Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  It is perhaps not to be wondered at that, after the compliments paid the composer by the most advanced of modern German composers, and the adverse opinion passed by some superior persons upon the “Pomp and Circumstance” tune, the composer should have adopted an ultra-modern style in this oratorio, and that it should be found so strange by some hearers as to call for censure.38

  If Fuller-Maitland’s entry for Elgar was marked by trenchant criticism, his entry for Parry, published in 1907, was full of praise—and praise that seems almost deliberately to promote Parry at Elgar’s expense. Unlike Elgar’s highly colored orchestration, Parry’s symphonic works “laid more stress on the substance of the ideas and development, rather than on the manner of their presentment,” and as such “must always appeal strongly to the cultivated musician.” Compared with the “want of cumulative power” in “Praise to the Holiest,” Parry’s choral music was characterized by his “wonderful power” in “handling large masses with the utmost breadth and simplicity of effect, and of using the voices of the choir in obtaining climax after climax, until an overwhelming impression is created”: this was “felt not only by the educated hearer, but even by the untrained listener.” The implication is clear: without ever compromising his style, Parry wrote music whose authority was discernible to all; Elgar, by contrast, veered inconsistently between oversophistication (The Apostles) and vulgarity (the Pomp and Circumstance marches). Lest his readers be left in any doubt of Parry’s stature, Fuller-Maitland concludes the dictionary entry by stating that Parry’s “strong common sense” and the “purity of his artistic ideals” marked him “as the most important figure in English art since the days of Purcell.”39

  Fuller-Maitland was not Parry’s sole apologist, however. In a Zeitschrift article from 1903, Maclean conflated Parry’s social and musical elitism in terms very similar to those that Fuller-Maitland would use in Grove. Maclean wrote that Parry’s art “stands above that of his fellows, as the Drachenfels above the Rhine; lofty, alone, perhaps even melancholy.” His music is “a direct counterblast to preciosity”:

  In contour it is wholly broad. While in harmony it is free from decadent subtleties; indeed almost absolutely diatonic, a trait in common more or less with all British composers who are true to themselves, but carried in this beyond the practice of most of them. The amount of expression which Parry obtains with diatonic means is quite astonishing… . Nor does his art yield to emotional excesses; he is greatly subjective, but his introspection is steadied by reflection.40

  Thus, not only did Parry’s solidity of form and emotional moderation offer proof of his naturally good musical taste, but his avoidance of chromaticism provided evidence of his echt-Englishness—certainly much more than was the case with Elgar, against whom Maclean ends his article with a damning broadside. Recalling Strauss’s toast to Elgar as the “first English progressivist” at the 1902 Lower Rhine Music Festival, Maclean pompously observed that with works of art, unlike with “physical and mathematical truths,” there is “at least as much chance of what is older being superior to what is younger, as vice-versa.” To prove his point, Maclean compared Elgar’s Coronation Ode with Parry’s symphonic ode of 1903, War and Peace. The latter work, in Maclean’s opinion, was “Parry purified from mannerism or blemish, pushing new discoveries in poly-tonism without relinquishing his own diatonic habit … showing depths of harmonious sensibility in the solo numbers with long resistless forces in the choral numbers.” The Coronation Ode, however,

  consists musically of little else than this; first a decided mannerism of the composer in descending bass scale-passages and certain treble suspensions, secondly music based on quite the weakest form of the English part-song style, thirdly a march-tune imported from another composition which has no affinity whatever with this one and is in this place at least extra-ordinarily common.

  “It seems next to impossible,” Maclean concluded, “that any musician could hear or read these two works side by side, and not realise that the work of the older man is on an immeasurably higher plane than that of the younger.”41

  At least one periodical was moved to comment that Maclean’s choice of works was disingenuous. In a review of the article, Musical News dismissed Maclean’s claim that “composers must be judged by their latest productions,” observing that as the Coronation Ode was “not up to its composer’s highest standard” it was hardly the most appropriate piece to use for such a comparison.42 Quite what the periodical would have made of Maclean’s comments on the 1904 Gloucester Festival is debatable; for once again his praise for Parry is tempered by an implicit rebuke to Elgar. The main review of the festival for the Zeitschrift was written by the pro-Elgar critic Herbert Thompson, who dwelt chiefly on the performances of The Apostles (which was receiving its Three Choirs premiere) and Parry’s oratorio The Love that Casteth out Fear.43 Maclean added a postscript to Thompson’s report, in which he extols Parry in terms similar to his article of the previous year: The Love was the “master-work of the festival”; Parry’s diatonic language showed “capacities for still further budding and blossoming”; and “the effect … of this newest work of Parry’s on all right-minded musicians was prodigious.” In his closing comments comes the pointed gibe: “Such results achieved by a composer who never makes a bid for popularity might give cause to those who are on the crest of a wave to institute heart-searchings as to how much of the mountebank there may not be mixed up in their own art.”44 This reference is so transparent that Maclean hardly needed to invoke the composer’s name; the Elgar Festival at Covent Garden had taken place barely six months earlier and, as Thompson had noted, The Apostles attracted a larger audience at Gloucester than Elijah.

  As it is Elgar’s popular appeal, once again, that damns him, it is worth putting Fuller-Maitland’s and Maclean’s objections into context, for their remarks are the ancestors of Edward J. Dent’s notorious critique of the composer in Guido Adler’s Handbuch der Musikgeschichte (1924, rev. 1930), in which Elgar’s music is described as “too emotional and not quite free from vulgarity.”45 That vulgarity was a concern for early-twentieth-Century British music critics should not be surprising. The development of mass consumer culture in cities, epitomized by the growth of urban popular song and the growing respectability of music hall, provided attractions for potential audiences that were far removed from the internationally respected Tonkunst the critics were seeking to establish. Admittedly, these new stimulations might ignite a creative spark; Elgar himself argued that vulgarity “often goes with inventiveness” and that “in the course of time [it] may be refined.”46 But his was a minority view. More typical was that of C. Fred Kenyon, who saw musical vulgarity not as a raw material from which works of art might be fashioned, but as an unwelcome by-product of success: vulgarity was “the most insidious, and most deadly, and yet most popular of all vices.” In Kenyon’s eyes, a composer who possessed genius (“the highest gifts that the gods can bestow”) had no business seeking worldly pleasures, which was simply greediness on his part.47

  Elgar’s detractors do not accuse him of greed; indeed, if anything, the remarks above suggest that the resentment toward the composer from some within renaissance circles owed less to vulgarity per se, and more to Elgar’s post-Düsseldorf fame—hardly surprising, perhaps, given that Strauss’s toast had been dismissive of those who had spent the previous twenty years trying to advance the prospects of British music. Maclean’s defensive comment that “we have more than one composer” reveals just how sensitively the higher echelons of British musical opinion reacted to Strauss’s possibly tipsy reflections, but their attempts to promote other composers met with mixed success.48 Proposals to hold a National Festival of British Music in November 1903 at which “too much attention will not be given to the music and musicians who have been unduly prominent of late” came to nothing. Indeed, the prospect that this festival might be run on “Royal College lines” caused Musical Opinion’s columnist Common Time to remark that the Royal College had a repu
tation for self-advancement, and that “their idea of the best interests of the art [was] too limited by personal considerations.”49 By contrast, the Elgar Festival at Covent Garden in March 1904 was both artistically and financially successful—more so, indeed, than the Beethoven and Strauss festivals that had taken place in London the previous year.50

  Ironically, this London success occurred within a year of another source of resentment toward Elgar among London critics: the composer’s pronouncement, in a public letter to Rev. Canon Charles Gorton prior to the 1903 Morecambe Festival, that “unknown to the sleepy London press … the living centre of music in Great Britain is not London, but somewhere farther North.”51 The letter was reprinted in the festival brochure, from where it was copied by the Musical Times. The heated response it generated from critics was considerable: as one Musical Standard editorial put it, London’s critics were “annually driven near crazy during the months of May, June and part of July in the process of deciding which of the forty (or more) concerts per week need their personal attention … [Elgar] should remember, at all events, that there is other music besides part-songs and oratorios.”52 Whether Fuller-Maitland, Maclean et al. took personally Elgar’s description of a “sleepy” London press, uninterested in provincial music making, is a moot point. But it is hard to imagine that it did not color their views of the composer. It is surely no accident that this period coincided with a hardening of Fuller-Maitland’s stance toward Elgar. It is likely, too, to have contributed to the often negative reaction to Elgar’s professorial lectures two years later, when the composer appeared at times to take a consciously anti-metropolitan stance, notably when he hinted that Leipzig (rather than London) might prove the most appropriate model for music making in Birmingham.53

  A more profound reason for this resentment of Elgar’s popularity was his unsuitability as an exemplar. The future of British music was a major concern for many critics, who saw one of their functions as promoting the best British composers and their works to as wide an audience as possible in the hope that a younger generation, an elusive “School of British Composition,” might be inspired to follow in their wake. (Maclean’s articles in the Zeitschrift are one manifestation of this; Fuller-Maitland’s favorable comparison of his five renaissance “leaders” with the Russian Kuchka is another.)54 But the “School of British Composition” had to consist of the right kind of composer; not everyone was welcome to join this exclusive club. In the critical critics’ eyes, the aristocratic Parry qualified for membership, but Elgar, the tradesman’s son, did not. A comparison of the language used to describe the two composers is most revealing. Parry’s “loftiness” and “aloofness” hint at a social and artistic elitism from which Elgar’s “extra-ordinarily common” writing (and ordinary background) automatically excluded him. Parry’s music was described by Maclean as a “direct product of academic olive-groves.” Elgar, however, was not only uneducated but implicitly undisciplined, trusting “little if at all to intellect” and “rush[ing] wholly on impulse.”55 Parry’s diatonicism and his emphasis on musical ideas rather than color provided evidence for the “purity of his artistic ideals”; Elgar was overreliant on virtuosic orchestration and “ultra-modern” chromaticism that might mask a deficiency in technique elsewhere.56 Above all, Parry possessed a “power” and emotional control that had its roots in the manly self-restraint of “muscular Christianity,” the very embodiment of Victorian public school values. It is not without significance that Fuller-Maitland refers to the “purity” of Parry’s artistic ideals. That same self-restraint and, implicitly, purity was lacking in the more volatile, stylistically protean Elgar.

  In short, the critical language used to describe the two composers forms part of a system of binary oppositions: Parry consistently embodies the positive, hegemonic values of the normative Self, Elgar the negative values of the Other. Given this construction of the two, there was no way that Elgar might have been held up as a model for younger composers to emulate because he was defined expressly in opposition to the one composer, Parry, who was regarded as a salutary—and characteristically British—influence for the young. Ironically, the discourse used by Fuller-Maitland and Maclean to describe Parry’s music is used by pro-Elgar critics to describe his work, as is illustrated by three comments about The Apostles: Alfred Kalisch wrote of the score’s “power and beauty and spiritual elevation”; Herbert Thompson referred to Elgar’s “masterful” weaving together of the score; and Robert Buckley, comparing the work to Gerontius, commented that it is “of more masculine fibre, and with all its passion, has greater reserve. And greater reserve means greater dignity.”57 The ideological values shared by these three writers were the same as those of the critical critics; even the vocabulary is virtually identical. The only difference is in the object of approbation.

  The binary oppositions outlined above can perhaps be summed up by reference to an article by Henry Hadow, titled “Some Tendencies in Modern Music,” which appeared in the Edinburgh Review in October 1906. Once again, Parry is praised for his depth of purpose (“his prevalent mood is one of serious earnest[ness]”), his emotional restraint (Parry “minimis[ed] the appeal to the senses, concentrating his whole force on the intimate expression of religious or philosophic truth”), and his ability to depict “the awe and mystery which surround the confines of human life” in musically simple ways. Above all, Parry embodied the national character, and in a way that drew sustenance from his artistic forebears:

  Throughout his work he employs an idiom of pure English as distinctly national as that of Purcell himself. He is the spokesman of all that is best in our age and country, its dignity, its manhood, its reverence; in his music the spirit of Milton and Wordsworth may find its counterpart.58

  Conversely, Hadow’s criticisms of Elgar echo those of Fuller-Maitland and Maclean. Gerontius offered proof that Elgar’s music “invariably falters” before the “highest and noblest conceptions” and that his “extraordinary skill of orchestration covers … an occasional weakness of idea,” while in The Apostles, there is a “want of largeness and serenity” in Elgar’s handling of the music. This, Hadow claimed, was caused by Elgar’s leitmotif technique: the motifs were “all broken up into little anxious ‘motives,’ which are not blended together but laid like tesseræ in a mosaic, each with its own colour and its own shape. No work of equal ability has ever displayed so little mellowness of tone.” In general, Elgar’s style is “somewhat tentative and transitional; it often moves with uncertain step, it often seems to be striving with a thought which it cannot attain.” For these reasons Hadow likened Elgar to Berlioz, as the Frenchman possessed something of the same “wayward brilliance.”59

  “Wayward brilliance,” however, was scarcely a sure foundation for an English school of composition. Elgar’s tentativeness, uncertainty, and mosaiclike orchestration seemed to offer a fragmented, even emasculated, future for English music, compared with the philosophical certainties and wholeness of Victorian manliness embodied in Parry’s music. Not surprisingly, it is Parry, the spiritual heir of English poets, rather than Elgar, the artistic heir of Berlioz, who emerges as the true musical voice of the nation: the Balakirev at the head of Britain’s Kuchka to Elgar’s Tchaikovsky.60

  Elgar, Wagner, and Lyricism

  Hadow’s concerns about Elgar’s use of leitmotifs were as much a matter of personal aesthetics as of technique. As noted above, opinion on Wagner in Britain was divided, with many leading figures within the renaissance set skeptical of the composer, at least as a compositional model and certainly as an ideologue. Hadow was less explicitly anti-Wagner than some, but his pronouncement in 1893 that it was “neither likely nor advisable that [Wagner] should exercise any permanent influence” on composers working in musical genres other than opera or music drama was somewhat ingenuous, to put it mildly.61 Yet this rejection of Wagner outside the theater was consistent with the idealism, derived largely from the critical writings of Hanslick, that pervaded contemporary British musical
thinking. Such idealism found its perfect exemplar in the music of Hanslick’s hero, Johannes Brahms, who provided British composers with a “safe” compositional model that eschewed the extremes associated with Bayreuth.62 The Brahmsian model was realized most fully in Britain by Parry, whose emotional control and moderation in orchestration seems almost the antithesis to Wagner. For Elgar to make use of a Wagnerian orchestra, Wagnerian chromatic harmony, and an extensive network of leitmotifs in Gerontius and The Apostles was, to some extent, to state his allegiance to a composer against whom the leading faction in modern English music had defined itself. Moreover, despite Elgar’s plausible claim that his earliest acquaintanceship with reminiscence motifs had not been in Wagner but in Mendelssohn’s Elijah, the “thematic analyses” to Gerontius, The Apostles, and The Kingdom, which were written by Jaeger under the composer’s supervision, and which listed the works’ different motifs, were clearly based on Hans von Wolzogen’s Handbücher for audiences at Bayreuth.63 Comparisons with Wagner were thus inevitable.

  These comparisons were often negative, notably with regard to The Apostles, where the composer’s leitmotif technique attracted unfavorable comments. For instance, J. H. G. Baughan of the Musical News felt that the piece lacked spontaneity and that Elgar’s use of leitmotifs elicited only boredom; the opening of Part II, indeed, was castigated as “bald, means absolutely nothing; and must surely have been written in a hurry.”64 This much we might expect from a critic who had previously claimed of Gerontius that it “lacked novelty and real inspiration,” that “the feminine whine and excessive love of minor harmonies” made “many of the score’s pages more painful than artistically impressive,” and that its “frequent faded feeling and morbidity” compared unfavorably with the “virility” and “robustness” of Elgar’s earlier (and more conservative) King Olaf.65 But criticism of this same passage in The Apostles also came from one of the most ardent advocates of Gerontius, Ernest Newman, for whom it had “no musical raison d’être. You could play the themes in any order you liked without any sense of discontinuity.” The problem with the oratorio, Newman argued, was that Elgar’s primary concern was to depict a literary narrative, which he achieved through juxtaposing motifs irrespective of musical sense. According to Newman, the music was incapable of developing “an organic life of its own… . In no modern work have leading motives been employed so woodenly and with such lack of variety.”66 This charge was echoed by a critic whose views of the composer generally fell between J. H. G. Baughan and Newman, namely Common Time: