by Adams, Byron
British poetic responses to the conflict began to flood the pages of newspapers and periodicals, and among the first were those published in the London Times by Elgar’s friend Laurence Binyon. By Christmas Binyon had gathered twelve of his poems into a single volume, The Winnowing-Fan: Poems on the Great War; from this collection, probably working from a copy given to him by the poet himself, Elgar took the following as the basis for a new cantata: I. “The Fourth of August” (referring to the day war was declared); X. “To Women”; and XI. “For the Fallen”; all of which are presented below.15 The elegy “For the Fallen” would become the most famous and lasting of Binyon’s poems, containing the prescient fourth stanza:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Over the decades to come this quatrain would be recited during countless Armistice and Remembrance Day services and carved on many of the cenotaphs and war memorials erected across the British Empire. After the war, at the behest of the League of Arts, Elgar would rearrange his setting of “For the Fallen” for “Military or Brass Band, or Organ or Pianoforte” (later replaced by full orchestra), omitting the solo part, cutting three stanzas, more than halving the movement in length, and reworking his treatment of the central quatrain into a more consoling, luminous, and sparsely accompanied passage in E major. Renamed With Proud Thanksgiving, this version was intended for performance at the dedication of Edwin Lutyens’s Whitehall Cenotaph and the entombment of the unknown warrior in Westminster Abbey in 1920, though in the end hymn singing would be preferred by the organizers.16 As the third movement of Elgar’s The Spirit of England, “For the Fallen” would become a stock item in the BBC’s Armistice Day broadcasts, sometimes conducted by the composer himself.17 Elgar considered it equal in merit to The Dream of Gerontius and The Kingdom, and by 1933, Basil Maine could confirm that “for many [The Spirit of England] has become a national memorial to which they instinctively turn each year on Remembrance Day.”18
The idea of setting poems from Binyon’s The Winnowing-Fan appears to have been triggered by Elgar’s friend Sir Sidney Colvin (1845–1927), who, until his retirement as Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings, had been a colleague of Binyon’s at the British Museum. It was widely believed by the Allies that the war would be over by Christmas, and so by the first weeks of New Year 1915 the need was keenly felt for something that could help to make sense of the escalating carnage and offer consolation to the growing mass of the bereaved.19 Colvin probably discussed this with Elgar, for after spending the day with him he jotted the following postscript to a letter dated 10 January 1915:
Why don’t you do a wonderful Requiem for the slain—something in the spirit of Binyon’s “For the Fallen,” or of that splendid homage of Ruskin’s which I quoted in the Times Supplement of Decr 31—or of both together? —SC.20
That Elgar found Colvin’s citation of “For the Fallen” sufficiently appealing to set the text itself, along with others from the same collection, is perhaps not surprising. The verses are replete with musical references, which Binyon enhanced in an extra stanza he wrote for Elgar’s “Marziale” section (quoted below). As the son of an Anglican clergyman, Binyon also drew on a long familiarity with the language and imagery of the Bible in his poetry: for the famous quatrain in “For the Fallen” he later described how he had “wanted to get a rhythm something like ‘By the Waters of Babylon we sat down and wept’ or ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me’ … and having found the kind of rhythm I wanted, varied it in other stanzas according to the mood required.”21 His disillusionment with institutionalized religion, however, and fascination with Eastern art and cultures (the main focus of his scholarship in adult life) brought to his poetry both an emphasis on humanism and a broad frame of reference, giving it an appeal that crossed denominational boundaries. His studies of William Blake’s apocalyptic visions might also have helped him to find a voice with which he could speak of the harrowing events of the war; and in “Louvain,” the sixth poem from The Winnowing-Fan, he expressed both a deep love for Flanders and his personal pain at the sacking of this ancient university town. (He did not at this stage know of the murder of his close friend Olivier Georges Destree, who had entered a Benedictine monastery there.)22 The extent to which in early 1915 “For the Fallen” seemed to capture the mood particularly of the nation’s noncombatants, and would do so increasingly over the course of the war, is underlined by Binyon’s biographer, John Hatcher:
“For the Fallen” is one of the few great war poems to include in its tragedy those “that are left.” It takes Henry’s St. Crispin’s Day speech from [Shakespeare’s] Henry V IV. iii, the key text of English chivalric patriotism, and turns it inside out, seeing the war and its aftermath from the point of view of those at home, the older generation too old to fight, including those who found their jingoistic platitudes stilled in their throat by the surreal nightmare the war had become.23
Colvin, Binyon, and Elgar all belonged to this “older generation”—“Do you realize that nearly half my life belongs to Victoria’s days?” Binyon quizzed T. S. Eliot in 1940—and of the three, only Binyon had direct experience of the fighting.24
The second text to which Colvin referred Elgar came from the final chapter in volume 3 of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters—this was an important, indeed crucial, book for Colvin, who had idolized Ruskin all his life.25 Writing during the Crimean War (1853–56), Ruskin takes as his theme “righteous” warfare, which he argues is essentially a better, more ennobling state for England than peace, referencing ancient codes of Christian chivalry:
I ask their witness, to whom the war has changed the aspect of earth, and imagery of heaven, whose hopes it has cut off like a spider’s web, whose treasure it has placed, in a moment, under the seals of clay. Those who can never more see sunrise, nor watch the climbing light gild the Eastern clouds without thinking what graves it has gilded, first, far down beneath the dark earth-line—who never more shall see the crocus bloom in spring without thinking what dust it is that feeds the wild flowers of Balaclava. Ask their witness, and see if they will not reply that it is well with them and with theirs; that they would have it no otherwise; would not, if they might, receive back their gifts of love and life, nor take again the purple of their blood out of the cross on the breastplate of England… . They know now the strength of sacrifice, and that its flames can illumine as well as consume; they are bound by new fidelities to all that they have saved—by new love to all for whom they have suffered; every affection which seemed to sink with those dim life-storms into the dust, has been delegated, by those who need it no more, to the cause for which they expired; and every mouldering arm, which will never more embrace the beloved ones, has bequeathed to them its strength and its faithfulness.26
Elgar’s own affection for Ruskin is apparent in his quotation of a passage from Sesame and Lilies on the last page of his score of The Dream of Gerontius. That he considered working directly with the text Colvin highlighted for him seems unlikely—it is, after all, prose rather than poetry—but in its message and atmosphere of heroic idealism it comes close to the poem he would choose for the opening movement of The Spirit of England, Binyon’s “The Fourth of August” (text quoted below). By 1915 most Englishmen believed their country was engaged in a just war, necessary to honor treaties and avenge the “rape of Belgium” by going to the aid of the smaller, weaker country overwhelmed by a foreign aggressor. In this manner, the war engaged highly developed notions of chivalric honor, manliness, patriotic duty, and, as David Cannadine has observed, an increased confidence that death, when it came, would come naturally and in old age, encouraged by the lengthening of life expectancy and decline in infant mortality in Britain since the 1880s. Combined with growing international tensions (including a concern that colonial youths were outstripping their home-gro
wn counterparts in prowess and vigor) and the increasing appeal of social Darwinism in the 1900s, these factors had created the “strident athletic ethos of the late-Victorian and Edwardian public school … in which soldiering and games were equated, in which death was seen as unlikely, but where, if it happened, it could not fail to be glorious.”27 Such conditioning determined the conduct not only of the officers drawn from the public-school elite, but also those from the lower social ranks who emulated them, and can be seen to have been effected through music as much as through the literature and imagery of the 1900s (see, for example, figure 1).
Figure 1. Ezra Read, The Victoria Cross: A Descriptive Fantasia for the Pianoforte (London: London Music Publishing Stores, c. 1899). Note the detailed program.
The most striking aspect of Colvin’s proposal is that he should have prompted his Catholic friend Elgar to compose a “requiem for the slain,” a phrase that may owe something to Binyon’s habit of referring in private to “For the Fallen” as his “requiem-verses.”28 To someone with a Protestant background, like Colvin, the word requiem could be bandied quite lightly. Over the 1890s and 1900s English audiences had shown a greater willingness to accept choral works based on Roman Catholic liturgy; and in his discussion of Stanford’s decision to compose a requiem for the 1897 Birmingham Festival, Paul Rodmell cites freedom from librettists and potential copyright entanglements among the attractions of setting such a text.29 Yet to Elgar, raised as a Roman Catholic, requiem was inseparable from a particular view of the afterlife, especially the doctrine of purgatory—a process that allowed for the purification of the souls of repentant sinners in a slow agony and which could be hastened and even curtailed by the prayers of the living. By contrast, Protestant theology on the afterlife during the Victorian era was far more rigid: God’s judgment determined whether a soul ascended to heaven or was cast into the fires of hell for eternity, and the doctrine of purgatory was excoriated in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church.30
Byron Adams has described Elgar’s faith as never more than “a flickering light” and in a compelling narrative tracks the faltering of that faith through a downward spiral of physical and psychological corrosion as the composer struggled to complete his massive trilogy of oratorios, especially the final work The Last Judgement.31 Such was the extent of this apparent spiritual decline that the doctor who diagnosed Elgar’s terminal cancer remembered the composer telling him that “he had no faith whatever in an afterlife: ‘I believe there is nothing but complete oblivion.’”32 This must have seemed an astonishing remark to hear from the man who had composed The Dream of Gerontius over thirty years earlier. Similarly, in his last weeks Elgar’s friends and daughter were unsettled by his request to have his body cremated and his ashes scattered at the confluence of the rivers Severn and Teme; and although he reportedly received the “last rites,” it was only after he had slipped into morphine-induced unconsciousness. Elgar’s daughter Carice finally persuaded him to be buried alongside his wife, Alice, at St. Wulstan’s Roman Catholic Church, Little Malvern, and though a requiem mass was celebrated in his memory, it was a low mass without music.33
Whether one can fully accept Adams’s narrative of a crushing loss of faith, or set Elgar’s apparent ambivalence toward his Catholicism down to the obfuscation necessary for acceptance in Protestant British society, two considerations are fundamental to any discussion of Elgar’s spirituality. First, whatever his experience in late adulthood, and whatever the strength or otherwise of his faith, Elgar’s outlook and personal history were steeped in Catholicism: culturally, he always remained a Catholic. Until his departure from Worcester to London in his early thirties, he lived life in a Catholic context dominated by his mother, a fervent convert to the faith; he had attended Catholic schools and a Catholic church, had socialized with Catholics, and was organist at St. George’s Catholic Church in Worcester, which provided him with many of his earliest musical experiences including exposure to repertoire from the continental Catholic traditions. Catholicism would remain a strong influence on the women in his life—his wife would convert to Catholicism, and his sister became a senior nun at a Dominican convent near Stroud. Memories of boyhood would forever be inseparable from this “Catholic ethos,” to borrow John Butt’s phrase, as when Elgar reminisced about priests he had known as a child, for example, in conversation with the Leicester family on June 2, 1914.34
Second, in the sphere of religious music Elgar had to become adept at negotiating Protestant sensibilities. In his early career, before 1898, he composed a great deal of Latin sacred music, including a short hymn tune for the Marian devotion “Stabat Mater Dolorosa” and a number of individual mass movements, though he never attempted a complete setting of the Ordinary.35 In the years before the Great War, Elgar turned his attention to the composition of Anglican liturgical music, to the extent that John Butt describes him as “an Anglican manqué,” but his interest in Catholic music continued unabated.36 While on a trip to Italy in 1907–8, Elgar planned to obtain a copy of Giovanni Sgambati’s Messa di Requiem, which had been sung at Italian royal funerals and had been heard twice to great acclaim in Germany; perhaps he hoped this might reignite his inspiration as he struggled to complete his oratorio The Last Judgement.37 He suggested to Ivor Atkins, organist of Worcester Cathedral, that Sgambati’s Requiem might be suitable for a Worcester Festival Choral Society concert, or even the Worcester Festival of 1908, and laid plans to meet the composer personally while in Rome to discuss the loan of orchestral parts. In the end, however, the festival committee chose Stanford’s Stabat Mater (1906), a setting of a Catholic text by a safely Anglican composer.38
The most eloquent evidence of Elgar’s willingness to appease his Protestant countrymen remains his approach to the setting of Cardinal Newman’s “The Dream of Gerontius.” Newman’s poem required considerable truncation and simplification in order to render it suitable as a libretto. Elgar also seems to have wanted to shift the focus of attention away from Newman’s conception of the afterlife, toward Gerontius as a universalized suffering human figure, which, as McGuire observes, was characteristic of his approach in his later oratorios.39 Among the cuts Elgar was prepared to make were several passages of Catholic doctrine. The Guardian Angel’s words on leaving Gerontius in the care of the Angels of Purgatory were left out, for example, although the remaining text still clearly described a purging of the soul hastened by masses said by the living.40 Passages from Newman such as these caused Dean Spence-Jones of Gloucester to ban the work from performance in the cathedral there in 1901 and the Anglican authorities to stipulate textual alterations before Gerontius could be heard in Worcester Cathedral the following year.41 As Elgar outlined in a letter to Jaeger, on May 9, 1902, the problematic sections were the Litany of Saints recited at the dying man’s bedside, Gerontius’s beseeching of the Virgin Mary to intercede for him, and the references to the doctrine of purgatory in the final scene:
What is proposed is to omit the litany of the saints—to substitute other words for Mary & Joseph—& to put “Souls” only over the chorus at the end instead of “Souls in Purgatory” & to put “prayers” instead of Masses in the Angel’s Farewell… . So far I have only said I have no objection to the alterations or that I concur—permission I cannot give.42
For that permission the approval of Newman’s executor, Father Neville, had to be sought. In the end Neville concurred with Elgar on a bowdlerized version of the work designed for performance in an Anglican church; Elgar was sufficiently content to conduct this version himself at Worcester in 1902 and finally at Gloucester in 1910.43 Clearly, Elgar learned from these experiences: he took the precaution of having the text of The Apostles vetted by two Anglican clergymen before committing himself to the final version.44
In view of Elgar’s cultural roots in Catholicism, the faltering of his inspiration for The Last Judgement, his preparedness to make compromises for his Protestant audiences and patrons, and the fervency of his nationalism, we can speculate t
hat Colvin’s invitation to write a requiem for the slain in the early months of the Great War would have been a powerful stimulus to the composer’s creative imagination. Having suffered Anglican censure of The Dream of Gerontius, however, Elgar would surely have been reluctant to court controversy again by composing a setting of the Latin Mass for the Dead. A requiem from his pen, as opposed to those of his Protestant countrymen, would need to take a less overtly Roman Catholic (and therefore less provocative) form; Binyon’s poetry would prove ideal for the composer’s purpose.
The verses Elgar selected from Binyon’s The Winnowing-Fan had been published in the Times at the outset of the conflict on August 11, August 20, and September 21, 1914. Elgar emphasized their local significance in an inscription on the completed score: “My portion of the work I humbly dedicate to the memory of our glorious men, with a special thought for the Worcesters,” and at the end, “For the Fallen & especially my own Worcestershires.” The text is as follows:
Movement I (Moderato e maestoso)
I. The Fourth of August45
Now in thy splendour go before us,
Spirit of England, ardent-eyed,
Enkindle this dear earth that bore us,
In the hour of peril purified.46
