Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  Several of the musicians with whom Elgar played chamber music at this early stage in his career were men: Charles Buck, Basil Nevinson (“B.G.N.” of the twelfth Enigma variation), Hew David Steuart-Powell (“H.D.S-P.” of the second Enigma variation), Frank Webb, and others. But just as many were women: the Fittons, Buck’s mother, Webb’s sisters, and others. Women also played important roles in organizing local musical institutions. Pianist Winifrid Norbury (“W.N.” of the eighth Enigma variation) was one of the cofounders and first secretaries of the Worcestershire Philharmonic Society, formed in 1897 with Elgar as its conductor. Serving on the society’s committee was the one member of the aristocracy with whom Elgar developed a friendship at this early stage in his career: Lady Mary Lygon (1869–1927), daughter of the sixth Earl Beauchamp. Lygon was a dynamic character and enthusiastic musician who founded and often conducted at a local competition festival at the family estate, Madresfield Court. She, too, was almost certainly immortalized in an Enigma variation—the contested thirteenth variation, headed “***.”

  Much of Elgar’s working life from the 1870s on was spent teaching the violin, usually to women. It is hardly surprising that he hated teaching the violin, as the need to earn his living by teaching was a constant reminder that he had not succeeded either as a soloist or a composer. By the 1890s he was giving numerous private lessons in Worcester and Malvern and at two girls’ schools (The Mount and Worcestershire Girls’ High School). One of the musical manifestations of women’s expanding opportunities at the end of the nineteenth century was the “violin craze” of the 1880s and ’90s, when increasing numbers of women took up the violin, despite the fact that in the earlier part of the century the violin had not been considered a suitable instrument for a “lady.” Contemporary critics were quick to comment on this phenomenon. In 1885 a journalist noted that “female violin virtuosi (beg your pardon, virtuose) are now springing up like mushrooms.”23 Four years later a reviewer of the all-female Shinner Quartet waxed lyrical: “In no instance is the present expansion of female emancipation more apropos than in the cultivation of the ‘queen of instruments’ by the doights effilés of the beau sexe.”24 Many of these female violin pupils wanted to take their playing outside the home and play with others, though still retaining their genteel status as amateurs. One of the earliest references to a British women’s amateur ensemble dates from 1880 when an “Orchestra of Ladies” (although five of the twenty-five players were men) played at a Musical Festival in Newbury. The orchestra was led by a Mr. J. S. Liddle, violin teacher of many of the performers.25

  A year later, in 1881, the Dundee Ladies’ Orchestra gave its first performance. This group was a string orchestra of thirty-one women who were all pupils of the conductor, Arthur Haden.26 Their accompanist was Florence Marshall, who was later to start her own predominantly female amateur orchestra.27 Hildegard Werner, a Swedish teacher and journalist who had settled in Newcastle, banded her pupils into her Ladies’ Mignon String Orchestra in 1885.28 One of her pupils was Marie Hall (1884–1947), Britain’s first native-born violin virtuoso.29

  Elgar was quick to realize the financial possibilities of organizing a similar amateur ensemble of his own female violin pupils. In December 1887 he wrote to his friend Buck: “Jape! I have started a Ladies Orchestral Class & have sixteen fair fiddlers all in two rows & I direct their graceful movements; it is doing well & I think will pay very well & flourish another season.”30 He also used the group for playing through new works—in 1892, for example, rehearsing his Serenade for Strings with them. One member remarked wryly of this practice: “He’s always writing these things and trying them out on us.”31

  Like Werner, Elgar gave Marie Hall some violin lessons; these lessons paid off many years later when in 1916 she made the first recording of his Violin Concerto.32 The headmistress of The Mount school in Malvern, Rosa Burley, who was to become one of Elgar’s friends, also took violin lessons from him. Yet another significant pupil, this time studying piano accompaniment, was a local major-general’s daughter, Caroline Alice Roberts. In 1889, Alice Roberts became Elgar’s devoted and endlessly supportive wife in defiance of family and friends horrified at the very thought of knowing someone whose father was “in trade.”

  An enormous amount has been written over the years on Alice Elgar and the various women in Elgar’s life, from Helen Weaver and Rosa Burley to Alice Stuart-Wortley and Vera Hockmann. These writings have explored the often intense and passionate nature of Elgar’s relationships with these and other women—all of whom, in various ways, invested vast amounts of energy in nurturing and supporting the moody and self-doubting composer. But little has been written about the keen musicality of many of these women or that it was their musical talents rather than (or at least as well as) their feminine charms that inspired Elgar to write pieces for them and dedicate works to them. In many ways the musical worlds in which Elgar felt most comfortable and at ease were the feminized spaces of the private drawing room or the society salon.

  In the years after his marriage and the success of the Enigma Variations, Elgar started to move in somewhat different, more exalted musical circles. He became an honored denizen of the world of upper-class music making, a milieu similar to that which Mary Gladstone had written about in the 1870s and ’80s. Some of these society contacts were made through his increasingly high public profile as a composer and some through his wife, Alice, as she was born into a higher social class and so was at ease with and had an entrée into this world. She was also a creative, artistic woman in her own right, described by one of her friends as “a woman of great culture.”33 She had published a novel (Marchcroft Manor, 1882) as well as stories, essays, and poems before her marriage, and had also studied the piano in Brussels.34

  One of Elgar’s most useful and supportive contacts was made directly through Alice in 1901 when, at the Leeds Festival, she renewed her acquaintance with Antonia Kufferath (1857–1939), the daughter of her Brussels piano teacher.35 Antonia was a talented singer who was now married to Edward Speyer (1839–1934), a wealthy German-Jewish banker and enthusiastic music lover whose father had been a friend of Weber, Spohr, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Meyerbeer, and Rossini.36 Edward Speyer had settled in England in 1859 at the age of twenty, becoming an English subject in 1869. Antonia was his second wife. He first saw her singing at a concert in Frankfurt in 1885 and was later to describe the impact of her artistry in his memoirs:

  Her soprano voice, though not of a particularly robust or bravura character, was of considerable compass, of the finest quality, & trained to a state of perfection. Her diction was exceptionally clear … but it was the truly musical & aesthetic side of her art, with its exquisite poetry & warmth of passion, which completely overwhelmed me.37

  Antonia’s public career ended with her marriage, but she continued to sing in private. In 1902 Elgar dedicated the song “Speak, Music” (text by A. C. Benson) to Antonia. The Elgars soon became frequent guests at the Speyers’ estate, Ridgehurst in Hertfordshire, where their hosts’ musical parties provided numerous opportunities for the composer’s new works or works-in-progress to be heard, as, for example The Apostles in January 1903 and the Cello Concerto in 1919.38 Elgar wrote the recently discovered 42–second “Smoking Cantata” for baritone and very large orchestra on a visit to the Speyers’ home. This whimsical work was a dig at Edward Speyer’s request that his guests not smoke in the house. According to Elgar’s words on the score, this exercise in drollery is a “specimen of an edifying, allegorical, improving, expostulatory, educational, persuasive, hortatory, instructive, dictatorial, magisterial, inadautory work.”39

  The mixture of sport and music at Ridgehurst, unusual for stately homes of the period, would have appealed to Elgar. Among the many musicians who were frequent visitors there in the early twentieth century was Pablo Casals, who recalled arriving to stay with Speyer and announcing: “First we’ll play six sets of tennis and then the two Brahms sextets.”40 Edward Speyer’s cousin Sir Edgar Speyer (1862–193
2) was another influential musical patron and friend of Elgar. Edgar Speyer, born in New York and educated in Frankfurt, settled in England in 1886 as senior partner of the Speyer Brothers Bank.41 He was chairman of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London from 1906 to 1915, contributed to the founding of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, and from 1909 was Honorary Treasurer of the British Antarctic Expedition’s fund.42 He was also head of the Queen’s Hall syndicate and, according to John Bird, was in 1906, “the sole monetary force which kept the Queen’s Hall Orchestra afloat.”43 He was host to many musicians when they visited London, including Debussy, Grieg, and Strauss. Elgar encountered Strauss at Edgar Speyer’s house in 1902.44 In 1921 Speyer was expelled from the Privy Council for so-called pro- German activities during the First World War.45 He had earlier resigned from the Queen’s Hall syndicate and eventually left a hostile and ungrateful Britain.46

  Edgar Speyer married the American violinist Leonora von Stosch (1872–1956), whom he met when she performed at a concert organized by composer Maude Valerie White in the Cotswold village of Broadway.47 Lady Speyer, as she became, had studied with Ysaÿe and made a successful career in the States, following her debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.48 She does not appear to have played professionally after her marriage but was still firmly associated with the violin, as can be seen in John Singer Sargent’s 1907 portrait of her in action. It was Lady Speyer to whom Elgar turned for the earliest private performances of the slow movement of his Violin Concerto in early 1910.49

  The Violin Concerto is, however, more closely associated with one of Elgar’s closest musical women friends, Alice Stuart-Wortley (1862–1936), or “Windflower” as Elgar called her in order to distinguish between the two women named Alice in his life. Stuart-Wortley was not a violinist but rather an accomplished amateur pianist. She was the daughter of the painter John Everett Millais and Effie Gray, and used to play the piano to her father as he worked in his studio.50 Her musicality was clearly helpful to Elgar: apart from reviewing and playing works-in-progress she also helped him prepare for conducting Cesar Franck’s symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1912 by playing it through with him as a piano duet.51 In 1913 Elgar also asked her to learn part of a piano concerto which he had begun to sketch, but even his beloved “Windflower” could not inspire him to finish this score.52

  Many other women active in society musical circles knew and worked with Elgar. Lady Maud Warrender (1870–1945), daughter of the eighth Earl of Shaftesbury, was born Ethel Maud Ashley-Cooper and married naval officer Sir George John Scott Warrender. After his death in 1917 (if not before) she became the lover of American soprano Marcia van Dresser, with whom she lived at her house, called “Leasam,” near Rye.53 Music was central to Maud Warrender’s life. At the age of twenty-one, a family friend persuaded her mother to allow Warrender to take singing lessons from a Signor Caravoglia.54 She soon became a celebrated amateur contralto who organized and participated in innumerable charity concerts, both private and public. Always a supporter of the suffrage movement and women’s rights, Warrender knew and worked with many women musicians and composers including Rebecca Clarke, Ethel Smyth, and Maude Valérie White.55 Alice Dew-Smith once summed up Warrender’s musical reputation in the following limerick:

  There is an enchantress called Maud,

  Her voice!—let me hereby record

  That the angels who hear it

  Turn pale, for they fear it

  May rival their singing to Gawd.56

  In 1908 Elgar wrote one of his best-known songs for her, “Pleading” (text by Arthur Salmon).57 She had earlier, in 1903, organized a concert with the Leeds Choral Union in aid of the Union Jack Club at the Albert Hall, which included the first performance of Elgar’s Coronation Ode. Elgar was one of many musical visitors to Leasam.58

  Warrender clearly became a close friend. Lady Radnor and Mabel Veronica Batten, both notable amateur musicians and patrons, were less close to Elgar but his acquaintance with them served to reinforce the significance of talented, assured, amateur women musicians in his life. Helen Bouverie, Viscountess Folkestone, and later Lady Radnor (?–1929) had studied singing with, among others, Ciro Pinsuti, Pauline Viardot, and Paolo Tosti. Like Warrender, Radnor put her musical talents to use in charitable ventures. She was involved in the People’s Entertainment Society, regularly performed at concerts for “the working men of Battersea,” and started singing classes in Bermondsey.59 But she was best known for her String Band, an ensemble of women string players that she first assembled and conducted in 1881 for a concert that raised £1,000 for the Royal College of Music. The reviewer for the World was impressed: “Imagine a string band of twenty-four young girls of the highest station from about 12 to 17 years old, beautiful for the most part, playing magnificently, producing a pianissimo which would do honour to a professional band… . Lady Folkestone handled the baton like a Costa.”60 Parry composed his Lady Radnor’s Suite for the ensemble; the premiere, with Radnor conducting from memory, was given in June 1894.61 The String Band gave its last performance in 1896, before Elgar became part of the circles in which Lady Radnor moved. But he had taught her eldest son Jack the violin in Malvern and when Elgar first tried to make a name for himself in London, Lady Radnor gave him a letter of introduction “to some of the leading musicians in town.”62 She later became a staunch supporter of his music; Elgar valued her encouragement, treasuring the letters that she wrote to him.63

  Elgar appears to have first met Mabel Veronica Batten (1856–1916) and her lover, novelist Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943), in 1911.64 Batten and Hall were Catholic converts who had a house in the Malverns—both useful qualities for cultivating a friendship with Elgar. Elgar may have met Hall several years earlier as a guest at the house of her stepfather, singing teacher Alberto Visetti.65 Batten had been a renowned society singer who had studied harmony and composition in Dresden and Bruges. In 1902 she was described in an unidentified newspaper as “a pretty, vivacious lady, with a lovely voice and a distinct talent for music.”66 Both Edward and Alice Elgar enjoyed Batten’s company. In 1913, for example, Batten’s diary recorded lunching with Alice Elgar and the composer Liza Lehmann at the Berkeley Hotel.67

  Elgar knew several of the successful women composers who were his contemporaries, many of whom had careers that centered around the private musical world.68 Liza Lehmann (1862–1918), having achieved considerable fame as a professional concert-hall singer, turned to composition after her marriage in 1894. Her first major work was the song cycle for four voices and piano, In a Persian Garden (1896), a setting of extracts from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in Edward Fitzgerald’s popular translation. This work, however, might never have come to public attention were it not for the private musical world. Lehmann had been unable to get the work heard or published, but her friend, the society hostess Angelina Goetz, arranged a performance of it at one of her musical soirees and persuaded the firm of Metzler to publish it. One of the guests at Goetz’s soiree was Hermann Klein, music critic for the Sunday Times, who was so impressed that he took the unusual step of reviewing a work that had been presented at a private concert. With such support, musicians soon took an interest in the cycle, which was to become extraordinarily popular throughout Britain and the United States.69 Elgar, however, was obviously not overly impressed with Lehmann’s work, writing to Alice Stuart-Wortley in 1923, apropos of a stage version of Omar Khayyám at the Court Theatre: “I am not drawn to Liza Lehmann’s music.”70

  Elgar also knew Maude Valérie White (1855–1937). They had several friends and acquaintances in common, such as Frank Schuster, Lady Maud Warrender, and, especially, White’s Broadway neighbor and close friend, the American actor Mary Anderson, later de Navarro. In a letter to Alice Stuart-Wortley of 1927, Elgar records Anderson coming to tea “with messages from Maude White.”71 Both White and de Navarro were Catholics. Elgar’s opinion of White’s songs does not appear to have been recorded but they were so ubiquitous he must have known them, an
d the question of her influence over his own songwriting, an intriguing topic, is unfortunately beyond the scope of this essay.

  It also seems probable that Elgar met Adela Maddison (1863–1929)—they too had several friends and acquaintances in common, including Schuster and Fauré. But no record of a meeting has survived.72 Another composer whose contact with Elgar appears to remain unrecorded is Ethel Smyth (1858–1944). He certainly heard her conduct her own music on at least one occasion, at the first meeting of the Musical League, of which he was president, in Liverpool in 1909.73 Smyth has left her opinion of Elgar’s music, recording in her memoirs John Singer Sargent’s request to her sister: “Do persuade your sister to pretend she likes Elgar’s music.”74

  Whereas Lehmann, Maddison, and White all found a supportive space in the private musical world of turn-of-the-century England, Smyth was rather more ambivalent, perhaps resisting the expectation that, as a woman, this was the sphere in which she was expected to succeed and flourish. With typical stubbornness Smyth refused to make use of or enjoy this kind of musical support. Smyth’s view of amateur musicians was harsh, coming from someone who herself did not need to make a living through her music. Her disparaging remarks about Lady Radnor’s String Band, written in retrospect, contrast sharply with the critical acclaim they attracted from contemporary commentators.75 Maybe, as a woman and a composer, Smyth feared her art might be compromised by too great an association with this private society world, one that was so clearly regarded as a feminized space, chiefly inhabited by women and by foreigners, often German-Jewish musicians or patrons.76