Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  99. Musical Times 53, no. 836 (1 October 1912): 665–66; The Referee similarly spoke of “a touch of the barbaric appropriate to the situation” in the “March of the Moghul Emperors” (17 March 1912), EBM Cuttings, 19.

  100. Cecil Gray, A Survey of Contemporary Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), 78–79.

  101. F. H. Shera, Elgar: Instrumental Works (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 6.

  102. Ronald Taylor, “Music in the Air: Elgar and the BBC,” in Edward Elgar: Music and Literature, ed. Raymond Monk (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 337.

  103. Ibid., 336.

  104. Alex Cohen, “Elgar: Poetic Visions and Patriotic Vigour,” Radio Times, 2 December 1932, 669.

  105. Ibid., 669.

  106. Crump, “Identity of English Music,” 184.

  107. Ibid., 184.

  108. Ibid., 181.

  109. Ernest Newman in the Sunday Times (25 February 1934); quoted in Crump, “Identity of English Music,” 180.

  110. Frank Howes, “The Two Elgars,” Music and Letters 16, no. 1 (January 1935): 26–29.

  111. A. J. Sheldon, Edward Elgar with an introduction by Havergal Brian (London: Office of “Musical Opinion,” 1932), 16.

  112. Howes, “Two Elgars,” 26–29.

  113. A recent manifestation of this is Roger Scruton’s England: An Elegy (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000), which, as its title suggests, mourns the loss of “traditional values” associated with Victorianism while celebrating “the virtues of England” (preface). Elgar’s music, along with that of other supposed purveyors of English pastoralism, is called on as a witness of the now-lost Golden Age: “Hardy, Housman and Edward Thomas; Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Holst, offer the last united invocations of a regional England, in which people were united by the history that divided them… . Theirs was a country of varied agriculture and localised building types, of regional accent and folk song, of local fairs and markets and shows.” (183).

  114. Jeffrey Richards, “Elgar’s Empire,” in Imperialism and Music: Britain 1876–1953 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), 44–87; 45. Richards goes on to reveal his desire to exculpate imperialism from its driving force: profit. Thus, like those Elgar scholars he so readily criticizes, he tries to save Elgar from himself, in this instance by claiming that (British) imperialism was “altruistic,” (53) and that it was “the noble vision at the heart of British imperialism” (84) that inspired Elgar: “The problem is that people have misunderstood the meaning of imperialism, equating it with jingoism and exploitation. To apply the term ‘jingoistic’ to Elgar’s work is to misunderstand his view entirely. His critics should have had more confidence in Sir Edward. Elgar’s vision of Empire was clearly set out at the end of Caractacus: it is a vision of justice, peace, freedom and equality, of the pax Britannica—and of the fulfillment by Britain of its trusteeship mission, to see the countries in its charge brought safely and in due course to independence—a far from ignoble dream.” (51). Actually, the facts are quite to the contrary—far from other people having misunderstood imperialism, it is Richards himself who has failed to grasp the driving force of imperialism, concentrating merely on the pillars of arguments that were constructed to support the colonial enterprise, and which have been laid bare by a generation of postcolonial scholars. Moreover, far from Britain “bringing [them] safely and in due course to independence,” all colonized peoples have fought for their independence, many for over half a century and with considerable loss of life, before forcing the British to leave (especially India, which fought for over fifty years for its freedom).

  115. The most recent volume that contributes to the revisionist Elgar-bild is The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, ed. Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), see esp. the editors’ introduction, 1–14. See also the two books edited by Raymond Monk, Elgar Studies and Edward Elgar: Music and Literature; Charles Edward McGuire, “Functional Music: Imperialism, the Great War, and Elgar as Popular Composer,” in Cambridge Companion to Elgar, 214–24; Byron Adams, “The ‘Dark Saying of the Enigma: Homoeroticism and the Elgarian Paradox,” in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 216–44; Stephen Banfield, “Three of a Kind: Elgar’s Counterpoint,” Musical Times 140 (Summer 1999): 29–37; Michael Allis, “Elgar and the Art of Retrospective Narrative,” Journal of Musicological Research 19 no. 4 (2000): 289–328; Crump, “Identity of English Music,” and John Gardiner, “The Reception of Sir Edward Elgar, 1918–1934: A Reassessment,” Twentieth Century British History 9 (1998): 370–95.

  116. Alain Frogley, “Rewriting the Renaissance: History, Imperialism, and British Music Since 1840,” Music and Letters 84, no. 2 (May 2003): 241–57, 252.

  117. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 39. An entirely contrary tendency, involving the celebration of imperialism and its orientalist works, is visible in the recent work of a number of writers including Richards, “Elgar’s Empire” (see n. 117 ); MacKenzie, who tries to resurrect a respectable face for orientalists of all kinds in his book Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts; James Day, who celebrates the “noble” empire he hears in Elgar’s music, in his book “Englishness” in Music: From Elizabethan Times to Elgar, Tippet and Britten (London: Thames Publishing, 1999); David Cannadine, who attempts to erase race from the imperial equation in his book Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2001); Bernard Porter, who concludes that “imperialism was a veneer,” not only for Elgar but, he suggests, also for Britain in general, in his “Elgar and Empire: Music, Nationalism and the War,” in “Oh My Horses!”: Elgar and the Great War, ed. Lewis Forman (Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 2001), 133–73, 162; and Scruton, who, in his recent article “Islam and Orientalism,” claims that “we” should acknowledge that “Eastern cultures owe a debt to … those noble orientalists [who undertook] the task of rescuing a culture other than their own.” The American Spectator, May 2006, 10–12. This tendency began in the 1980s: Salman Rushdie has argued that the vogue of “Raj revivalism” in that decade—the period of such films as A Passage to India and Gandhi, and of the televised serialization of M. M. Kaye’s The Far Pavilions and Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet—was an attempt to restore the prestige, if not the reality, of the British Empire; see his “Outside the Whale,” in Granta 11 (1984): 125–38; repr. in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (New York and London: Granta Books, 1991), 87–101.

  118. Francis G. Hutchins analyzed the orientalizing of India in his The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967).

  119. Even though Elgar, along with many of his generation, may have resisted this reality, India had been engaged in a dynamic of opposition to colonial rule from the First War of Independence in 1857, with the first Indian National Congress established in 1885 and the Swadeshi, or home rule movement, in 1905.

  Working the Crowd:

  Elgar, Class, and Reformulations of Popular Culture

  at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

  DEBORAH HECKERT

  Opened in 1904 by the visionary impresario Oswald Stoll, the London Coliseum was arguably the most opulent of the Edwardian music halls. It had a particularly unusual feature: an enormously expensive conveyance christened the “King’s Car.” This clumsy, elephantine contraption was a lavishly decorated anteroom on wheels that ran for twenty-six yards on a series of tracks; it was designed to whisk the king and his guests from their carriages directly through a special Royal Entrance to the door of his box. Thus His Majesty would not have to mingle with—or indeed, so much as glance at—any of his subjects. Instead, unsullied by propinquity to the lower classes, the monarch could partake of an entertainment only recently beginning to distance itself from working-class associations. In his lively history of the London Coliseum, The House That Stoll Built, Felix Barker relates the tragicomic fate of the King
’s Car:

  The only recorded occasion on which this unique piece of transport had a chance to prove itself came on a visit by Edward VII. This was shortly after the opening of the theatre, and was the first visit ever paid by a member of the Royal Family to a variety theatre. The royal party climbed in, the manager gave the signal. But instead of moving softly along its tracks, the car stayed quite still. The King passed it off as a joke, but the car never recovered from the disgrace.

  Covered in ignominy, the King’s Car was banished to the Stoll Theater where it gathered dust until it was eventually converted into a supplemental box office during the 1920s.1

  Figure 1. An early photograph of the King’s Car at the London Coliseum.

  Elgar, too, might have wished for a hermetically sealed (or hermeneutically sealed) “Composer’s Car” to whisk him through the portals of his fraught interactions with the popular culture of his day. For the composer’s engagements with mass culture—and the attendant accusations of “vulgarity” leveled at him by elitist critics—have raised some of the most problematic questions in the study of Elgar reception by both his contemporaries and later commentators.2 Since the topic of Elgar’s relationship to popular culture is extraordinarily complex, this essay seeks to explore ways in which envisioning Elgar crossing the Coliseum’s threshold might open the doors for an investigation of the popular, vulgar spaces available to artists during the fin de siècle. Barry J. Faulk and others have argued that new forms of entertainment arising in the late nineteenth century allowed for the transcending of class barriers. In marked contrast to the dubious working-class entertainments of the mid-Victorian period, widely considered by the authorities to be socially disruptive and unsuitable, a new version of popular culture developed as part of a bourgeois field of activity.3 By turning a critical eye on Elgar’s participation in the popular culture of his era, we may well arrive at a clearer understanding of his engagement with modernity.

  For Elgar, who reached the height of his fame in the early years of the twentieth century, an aspect of being a “modern” composer was to step boldly into the arena of mass popular culture, especially as the “popular” had gained new respectability due to its associations with the genteel middle classes. Given Elgar’s family background, his alliance with the middle class was a comfortable and natural step up in social status. Elgar’s father was a provincial piano tuner and freelance musician who raised himself from working class to the lower-middle class by going into trade as part owner of a music shop in Worcester. Despite Elgar’s marriage to a woman who enjoyed a markedly higher social status and his subsequent conflicted attempts to play the county gentleman, the composer was forever branded by some denizens of upper-class society as a social climber from the lower-middle class.4 The extent to which Elgar’s biographers dwell on the class conflicts inherent in his career and character attests to the centrality of this issue. Positioning Elgar against the backdrop of a newly respectable and increasingly uniform middle-class version of mass culture now helps us gain insight into a whole range of Elgar’s compositions that were regarded, in his lifetime and after, as problematic because of their supposed vulgarity. A partial list of such “vulgar” scores might include the Pomp and Circumstance marches and the many works designed to celebrate coronations and other civic occasions; “salon” music, such as Salut d’amour; and much of the incidental music written for theatrical productions. All of this music may be viewed, as it is by Charles Edward McGuire, as “functional music.”5 By composing functional music that appealed to an expanding bourgeois audience, Elgar demonstrated that he was a savvy professional who accurately assessed the possibilities, fiscal and otherwise, that popular culture offered to a British composer during the first decade of the twentieth century.6

  A prerequisite to gaining greater insight into this phenomenon is an exploration of the times and places in which Elgar purveyed music to the masses. Such an investigation must take place on multiple planes, encompassing both the metaphorical and the concrete. An apt place to begin is in the music halls (also known as “variety palaces” or “variety theaters”), which functioned, as noted above, as prominent loci of popular entertainment in the years preceding the First World War. The culture of the music halls has recently attracted a lively amount of attention from historians who study the rise of popular culture, but Elgar’s place in this milieu has rarely been examined in depth.7

  In 1912, Elgar composed a spectacular masque, The Crown of India, op. 66. By creating this piece of functional music, the composer passed the threshold of more than the Coliseum, for he also entered into a metaphorical space understood at the time as “modern.” Furthermore, in that same step, he traversed a series of class boundaries: the slumming royals, the boisterous working classes, and the respectable bourgeoisie. Recent scholarly work on Crown of India rightly investigates its overt imperialistic and orientalist aspects: the score can be viewed as a nexus for issues of national identity and colonial “otherness” that permeated British cultural productions during the late-Victorian, Edwardian, and, indeed, Georgian, eras. Nalini Ghuman, for example, offers an insightful exploration of the imperialist underpinnings of Crown of India in her essay “Elgar and the British Raj: Can the Mughals March?” in this volume. These accounts present a fascinating picture of how the details of the music and production commingled to uphold a set of musical and dramatic conventions that served to encourage (and maintain) the then popular ideologies of empire. Instead of viewing the score through the lens of colonial studies, however, this essay concentrates on the particularly modern artistic and public stance that Elgar adopted in exploiting imperialist tropes within the larger contexts of audience and mass culture.

  The Crown of India as Popular Entertainment

  The commission for the Crown of India masque came from impresario Oswald Stoll, who sought Elgar’s prestige and popularity for the London Coliseum in order to celebrate the state visit of King George V to India in December 1911.8 Stoll planned a sumptuous production for the Coliseum, with a budget of over £3,000 for fabulous costumes and elaborate sets. He hired popular actors and actresses, including the celebrated Nancy Price in the role of “India” (figures 2a and 2b).

  The elaborate libretto was concocted by the playwright and littérateur Henry Hamilton. His text for Crown of India exalted British colonial power as if it were still at its historical peak rather than already in the process of an inexorable decline. (Nalini Ghuman has provided a synopsis of Hamilton’s libretto in her discussion of Crown of India.) Not content to fill the stage with the several groups of dancers, personifications of cities, and the putative national characteristics of both Britain and India, Stoll crowded in courtiers, soldiers, attendants, pages, natives, and a multitude of “etceteras,” providing an opulent visual display that played directly to his public’s colonialist fantasies. In Stoll’s vision, India was characterized as an exotic dreamland firmly controlled by a benign British military, abetted by commercial interests. India was therefore controlled within the space of the theater by the modern gaze of an audience of British consumers.

  Figures 2a and 2b. Publicity stills of Nancy Price as India from the Coliseum production of The Crown of India.

  For this spectacle, designed to cater to the longings of the newly emerging lower-middle and middle classes, Elgar created a richly varied score: introductions, melodramas to support speeches, songs, interludes, and marches that reflect the stereotyped characteristics of an orientalist mode. These sections mined musical representations of non-Western locales that were used throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth.9 Such characteristics—including discreet chromaticism, “exotic” percussion, and piquant harmonies—had long been exploited by British composers who specialized in short, light orchestral works often featured prominently in concert halls such as the Crystal Palace. Such exotic tropes are also found in music for the theater, both serious and comic, and above all in the extensive corpus of parlor songs with orientalist lyrics
, such as Amy Woodforde-Finden’s famous “Kashmiri Song.”10 In Crown of India, these standard elements of exoticism emerge in music designed to characterize the “East,” whereas British characters are portrayed through hearty diatonic tunes.

  Once the score was complete, Elgar threw himself enthusiastically into preparations for the premiere.11 He conducted cast rehearsals, both for the chorus and the soloists, often as accompanist at the piano. He rehearsed the pit orchestra as well. During the first two weeks of the run, Elgar conducted two performances of the masque daily, and often called additional rehearsals as needed. This tremendous effort exhausted the aging composer and, by its end, exacerbated an inner ear problem that ultimately required a stay in a nursing home.12

  Crown of India was first performed on March 11, 1912; Elgar’s participation in its run ended on March 23 (figures 3a and 3b). The production was unquestionably a commercial success. Nevertheless, some critics at the time—and several commentators since—considered it beneath a composer of Elgar’s stature: the creation of such a frankly commercial score could not be received with universal approbation.13 Concerns about the composer’s involvement in a populist spectacle were voiced by a reporter who interviewed him for the Standard just before the premiere of The Crown of India. In response, Elgar mounted a public defense:

  Sir Edward Elgar would commit himself to no special opinion regarding his first definite contribution to the programme of a big music-hall. “It is hard work, but it is absorbing, interesting,” he said, during pause in the proceedings. “The subject of the Masque is appropriate to this special period in English history, and I have endeavoured to make the music illustrate and illuminate the subject.”14

  Elgar’s statement reads as a thinly veiled attempt to give the commission greater dignity through an appeal to patriotism. However, the composer’s motives for accepting such commercial projects were more personal in nature.