgar’s Violin Concerto, by Charles Sanford Terry

  It seems well, for the benefit of posterity, that I should place on record the facts and details known to me in relation to the Concerto. There are matters too sacred and intimate for even the biggest friendship to pry into, and though I was with Elgar when he was correcting the proof of the dedicatory page bound in this volume I did not attempt to obtain any solution of the mystery of the Spanish motto. At the same time I have not the slightest doubt that it is his own soul which the Concerto enshrines. In the first place it will be noticed that he originally wrote “del” before the blank, an indication that the name to follow was a masculine one. True, while I was looking over his shoulder, he wrote “de la” in red ink under “del,” but thereafter he took the trouble to consult a Spanish friend, M. de Novaro [sic]1, as to whether the word “del” would leave the sex of the soul’s possessor undetermined. Receiving an assurance that it did he retained it and deleted the “de la.” In the second place there is evidence of a particular intimate relation between the Concerto and its creator. One of the most extraordinary and fascinating traits in Elgar’s great and beautiful character is a curious attitude of detachment from his work, an utter absence of even the faintest trace of “side” or affectation in regard to it. To the genius, I suppose, even works of the most stupendous grandeur seem the inevitable result of forces within him. On the rare occasions when he spoke spontaneously of his work it was their construction on which he allowed himself to dwell. Thus of “The Apostles” he once remarked in answer to some attempt on my part to express its message to me, “Yes, it is a large canvas, isn’t it.” At York in July 1910 when he conducted “King Olaf” and heard it, so he told me, for the first time performed on the scale and with the accessories he required, he amused the orchestra vastly by saying out loud to himself, “By Jove, there’s good stuff in this.” Afterwards he told us that the constructional skill of one of the numbers had struck him and he pointed it out to us, adding curiously, “I could write in those days!” But I have never heard Elgar speak of the personal note in his music except in regard to the Concerto, and of it I heard him say more than once when he was playing it over before it was produced, “I love it.” Again there is a fact for which Ivor Atkins of Worcester is my authority. Speaking of the Concerto Elgar said to him one day that he would like the Nobilmente theme in the Andante inscribed on his tomb. I remember how moved he was by that passage and the violin passage which heralds it 2 bars before figure 53 when Kreisler first played it to him, and how with his own left hand held as though it were supporting his own fiddle he reproduced the emotion and vibrato which Kreisler brought to the interpretation of that passage. Nor did I ever hear the Concerto played through by Elgar without his doing the same thing.

  The first Rehearsal of the Concerto was called for the morning of Wednesday November 9th. A few privileged people were present, among whom I saw Ysaÿe, old Hollmann the Cellist, Landon Ronald and others. Before rehearsing the Overture (The Naiades)2 Elgar turned at once to the Cadenza Accompagnata, evidently anxious to have the first opportunity of testing the effect of the novel tremolando which he has introduced there for the strings. He had originally used the word “drummed” at figure 101 in his direction as to how the tremolando was to be secured. I ventured however to point out to him that the word “Thrummed” had a more obvious meaning and expressed exactly the idea he wished to convey. He therefore made the change. At first the orchestra, unaccustomed to such a form of accompaniment, quite failed to obtain the soft shimmer of sound which Elgar required. The tone was hard and “naily” and observing one or two of the Double Basses actually “drumming” the strings I wondered after all whether Elgar had not been right in his choice of word. But after telling the men to put down their bows the tone became lighter and eventually at the performance the effect of the accompaniment of the Cadenza was quite extraordinary. When later Elgar rehearsed the Concerto with the orchestra alone I noticed that he was taking the first movement much slower than when he first played it to me and much slower than the metronome mark (crotchet 100) in the score. The tempo which he actually adopted was (I trust to memory here, for I was not able to test my memory by the metronome until the morning after the performance) crotchet 88. Elgar’s first conception of the opening theme was certainly analogous to that of the vigorous and pressing second theme of the first movement of the Symphony, whose metronome mark is crotchet 104. Not only so, but in the last eight bars of the first movement, where the first subject is again brought in, as will be seen from the proof of the Full Score, Elgar marked it Piu Allegro increasing to Presto. But in the course of the rehearsals at Gloucester[,] to which reference has already been made, Kreisler pleaded the importance of a “broad presentment” of the first movement of a new work and Elgar agreed. I remember Kreisler laughingly telling Elgar[,] “You composers never know how to play your own works.” Kreisler also made a few alterations in the solo part with the object of securing greater effectiveness or convenience for the solo instrument. These Elgar sanctioned. One very effective one is at the second bar before figure 47, where the whole of the nine notes before 47 are carried an octave higher. Another effective alteration which Elgar made on Kreisler’s representation will be noticed just after figure 96. My proof Score shows the Violin part as it was originally written and without the alterations which Elgar made in the course of his rehearsals with Kreisler. Regarding those rehearsals there is a little incident which is perhaps worth record. Kreisler is an extraordinarily good linguist. But he occasionally uses the word he wants from a foreign language with the pronunciation of the language in which he is speaking for the moment. Thus it was amusing after a long rehearsal and in the midst of a violent passage when he suddenly stopped and said excitedly to Elgar[,] “Sir Edward, I must have a quart here,” pronouncing the word as though it were the En
glish liquid measure.

  The first rehearsal of the Concerto roused extraordinary enthusiasm among the orchestra, who rose and cheered Elgar and Kreisler at the end of it. On the following morning Elgar did Landon Ronald the honour to ask him to conduct the first movement so that he might hear the effect from the auditorium. I lunched with Elgar at Schuster’s after the rehearsal and we strolled after that through the old streets round Westminster. In so far as he touched on the Concerto at all, Elgar’s talk was about the fine theme at figure 87. He described it as “ritterlich,” and was pleased to have secured from the orchestra the atmosphere he wanted there. At the performance in the evening the Queen’s Hall was packed. It was said that most of the musical celebrities of the country were present. For that I cannot vouch. But I can vouch for the fact, and it is I think remarkable, that in the audience were five of our Cathedral organists, namely Ivor Atkins of Worcester, G. R. Sinclair of Hereford, Herbert Brewer of Gloucester, Dr Bennett of Lincoln, and Tertius Noble of York. Kreisler was certainly nervous during the first movement, but the persistent applause at the end of the movement proved that already the audience had recognised a master-piece. The Andante was superbly played both by Kreisler and the orchestra. Indeed I cannot remember ever to have heard such wonderfully sympathetic accompaniments. During the wonderful Cadenza in the last movement the interest was tense and at the end of the Concerto there was such enthusiasm as I have never before witnessed. There was a long and persistent roar of applause which was continuous for about five minutes and never lessened in volume even when Elgar and Kreisler had escaped from their journeys to the centre of the platform. As usual Elgar tried to put himself in the background and refused to take himself the first applause which followed the end of the work. At length Kreisler himself refused to take the applause for himself and turning to Elgar bowed with a fine air to him. In the Artists room Elgar was again besieged by enthusiastic friends. “You have saved me from this before, can’t you do it again?” he said to me. Kreisler was naturally exhausted. His magnificent interpretation of the work was the theme of all. Save at one point his memory did not fail him throughout. His wife, to whom he introduced me, was also clearly very proud and happy.