by Adams, Byron
That Elgar should have condemned Fuller-Maitland perhaps reflects another instinctive bias on his part. Fuller-Maitland (1856–1936) was no ordinary journalist, but the chief music critic of the Times and a distinguished scholar—he was the author of an important recent monograph on English music and, at the time of the lecture, was editing the revised edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music.15 He was also a central figure in the English musical “renaissance” set of composers and critics, based around the Royal College of Music, where the group’s two most important composers, Parry and Stanford, were professors. As Meirion Hughes has pointed out, the members of this set were mostly from the university-educated, upper-middle classes and Fuller-Maitland was particularly keen to emphasize their social and intellectual elitism.16 He was less keen, however, to acknowledge the achievements of a lower-middle-class, self-taught, provincial Roman Catholic like Elgar. His reviews of Elgar premieres in the Times were frequently ambivalent and often hostile, as both Hughes and Jerrold Northrop Moore have noted. With the works that appeared before the Enigma Variations, Fuller-Maitland was often as concerned with Elgar’s provincial background as with the music; the Variations themselves were damned for their “obscure” program; The Dream of Gerontius was compared unfavorably with Stanford’s Eden and Parry’s Job; and the Concert Allegro for piano suffered because of an alleged lack of “organic connection between one part and another.”17 Fuller-Maitland’s attitude toward Elgar hardened with each of the composer’s successes. The critic was absent from the premiere of the First Symphony in 1908 and, after criticizing the composer for his overcolorful orchestration at the work’s London premiere, conducted an unsuccessful campaign against the piece in the Times.18 It is uncertain exactly how aware Elgar was of Fuller-Maitland’s later writing about him, given the composer’s claim that after 1900 he never read any (negative) criticism of his own work. But even if that claim were true, the mixed reception of Gerontius, to which Fuller-Maitland contributed, had hurt Elgar and one could understand it if his rebuke of the critic were a way, subconsciously, of settling scores.
The significance of Fuller-Maitland’s criticism of Elgar, however, is not the extent to which it was fueled by personal enmity, but that it provides any evidence of a negative view of the composer. Until recently, Elgar scholarship, perhaps understandably, has emphasized the many positive reviews of the composer’s work and concentrated less on the dissenters; the one significant exception among the latter is Edward J. Dent, to whose infamous assessment of Elgar in the 1920s we shall return below.19 But Fuller-Maitland and Dent are only the best known of a significant minority of critics who were skeptical of the popular and critical acclaim afforded to Elgar, particularly following the successful German performances of Gerontius in December 1901 and May 1902. For the most part, these critics differed from their pro-Elgarian counterparts in their social provenance and in their philosophical and aesthetic views, particularly in their attitude to Wagner. With the exception of the ultraconservative Bennett, whose enthusiasm for Elgar stemmed more from their shared autodidactic background than from purely musical reasons, the pro-Elgar critics were generally pro-Wagner and/or pro-Strauss.20 This group included not only Newman and Shaw, but two other pro-Wagnerians: Alfred Kalisch (1863–1933), from 1912 the critic of the Daily News, and Herbert Thompson (1856–1945), between 1886 and 1936 the critic of the Yorkshire Post.21 Moreover, all of these critics shared with Elgar the fact that they were outside the London establishment of the “renaissance” clique: Bennett and Newman were self-taught provincials; Shaw was Irish (and a socialist to boot); Thompson, Cambridge-educated but Leeds-born and based, was steeped in the conservative traditions of the English choral tradition (his father-in-law, Frederick Spark, was the secretary of the Leeds Music Festival in 1898 when Caractacus received its premiere); and Kalisch, though London-born, was of German-Jewish extraction. By contrast, the “critical critics” were mostly part of (or close to) renaissance circles, and shared the predominantly anti-Wagner views of Stanford and, especially, Parry, who disliked Wagner’s ideology and his late works—a consequence partly of the failure of his opera Guenever (1886) and partly of his puritanical sensibility.22 The significance of this particular bias is considerable. A key aim of the renaissance critics was, through their writing, to influence, rather than simply reflect, musical “good taste”: a concept that, in theory, was ideologically neutral but, in practice, often betrayed the critics’ anti-Wagnerian aesthetic agenda. The value of their discourse on Elgar is therefore not that they reveal the hidden “essence” of his music (insofar as that objective was ever possible), but that they reveal much about the forces that conditioned the reception of his works and those of his contemporaries. In doing so, they offer proof, if any were needed, that Elgar’s works, far from transcending the period in which they were written, are grounded in the historical, critical concerns of the early twentieth century.
The aim of this essay, then, is not to revisit the positive criticism of Bennett, Johnstone, Newman et al., which has been covered adequately elsewhere in Elgar scholarship. Instead, it is to show how Elgar’s detractors viewed him as an uncomfortably progressive addition to British musical life: first, by consciously (and negatively) distancing him from the “safe” figure of Parry; and second, by associating him with the ethically suspect school of Wagner and his followers. Elgar emerges from this criticism as a deeply politicized figure, the vessel through which particular critical critics directed their arguments about the future of British music.
One such critic is Dr. Charles Maclean (1843–1916). Maclean’s background was typical of the renaissance set: public school (Shrewsbury) and Oxford (where he was a classical scholar), further musical training under Ferdinand Hiller in Cologne, and then the musical directorship of Eton College between 1871 and 1875. His musical activities in Britain were curtailed somewhat during the twenty-two years in which he worked in the Indian civil service (as an inspector of schools, a magistrate, and a government translator), but they resumed on his retirement in 1893, whereupon he became active both as a critic and within the Musical Association (later the Royal Musical Association).23 In 1899 he was invited to join a committee, chaired by Parry and including Stanford, John Stainer, Fuller-Maitland, and Ebenezer Prout among others, whose aim was to “further the objectives … in England” of the Internationale Musikgesellschaft (hereafter IMG), which had recently been founded in Leipzig by the German musicologist Oskar Fleischer.24 In practice, this meant setting up a British national section, and Maclean, with his linguistic skills, was the obvious candidate to become group secretary and national group editor of the society’s monthly periodical, Zeitschrift der internationalen Musikgesellschaft. The Zeitschrift was one of two IMG publications, but whereas the content of the quarterly Sammelbände der internationalen Musikgesellschaft was essentially scholarly, that of the Zeitschrift aimed at a wider readership. It included concert and book reviews, lists of forthcoming lectures and performances of old music, a comprehensive list of recent literature in music periodicals of all countries, reports of papers given at local group meetings, and short articles on musical subjects, most of which were written in either German or English. Its function was thus similar to that of The Musical Times, but with one vital difference: its readership extended beyond Britain to a larger, international audience. Consequently, the role of the national group editors of the Zeitschrift went well beyond being their countries’ musical diarists. What they wrote about individual composers had the potential to shape the opinions of foreign readers who had little or no direct experience of those composers, as well as mold the scholarly discourse on their music. The columnists thus represented the music-critical voices of their respective nations. For Maclean this entailed the additional responsibility of making a case for British music to a readership that, by and large, still considered Britain to be das Land ohne Musik.25
At best, Maclean’s attitude to Elgar was ambivalent; at worst, it was downright hostile. Writing abou
t the performance of Gerontius at the 1902 Three Choirs Festival, he described the composer as a “polemic modernist,” a comment that, given the generally negative tone of the article, was certainly not intended as a compliment.26 Maclean’s objections to Elgar can be classified as at least one of three forms: aesthetic (where Elgar’s compositional style is weighed in the balance, on its own merits, against Maclean’s preferred musical criteria, and generally found wanting); ad hominem (attacks on Elgar, as well as objections to composers who had clearly influenced him); and cultural (those where Elgar’s music is deemed unmanly, un-English, or both). In practice, these factors were interlaced, for Maclean’s aesthetic standpoint inevitably found its ideal in some composers more than in others, and given that his Zeitschrift column was frequently concerned with the future direction of English music, it is unsurprising that the composers whose works came closest to realizing his personal vision were lauded as models for emulation. Maclean’s vision was a conservative one, but it is by no means untypical (as will become clear when we consider other writing about Elgar in this period). Indeed, paradoxically, a critical view of Elgar such as Maclean’s actually serves to highlight the progressiveness of many of the composer’s scores composed at this time.27
Maclean’s influential position within the IMG and his consistent disparagement of Elgar make him a figure of more than marginal interest. Unaccountably relegated to a minor position in Elgar scholarship, Maclean assumes the role of a focal figure—perhaps the focal figure—in this essay due to his influential status and aspirations as an arbiter of musical taste. To use Maclean’s opinions as a lens through which to view the reception of Elgar’s music during this period brings into sharper focus the significance of several other critical critics, most notably Fuller-Maitland and W. H. (later Sir Henry) Hadow (1859–1937). Originally a classics don at Worcester College, Oxford, and later vice-chancellor of the University of Sheffield (where he was instrumental in establishing a professorial chair in music), Hadow was also the author of many significant books on music in the 1890s and 1900s, including two oft-reprinted volumes, Studies in Modern Music (which considered the careers of six leading nineteenth-Century composers); a number of contributions to Fuller-Maitland’s revised edition of Grove’s Dictionary; and, perhaps most notably, the fifth volume of the Oxford History of Music series of which he became editor in 1896.28 His interests also included British music. In 1921, he wrote a report on the history and prospects of British music for the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust and, in 1931, a monograph titled English Music, part of a series of books on English Heritage edited by Viscount Lee of Fareham and J. C. Squire.29 A protege of Fuller-Maitland, Hadow initially held views on Elgar mirroring those of his mentor, but, as will become apparent, Hadow’s espoused views in English Music are quite different from those he had embraced twenty-five years earlier.30
Before returning to English Music, two key musical relationships that the critical critics identified in their writings about Elgar must be considered: the musical debt he owed to Wagner and Wagnerites and, crucially, how he was compared to the composer at the heart of the renaissance establishment, Sir Hubert Hastings Parry.
Elgar and Parry
However else the critical critics might have disagreed with Elgar, they surely agreed with his high opinion of Parry. In his inaugural lecture at the University of Birmingham, Elgar drew attention to the fact that at the previous year’s “Musical Festivals … the honours have fallen, save with one exception to the younger men.” Identifying that exception, Elgar cited
a name which shall always be spoken in this University with the deepest respect, and I will add, the deepest affection—I mean Sir Hubert Parry, the head of our art in this country … : with him no cloud of formality can dim the healthy sympathy and broad influence he exerts and we hope may long continue to exert upon us.31
Elgar’s reservations about others associated with the Royal College of Music, notably Stanford, did not extend to Parry, for whom his admiration was genuine—and with good reason. Parry had been supportive in helping to secure Hans Richter’s services for the premiere of the Enigma Variations in 1899 and had proposed Elgar for membership in the Athenaeum Club in 1904. In the latter year, Elgar publicly acknowledged his indebtedness to Parry’s scholarship when he was interviewed by The Strand Magazine: “The articles [in Grove’s Dictionary] which have since helped me the most … are those of Hubert Parry.” Appropriately, Parry made the Latin oration when Elgar received his honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1905. Parry’s music impressed Elgar sufficiently for him to comment in a letter to August Jaeger of Novello, sent 8 October 1907 that A Vision of Life was “fine stuff & the poem [which Parry had written himself] was literature”—a far more positive endorsement than his barbed allusion to Stanford in the inaugural lecture that “to rhapsodise is one thing an Englishman cannot do.”32 With the exception of a (relatively early) complaint to Jaeger that Parry’s orchestration was “never more than an organ part arranged,” there is no hint that Elgar disagreed with prevailing critical opinion about Parry’s preeminence.33
Yet it was precisely this preeminence that led Elgar’s detractors to compare him unfavorably with Parry, as Fuller-Maitland’s assessments of both composers in English Music in the Nineteenth Century (1902) and the revised edition of Grove’s Dictionary (1904–7) exemplify clearly. It might seem unfair to include English Music here, given that it would have gone to press before the Düsseldorf performance of Gerontius in December 1901 and the burgeoning critical interest in Elgar that followed it; but, as perhaps the first monograph to advance the thesis that 1880 (the year when Parry’s Scenes from Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” was premiered) represented a peripeteia for British music, it is an important illustration of how in certain quarters Parry’s status was beyond dispute. Fuller-Maitland argued that the post–1880 renaissance was attributable to five “leaders” (Parry, Stanford, Mackenzie, Frederic Cowen, and Arthur Goring Thomas), who, in turn, had bred a generation of “followers” (essentially all other British composers born after 1850 and active in 1900). Not surprisingly, the five leaders are examined in considerable depth; conversely, the followers receive short shrift. Elgar, though the “most prominent among the older generation of the followers,” is summarized in just a single page, in which Froissart, The Light of Life, Caractacus, Dream of Gerontius [sic], and Cockaigne are mentioned only in passing, the Enigma Variations are described simply as “delightful,” and Sea Pictures is characterized tersely as “popular.” In all these works, Fuller-Maitland concludes, there were “evidences of a truly poetic gift, of imagination rightly held in control, and of great technical skill in the management of voices and instruments.”34 But that was all. Compared to these blandishments, Fuller-Maitland’s ten pages on Parry are positively effusive, for instance his comment that it was “Parry’s especial gift to ‘bring all heaven before our eyes’ by means of the mastery of his cumulative effect.”35
This disparity did not go unnoticed in early reviews of the book. Musical News felt that Fuller-Maitland had drawn “totally inadequate notice” to Elgar’s work; in Musical Opinion the pseudonymous columnist Common Time meanwhile declared that Fuller-Maitland’s “prejudices [were] strong and often unaccountable,” and proposed 1896 (the year of Stanford’s opera Shamus O’Brien) as an alternate starting date for an English musical renaissance.36 But Fuller-Maitland soon became more transparent in his prejudices, for his Grove entry for Elgar (1904) is laced with invective, particularly with regard to the composer’s large-scale choral works: “Praise to the Holiest” in Gerontius, for instance, suffered from a “want of the cumulative power which some other masters have attained, and which would have brought into the whole work a unity and a sublimity which it was not felt to possess.”37 No sense here, then, of Elgar managing to “bring all heaven before our eyes” like Parry; if anything, quite the opposite, for the success of Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1 was achieved “in spite of the objections of some musicians”�
��including Fuller-Maitland himself, presumably—“to it on the score of its immediate appeal to hearers of every class.” Meanwhile, The Apostles is portrayed as Elgar’s artifice-laden overreaction to these objections:
