Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  In his account of the period from 1910 to 1912 when the masque was composed, Jerrold Northrop Moore reveals Elgar’s anxiety over his persistent financial difficulties, especially the debts accrued through the composer’s ill-considered move into Severn House, a large and expensive edifice in Hampstead. Stoll’s lavish budget for the masque included a sizable fee for the composer, with additional funds for Elgar if he agreed to conduct it during the first two weeks.15 Elgar wrote a somewhat defensive letter to Frances Colvin outlining the fiscal benefits of the masque:

  Figure 3a. A playbill publicity insert for the Coliseum production of The Crown of India.

  Figure 3b. A program for an evening at the Coliseum in March 1913, including The Crown of India

  When I write a big serious work e.g. Gerontius we have had to starve & go without fires for twelve months as a reward: this small effort allows me to buy scientific works I have yearned for & I spend my time between the Coliseum & the old bookshops … Also I can more easily help my poor people [his brother and sisters’ families]—so I don’t care what people say about me—the real man is only a very shy student & now I can buy books… . I go to the N. Portrait Gallery & can afford lunch—now I cannot eat it… .

  My labour will soon be over & then for the country lanes & the wind sighing in the reeds by Severn side again & God bless the Music Halls!16

  Whether the money was spent on such purchases, or whether Lady Elgar used it to pay the servants’ salaries at Severn House, is unknown.

  Although the pecuniary rewards of such popular commissions obviously held their appeal for Elgar, he also respected his colleagues at the Coliseum. The timing of the Crown of India commission was suspiciously apposite, as Stoll’s extensive connections in society may have let him hear rumors of the composer’s unstable finances. Stoll was well-known for his successful approaches to “serious” music and theatrical personalities, overtures that were timed to coincide with periods when these artists were short of ready money.17 Stoll’s shrewd premise was that once the great and good, baited by cash, encountered the Coliseum’s high artistic standards and respectability, they would become advocates.18 Clearly, Stoll’s strategy worked with Elgar: in the letter to Colvin quoted above, Elgar also wrote, “It’s all very curious & interesting & the people behind the scenes so good & so desperately respectable & so honest & straight-forward—quite a refreshing world after Society—only don’t say I said so.”

  The obvious financial rewards of this commission were clearly not the only inducement for Elgar. As Corissa Gould has observed, he had no qualms about turning down commissions he did not feel suited his temperament, either musical or ideological.19 Rather, Elgar and his wife enjoyed the Coliseum. During the production’s run, Alice Elgar, whose standards of propriety were high indeed, repeatedly took friends and family to the Coliseum to view the entertainment.20 She wrote proudly in letters and diaries of the glories of the production and her husband’s music in a way that strongly conflicts with the notion that either Edward or Alice was embarrassed by the composer’s involvement with the Coliseum.21 Indeed, Elgar relished attending the Coliseum over the years: seeing a performance there of the ballet Little Boy Blue danced by Anton Dolin and Ninette de Valois inspired the composer to send Dolin his Nursery Suite to choreograph as a ballet.22 In 1918 Elgar wrote another work for Stoll and the Coliseum, Fringes of the Fleet, a setting of verse by Rudyard Kipling. In producing works for the Coliseum and its mass audiences, then, Elgar sought to fulfill at least part of what he conceived to be his responsibility as a modern British composer.

  The Nineteenth-Century Music Hall

  If neither Elgar nor his wife were embarrassed by the composer’s sally into Stoll’s Coliseum, then we should not be surprised at the imperialist ideology embedded in his music hall pieces. Recent investigations by Dave Russell, Penny Summerfield, and Peter Bailey have shown that jingoistic sentiment—a chauvinistic celebration of the British Empire—was an essential feature of a successful music hall revue.23 New data on the content of music hall acts reveal that the sorts of imperialist ideologies represented by Crown of India were present even in the performances by comic singers in workingclass variety palaces. Imperialism was therefore joined inextricably with popular culture in late-Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian music halls. The songs of the music hall stars were at times ambivalent about particular aspects of Britain’s imperialist ambition and the impact of empire building on the lives of workingmen and women, especially during the Second Boer War. Overall, however, support for Britain and its empire, found in overt displays of patriotic sentiment, was a signal way in which the music halls managed to create a unified audience from a disparate group of spectators across a spectrum of class backgrounds.

  But even as positive sentiments toward imperialism seemed to transgress the class boundaries of fin-de-siècle Britain and imply some sort of unity between these classes, the reality was that class distinctions were sharply drawn even within the walls of the music halls—as the very existence of the King’s Car suggests. Any reading of the popular culture found in the middle-class Edwardian and Georgian music halls must take into account the populist (and at times rowdy) characteristics of the earlier incarnations: the variety palaces that flourished during the second half of the nineteenth century that were also known as the “late-Victorian” or “working-class” music halls.

  During the transition between the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the “new” and “modern” music halls (as well as other emerging forms of mass entertainment) provoked both fascination and anxiety on the part of contemporary commentators. Such commentators lacked an adequate frame in which to position inherited attitudes against the onrush of modern influences. Since the general populace enjoyed a previously unknown amount of leisure time, access to early twentieth-Century sites promoting popular entertainments increased. These venues were surrounded by anxieties emanating from late-Victorian attitudes toward social control. Music and music making were particularly implicated in Victorian strategies for controlling the actions and attitudes of society, especially those of the working class.

  Music was securely bound to the Victorian ideal of “moral uplift.” Victorians of the ruling class sought to use didactic imperatives to support the continuance of a class-based system; in this context they tried to control the putatively undisciplined and volatile working classes through the medium of an artistic culture imposed from above. The result was an attempt to denigrate—or at times erase—popular music making that originated from within the working classes themselves. But for all the Victorian rhetoric of disapproval, which was often a nostalgic attempt to deny contemporary reality, popular music that arose from the working classes forced its way into visibility within institutions that were valued as modern. To the Victorians, the music halls represented a dangerous but enticing brand of modernity.24

  One British artist who celebrated the music halls was the painter Walter Sickert (1860–1942), who created several canvases dating from the 1890s that portray the variety palaces in ways that suggest their modernity.25 Sickert’s writings frequently valorized the music hall as an appropriate topic for the modern artist, and he practiced what he preached.26 Sickert was particularly drawn to the lively music halls in Islington and Camden; his nocturnal jaunts were habitual and became legendary, since he walked miles to attend these variety palaces, returning late at night on foot to his residence in the much more exclusive suburb of Hampstead.

  Sickert’s keen, unsentimental eye is evident in such paintings as The P.S. Wings in the O.P. Mirror. (Sickert’s title alludes to the “prompt side” and “off prompt” side of the stage.) In this canvas, a reflecting mirror separates the space of the painting into two contrasting perspective planes, heightened by differences in scale (figure 4). Sickert’s other music hall paintings present even more of a visual puzzle evoking his multivalent and essentially modern attitude to his subject. Indeed, Sickert’s paintings can be viewed as a mirror that reflected, through the use of
new techniques such as skewed perspective, the tensions—class, gender, and aesthetic—that arose as the new lower-middle and middle classes began to define themselves within the 1890s variety palaces. An example of Sickert’s ingenuity in this regard is his canvas of a lone audience member propped up against a mirror, which creates a vertiginous array of backdrops, wings, mirrors, and raking perspectives (figure 5). The intricacies of Sickert’s paintings constitute an eloquent portrayal of the music hall during the 1890s, as well as how perspectives, both literal and figurative, were changing during this period of transition.

  Figure 4. Walter Sickert, The P.S. Wings in the O.P. Mirror. Rouen, Musee des Beaux-Arts.

  The predecessors to the music halls that Sickert painted in the 1890s were various kinds of public meeting places that combined drinking and music, such as the supper club and music-licensed taverns. Music halls as such did not appear until the 1850s.27 During the 1860s, they multiplied until there were over three hundred such establishments in greater London alone. By the early 1870s, music halls had assumed a regular design: a proscenium arch marking a definitive stage area, bars serving alcohol at the back of the hall, and frequently a promenade area where men and prostitutes might open negotiations.

  The Oxford Music Hall was the most notorious of these establishments. When it came time to renew its license, this particular hall served as a target for attacks by several organizations dedicated to the preservation of public morality; these attacks represented just a few of the many overt attempts to close or constrain these variety theaters.28 Perceived as contested sites of modernity as well as immorality, the music halls and the debates that swirled around them reflected larger ideological concerns that flared up during the 1880s and ’90s. These centered on the dangers of popular culture and the frightening instability of the urban working classes.

  By the 1890s, music halls had sprung up in London’s suburbs such as Camden Town and Islington—the halls frequented by Sickert—as well as in the new theater and entertainment district around Leicester Square in London’s West End.29 Neighborhoods determined the style of hall; suburban halls catered to the new “clerk” class of the petit bourgeois, a direct result of a dramatic increase in white-collar workers on the lower end of the pay scale. The older, poorer neighborhoods of the East End were home to halls frequented by members of the working class. Larger, more opulent establishments were clustered around Leicester Square and Charing Cross, where proximity to rail stations allowed travelers of all sorts to stop in at the Oxford, the Empire, and the Alhambra—which meant that these halls had to maintain at least a veneer of respectability.

  In the early 1890s, these larger venues began to diversify their programs in order to appeal to new middle-class audiences by including variety acts; the Alhambra even made ballets a particular feature of their nightly offerings. However, this high-toned fare was more the exception than the rule; most music halls still appealed predominantly to working-class and lower-middle-class audiences. The success of the halls relied heavily on stars, especially comic singers such as Albert Chevalier, Harry Lauder, Marie Lloyd, and Katie Lawrence. Their songs were popularized not only by performances in the halls, but through sheet music which sold widely across Britain. A song’s success was based solely on the reputation of the star with which it was associated rather than the composer or lyricist. The songs dealt mostly with quotidian topics, some sentimental, most comical, and many pervaded by sly sexual innuendo. These popular songs were designed to mirror the audiences they targeted, treating with humor the trials and tribulations of love, courting, marriage, work, and other subjects. Recent discussions of music hall songs stress their conservative nature: these songs were hardly a call to revolution. Despite this conservatism, the songs nevertheless expressed a particularly working-class perspective that would have been considered modern at the time.

  Figure 5. Walter Sickert, Vesta Victoria at the Bedford. Private collection of Richard Burrows

  Although it would be a mistake to downplay the wide variety of social, political, and ethnic backgrounds represented by the individuals who made up the music hall audiences—London audiences in particular were notable for their diversity—music hall songs articulated a shared experience, creating both solidarity and camaraderie. The sense of solidarity is attested to by the audience’s participation in refrains of their favorite songs, and the give-and-take between audience members and the “Chairman” who acted as a master of ceremonies, as well as with the stars themselves.30 There were a number of opportunities for an audience to interact with the stars, as these privileged performers appeared more than once during the course of an evening. Acts were paid by the “turn,” or appearance onstage, and only established stars would perform more than one turn a night. The second turn, usually scheduled for around 10 P.M., was always the most desirable, since it was then that the hall had the largest audience, as opposed to the first turn at 8 P.M. and the third at midnight.

  Another reason for the music hall’s popularity among working-class clientele was the relatively cheap admission prices: a seat in the stalls by the Chairman’s table cost two shillings, a seat in the gallery a mere sixpence. Furthermore, an audience member could get back in drink half the cost of admission. With prices like these, affordable even to a member of the urban working class, it is unsurprising that the music halls were hugely popular, sometimes with nearly a thousand people crowding into the theater.

  But as the popularity of the music halls rose in the 1880s, so did governmental fears about the putatively deleterious effects of such raucous and risqué entertainments on public morals, and the variety palaces came under a closer scrutiny. Increased governmental intervention resulted in the growth of licensing laws and regulations controlling safety in the halls and the content of variety acts. The mid-to-late 1890s was a transitional period as these new regulations began to take effect. Music hall proprietors, fully cognizant of social pressures—and aware of the profitable potential of more genteel audiences—sought to gentrify their establishments.

  Edwardian Reconfigurations

  Hastening the changes that occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century, initiatives were made in the early twentieth by newly formed music hall amalgamates to avoid confrontations between theater owners and local governments over the issues of working-class rowdiness, temperance, and prostitution. The key to the success of these initiatives was modification of outdated formulas in order to appeal to a new middleclass clientele. Music hall proprietors shrewdly realized that the most important change needed to cultivate this particular audience was to attract middle-class women. If they could entice middle-class feminine spectators into their establishments, the families of these women would quickly follow. By this time, Stoll’s Coliseum, like halls in London’s West End, with its “round-the-clock variety” that ran from noon to midnight, was designed specifically to appeal to an audience that included large numbers of women with their families in tow. These respectable audience members were often suburban visitors to London who sought harmless but diverting entertainment on their excursions. Catering to this new kind of audience obviously had an enormous impact on the kinds of acts presented in Edwardian music halls: the Victorian working-class halls’ emphasis on the comic solo was sharply reduced, if not eliminated totally, and replaced instead by an array of acrobats, dancers, animal acts, and extended spectacular features that appealed to patriotic sentiment—as in The Crown of India.

  Given the highly varied composition of the audience on any given night, a convenient fiction was thus perpetrated by the impresarios and amalgamates who had a financial stake in the success of the variety palaces: an imaginary audience consisting entirely of middle-class families. This construct, at odds with reality, proved powerful and successful. It was attractive to consumers of all classes who were invested in maintaining a facade of social respectability—especially the lower-middle class aspiring upward. The fiction flattered both the bourgeoisie and those who aspired to be so, an
d was invoked to determine the acts’ content and, by extension, generate ideologies of representation and consumerism.

  The result of these reforms was that widely mixed audiences from all strata of the urban and suburban population flocked to the music halls. This diversity was reflected by the wide range of entrance prices, which theoretically made seats available for every income bracket. Along with aristocrats and the bourgeoisie, working-class spectators of both sexes still attended the variety palaces, of course, as well as the grandees who had patronized the louche late-Victorian halls.

  The theater’s cleverly calculated appeal to a decorous, feminized middle class is evident in a brochure published and distributed by Stoll in 1906.31 Lavishly illustrated, on heavy paper and embellished with gold, the publication concretized in its materials the goals of the management; it was cannily designed to convince a wide audience of the opulence, distinction, “culture,” and above all, propriety of the Coliseum (figure 6). But Stoll’s genius in promoting this perception of respectability served a related function that further legitimized his claims. Stoll used his advertisements, along with promises of lavish remuneration, in order to woo performers, composers, and artists who normally inhabited the world of high culture, such as Elgar. Like a set of facing mirrors reflecting off each other, the prestigious cultural products of such creators further confirmed the essential respectability and high tone of the Coliseum.

  The pamphlet stated that the Coliseum was built “to attract that huge class which believed the variety theatre to be in bad odour and would not in consequence visit it.”32 Much of the brochure is devoted to vivid descriptions of the beauty and tastefulness of the decorations, up-to-date stage machinery, and the Coliseum’s restaurants and cafés. The pamphlet forcibly outlined the dramatic changes to the music halls, stating, “It would be very little if the atmosphere and environment had not undergone a similar process of purification. It was desired to make attendance at this playhouse as respectable as going to church.”33 The brochure further claimed that “the Coliseum is like going to a friend’s house—everything is so homely and domestic and in good taste” (figure 7).34 Statements expressing Edwardian and Georgian ideologies of class and gender run through the brochure’s text. Moreover, sharp distinctions along class lines between the old music hall—which was “only the resort of a class”—and the modern Coliseum, a “space sufficient for each of the little worlds that go to make up society, each to enjoy equal facilities and, in a way, equal accommodation”35 (figure 8). Finally, the feminization of this space was linked to the broadening of the audience’s class base: