Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  72. Charles Maclean, “‘La Princesse Osra’ and ‘Der Wald,’” Zeitschrift 3, no. 12 (September 1902): 487.

  73. Charles Maclean, “London Notes,” Zeitschrift 15, no. 10–11 (July-August 1914): 295. Maclean advocated using ballad opera—a genre that was lyrical by its very nature—as the basis for developing a contemporary, consciously English operatic tradition. A composer whose work might be a model for this tradition, he suggested, was Mackenzie, as his style was “one of the most national … we have ever possessed” on account of its “fresh melody, complete individuality, and freedom from foreign models.” By “foreign” Maclean almost certainly meant German, since Mackenzie’s Colomba (1883), about which these remarks were made, owes much to Carmen in both its plot (which is based on a scenario by Merimee) and musical language. See Charles Maclean, “Mackenzie’s ‘Colomba,’” Zeitschrift 11, no. 5 (February 1910): 142–45.

  74. For a further example of a critic who regarded Elgar’s approach to melody as unpatriotic, see George Lowe and Diogenes, “English Music: Two Views,” Musical Opinion 31 (December 1907): 179–81. According to the pseudonymous Diogenes, “In the place of clear straightforward understandable writing, we find vague heavy most un-English and uninspired phrases loosely and often incoherently strung together. ‘Musical mosaics’ never have been and never will be great music; and great music is what we want and what we must have if we are to be a musical nation” (180).

  75. Ernest Walker, A History of Music in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 306.

  76. Common Time, “Musical Gossip of the Month,” Musical Opinion 24 (July 1901): 683.

  77. W[alter] B[ernhard], “My Note Book,” Musical Opinion 32 (February 1909): 245.

  78. Charles Maclean, “On Some Tendencies of Form as Shown in the Most Modern Compositions,” Proceedings of the Musical Association 22 (1895–96): 153–81, 179.

  79. C[harles] M[aclean], “London,” “Notizien,” Zeitschrift 7, no. 5 (February 1906): 204.

  80. Maclean described him as the “greatest of living musicians” in “Music and Morals,” Zeitschrift 8, no. 12: 462. The more liberal Alfred Kalisch described him as “the greatest, if not the only great force in the music of to-day, and destined to have a permanent and prominent place in the history of music.” “Musikberichte,” London section, Zeitschrift 4, no. 10 (July 1903): 627.

  81. “Teutonised France,” in “Comments on Events,” Musical News 24 (10 January 1903): 30.

  82. “Musikberichte,” London section, Zeitschrift 4, no. 10 (July 1903): 631. Indeed, Maclean follows this quotation with a negative review of the London premiere of Gerontius at Westminster Cathedral on June 6, 1903.

  83. Quoted in C[harles] M[aclean], “Musikberichte,” London section, Zeitschrift 6, no. 7 (April 1905): 294. See also “Richard Strauss’s Music,” in “Comments on Events,” Musical News 24 (18 April 1903): 363, for a report of a debate between the decadent poet Arthur Symons (in the Monthly Review) and Ernest Newman (in the Speaker) regarding the merits of Strauss’s orchestral music. Symons had argued that “Strauss has no fundamental musical ideas (ideas, that is, which are great as music apart from their significance to the understanding, their non-musical significance).” Newman defended the German composer.

  84. E. A. Baughan, “The Gloucester Festival: The New Works,” 185. A similar point was made by E[dwin] E[vans, Sr.], “Comments and Opinions,” “The Elgar Festival: Second Evening,” The Musical Standard 66 (19 March 1904): 180.

  85. Hadow, “Some Tendencies,” 393–94.

  86. Thompson, “The English Autumn Provincial Festivals,” 176.

  87. Quoted in “Notes on News,” Musical Opinion 28 (October 1904): 18; Charles L. Graves, “Elgar’s First Symphony” (2 January 1909), chap. 5 in Post-Victorian Music with Other Studies and Sketches, 38.

  88. Walker, A History of Music in England, 306–7.

  89. Byron Adams, “Elgar’s Later Oratorios,” in Cambridge Companion to Elgar, 81–105.

  90. Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 2–5, quoted in Adams, “Elgar’s Later Oratorios,” 85.

  91. Common Time, “Musical Gossip of the Month,” Musical Opinion 27 (November 1903): 112.

  92. Charles Maclean, review of Hugo Riemann, Introduction to Playing from Score (London: Augener, 1905), “Kritische Bücherschau,” Zeitschrift 7, no. 7 (April 1906): 296.

  93. F. J. Sawyer, “Modern Harmony: Exemplified in the Works of Elgar, Strauss and Debussy,” Musical Opinion 29 (August 1906): 816–17; Musical Opinion 30 (October 1906): 26.

  94. Newman, Elgar, 80–81.

  95. Hadow, “Some Tendencies,” 391–92.

  96. Hadow, English Music, 158–59.

  97. Italics added. The importance of “imagined communities” in modern nationalism has been identified by Benedict Anderson; see his Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso 1991).

  Elgar and the Salons:

  The Significance of a Private Musical World

  SOPHIE FULLER

  The Bank of England has a tradition of embellishing its banknotes with famous British public figures. Those celebrated have included an engineer (George Stephenson), an architect (Christopher Wren), a statesman (the first Duke of Wellington), scientists (Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, and Michael Faraday), writers (Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare), and social reformers (Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale). In June 1999, the Bank issued a new 20–pound note, replacing Michael Faraday (who had himself replaced William Shakespeare) with its first musician, Edward Elgar.1 Elgar is represented from the shoulders up, staring into the distance, in a drawing probably made from a photograph taken sometime in the first decade of the twentieth century. His hair is starting to thin and turn gray but the famous, resplendent moustache is still dark.2 The rest of the banknote shows a reclining female figure, labeled “St. Cecilia,” resting a portative organ on her lap; a trumpet-playing angel (presumably a reference to The Dream of Gerontius); and the west face of Worcester Cathedral, the Three Choirs Festival venue associated with many of Elgar’s public triumphs, and also, of course, the cathedral of the town in which he grew up, and close to which he lived for much of his life.

  The banknote is a pertinent acknowledgment of Elgar as one of England’s leading cultural figures—a clear demonstration of the place he holds in the British public consciousness at the start of the twenty-first century. It is above all as a public figure that Elgar is celebrated today. Knighted in 1904, made Master of the King’s Musick in 1924 and a baronet in 1931, he is most widely celebrated as the composer of the Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1 (“Land of Hope and Glory”), played every year without fail during the Last Night of the Proms—the culmination of a concert series modestly billed by the BBC on their website as “The World’s Greatest Classical Music Festival.”3 Despite the best efforts of a new generation of Elgar scholars to show other sides to the composer, Elgar the man is popularly regarded as an example of the stereotypical English Edwardian, whose gruff, pompous exterior masked considerable inner turmoil and emotion. The musical compositions that Elgar is most respected for, by both scholars and music lovers, are large-scale orchestral and choral works: the two symphonies, the two concertos, the three mature oratorios, and the Variations on an Original Theme, op. 36 (the Enigma Variations).4 During his lifetime, however, probably the most commercially successful and best known of Elgar’s works was the short Salut d’amour for violin and piano (1888), an elegant salon piece, endlessly arranged for other instrumental combinations and still widely available on a range of compilation albums, including Radiance 2: Music for Wine and Candlelight and Perfect Summer Wedding.5

  Music and the composers who created it have long held a conflicted place in British cultural life. As far back as the eighteenth century, music was generally regarded as the domain of those standing outside the mainstream of intellectual and artistic thought. The professional musician was
usually expected to be a lower-class foreigner, and amateur music was stigmatized and dismissed as an upper-class female accomplishment.

  The position of the musician and assumptions about his, and increasingly her, class or nationality were rapidly changing during the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, throughout that century and well into the next, male musicians faced the stigma of being perceived as effeminate or womanly. During the period usually characterized as the “British Musical Renaissance,” and in the retelling of the musical history of that period throughout the twentieth century, there was a continual self-conscious attempt to move music away from its associations with the feminine and the foreign—to create a full-blooded “masculine” and British music. In 1889, for example, an anonymous writer in The Musical Times tried to dissociate male musicians from the female, feminine, and effeminate, arguing that “effeminacy and capriciousness, so far from being essential characteristics of all musicians, are only the accidental qualities of some,” and that “the manlier an artist has proved himself to be, the better musician, ex ipso facto, has he generally been.” Drawing clear parallels between the effeminate and the drawing room, he wrote:

  About these pests of the drawing-room congregates a swarm of pallid dilettanti, cosmopolitan in sentiment, destitute of any manly vigour or grit, who have never played cricket or been outside a house in their lives. It is from contact with these nerveless and effeminate natures that the healthy average well-born Briton recoils in disgust and contempt.6

  From Hubert Parry to Ralph Vaughan Williams and beyond, male composers created images—or had images created for them—that stressed suitable vigor and grit. In his 1926 biography of Parry, Charles L. Graves passes swiftly over Parry’s socialism and feminism to concentrate on portraying him as above all a sportsman and gentleman, “robust, manly, and intrepid.”7 Images of Elgar, images encouraged by the composer himself and constructed for him by contemporary and later commentators, are similarly full of contradictions. As early as 1903, a journalist wrote, “Dr. Elgar gives no hint of the popular notion of a musician, and might pass for an Army officer in mufti [more] than anything else.”8 One of his close friends was to remark: “Elgar possessed extreme sensitivity, great tenderness of feeling and pronounced emotional qualities… . Outbursts of almost boisterous humour often alternated curiously with his reticence.”9 The upright, military figure who seemed reluctant to admit to being a musician, who loved golf, bicycling, and dogs, and sold his violin to buy a billiard table seems far removed from the man who cried when he conducted his own music and could write of that music (in this case the Violin Concerto): “It’s good! Awfully emotional! Too emotional but I love it.”10 It would be too simplistic to see this dichotomy merely as a tension between a public facade and a private personality. But it does seem bound up with the tensions between late-Victorian and Edwardian expectations of manliness and an expressive sensitiveness associated with femininity.

  It is certainly clear that Elgar desired to be a public figure, aching for recognition in the form of civic honors, longing for enthusiastic capacity audiences for performances of large-scale works at prestigious venues.11 He was always acutely aware that his Catholic, provincial, lower-class, self-educated background set him apart from the apparently effortless ease and confidence of those from the Protestant, upper-middle-class, Oxbridge, conservatory musical establishment—men such as Hubert Parry or Charles Villiers Stanford. But it is worth remembering that he shared his outsider status with several other contemporary composers such as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (whose father was African), Rutland Boughton (a political radical), and Ethel Smyth. Smyth, like Elgar, felt perpetually slighted by what she called “the Machine,” blaming her gender and her German musical education for the establishment’s neglect.

  The public musical world of the late nineteenth century that Elgar and Smyth aspired to was one of large choral festivals, such as the longestablished annual Three Choirs Festival held alternately in the three cathedral towns of Gloucester, Worcester, and Hereford; of orchestral concert series at venues such as London’s St. James’s Hall and the Crystal Palace in Sydenham; of ballad concerts where the best-selling songs of the day were sung by the most popular vocalists of the day; and of chamber music series such as the high-brow Monday and Saturday Popular concerts at which leading performers such as pianist Clara Schumann or violinist Joseph Joachim were heard. This was a world closely connected to the music conservatories such as London’s Royal College of Music and endlessly chronicled in the music reviews of the daily newspapers. But it was by no means the only musical world of fin de siècle Britain. This was a time when private music making provided vibrant, stimulating, yet now virtually unacknowledged opportunities for performers, composers, and audiences.12 Private music making took place in the lavish music rooms of the artistically inclined upper classes, the drawing rooms of the well-to-do middle classes, and around the family piano in rather less well-off homes. In these private worlds the audience—if there was one—was invited rather than paying. The amateur musician played an important part in such private milieus, often—in upper-class venues—on the same platform or in the same room as the professional, insofar as the two categories could easily be distinguished in these settings. Private music making provided a space for more than the genres categorized as “salon music,” now denigrated works such as character piano pieces, songs, and ballads.13 Such works were certainly heard in drawing rooms, but so were both established classics and adventurous new music.

  Besides groups of friends and family gathering to play together (often but not exclusively from the educated middle classes), private music making included the society gatherings organized by the celebrated music patrons of the day, such as Mabel Veronica Batten, Lady Gladys de Grey (later Marchioness of Ripon), Lady Radnor, Frank Schuster, and Edgar Speyer, women and men who also gave considerable support to struggling performers, composers, and institutions. At a time when women were only gradually moving into a more public musical sphere—whether as instrumentalists, composers, critics, or conductors—these gatherings provided a supportive space where they were able to work and perform alongside their male contemporaries. It helped, of course, that many of the women patrons and amateur musicians came from the assured, confident upper or upper-middle classes. Their education had stressed the acquisition of accomplishments—including singing and piano playing, alongside painting with watercolors or learning European languages—and many of them acquired considerable musical skills. The private musical world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a decidedly feminized space.14

  The world of society musicians is one that Mary Gladstone (1847–1927), the music-obsessed daughter of prime minister William Gladstone, recorded extensively in the thirteen volumes of her diaries.15 Mary Gladstone was an accomplished pianist who endlessly accompanied her friends (usually when they played arrangements of “great works” for concertina and piano) as well as performing at more formal private events and public charity concerts. Her diaries are invaluable in providing one of the few detailed accounts of society musical gatherings in the late nineteenth century. Gladstone attended enormous numbers of musical events—from opera at Covent Garden and orchestral concerts at St. James’s Hall or Crystal Palace to private, society concerts—often given after dinner and involving the same high-profile performers as the public concerts. One of her early entries records an after-dinner party in 1870:

  Oh, my winkie, Joachim played. It was marvellous. I was introduced to him and my feelings were nearly too many for me. An Andante of Mozart’s, but the great thing was a Concerto of Mendelssohn’s, Sullivan accompanying on the P[iano].F[orte]. I am so excited with the remembrance, I can hardly write.16

  Other entries record events such as an 1876 house party at Lord Brownlow’s estate at Ashridge Park, with guests including the violinist Wilma Neruda (later Lady Hallé), whom Gladstone herself accompanied in the slow movement of a Beethoven violin sonata.17 British composers of the music
al establishment, as well as performers, writers, and critics were also to be found at these private musical parties. In 1877, Gladstone went to Frank Balfour’s “very higher ground Concert. Not a thing I had heard before. The new Brahms Liebeslieder were really beautiful, Henschell [sic] sang most satisfactorily, and Richter, and Hubert Parry’s delightful Violin Suite took extremely well.”18 In 1880 she recorded J. A. Fuller-Maitland playing Chopin “beautifully” at a party given by the Tennysons.19 In May 1883 she dined with the Stanfords in Cambridge: “After dinner Gompertz came and played Joe’s [Joseph Joachim’s] Hungarian concerto. Mr. S[tanford] played some of Hubert’s [Hubert Parry’s] new symphony, the Scherzo and Trio delicious.”20

  While Gladstone was accompanying Neruda at Ashridge or listening to new music at Frank Balfour’s soirees, Elgar was still firmly ensconced in the musical world of Worcester, coming up to London for the occasional violin lesson or orchestral concert. One wonders if Elgar also attended the Rubinstein concert on April 21, 1877, which Gladstone vividly described as “a real rotten Concert, bad, flashy, vulgar music played to perfection, such a sarcasm, it was fun watching him and his marvellous performance on the [Piano Forte], but really as a composer!?”21 Elgar, like Gladstone, was involved in musical events in which both amateurs and professionals, women and men, took part. In the late 1870s he was the leader of the Worcester Amateur Instrumental Society and the Worcester Philharmonic as well as a violinist in the orchestra for the Three Choirs Festival when it came to Worcester. This was public music making, but Elgar also spent much time playing music with friends in private. This was not yet the society world he was to start moving in after his marriage and the success of the Enigma Variations, but it was still one in which talented women played a significant part. In the 1880s, he frequently took part in musical evenings at Severn Grange, home of the proprietor of an organ-building firm. Among the other regular musical guests here was Harriet Fitton, an amateur pianist who had studied in Germany and London and who played for the Herefordshire Philharmonic Society.22 Elgar frequently played chamber music with Fitton and anyone else staying at her Malvern house, including her two daughters, Hilda and Isabel. Isabel, to whom he gave viola lessons, was immortalized in the sixth Enigma variation as “Ysobel.”