by Adams, Byron
Relatives of combatants found comfort in images of Christ on the battlefield, which not only seemed to confirm the nobility and holiness of the cause, but also, if death was to be the fate of their loved ones, the promise of redemption by self-sacrifice. One of the most popular images of consolation, one with strong Catholic overtones, was a colored print taken from an oil painting commissioned for the Christmas 1914 edition of The Graphic, titled Duty or The Great Sacrifice (see figure 3). The artist, James Clark, depicts a young soldier lying dead from a head wound on the battlefield (“sacrificed on the altar of duty to country”), his hand touching the feet of a spectral Christ, haloed by the sun, who seems to gaze down in recognition from the cross. This print was circulated across the country, endorsed by at least five of the nation’s bishops, and further copies of this, dubbed the “most inspired Picture of the War,” were offered for sale in The Graphic of February 6, 1915.100 It could be found hanging in churches, Sunday Schools, soldiers’ institutes, public halls, classrooms, and private houses, and after the war it was used in several places as a design for stained-glass memorial windows.101 The print was so ubiquitous it is difficult to imagine that Elgar and his associates were unaware of it, just as the mass rallies and jingoistic speeches of the charismatic Anglican bishop of London, Arthur Foley Winnington-Ingram (1858–1946)—born in Worcestershire, like Elgar—must also have entered their consciousness at some level. Christ was often in the bishop’s sights, and he often spoke of the war as a struggle between “Christ and Odin,” “Berlin against Bethlehem,” or of “the Nailed Hand and the Iron Fist.”102 Sometimes delivered in his uniform as chaplain to the London rifle brigade, and from a truck swathed in Union Jacks or an altar of drums, his fervent, imperialist sermons did much to alienate his countrymen, particularly in the months following the Somme; but throughout the war years his message was simple and unswerving, as in this example, speaking of bereaved parents who had visited him for succor in Advent 1916:
Figure 3. James Clark, Duty, also known as The Great Sacrifice, oil on canvas, 1914. Donated by Clark to the Royal Academy’s War Relief Exhibition on January 8, 1915, it was bought by Queen Mary, who gave it to Princess Beatrice in memory of her son Prince Maurice Battenberg who had died at Ypres in 1914. Beatrice presented it to St. Mildred’s Church, Whippingham, Isle of Wight, where it now hangs in the Battenberg Chapel. Photo Rachel Cowgill.
The precious blood of their dearest boy mingles with the Precious Blood which flowed in Calvary; again the world is being redeemed by precious blood. “CHRIST did what my boy did; my boy imitated what CHRIST did” they say.103
The presence of the motifs associated with Christ from The Dream of Gerontius in The Spirit of England does not imply that Elgar shared the bishop’s starry-eyed jingoism. Daniel M. Grimley has noted how Elgar repeatedly undercuts even his most powerful and assertive moments of uplifting nobility in The Spirit of England, particularly in the final movement, “For the Fallen.” The resulting atmosphere of uncertainty, melancholy reflection, and vulnerability is intensified by several striking features: the return to the opening material of “For the Fallen” in the closing moments; the movement’s harmonic circularity, the putatively aspiring semitonal ascent in the overall tonal scheme of the trilogy (G, A-flat major/minor, and A minor); and particularly by the pensive rocking between A major and A minor in the final bars, marked morendo. With a passing reference to Catholic doctrine concerning the afterlife, Grimley observes:
Elgar’s music therefore suggests a state of musical, as well as spiritual purgatory. In Elgar’s setting, Binyon’s words “At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them” become an anguished expression of longing for closure or death, and not merely a patriotic act of remembrance. Far from being a moment of consolation, it is the most troubled music in the whole work.104
It was this profound emotional complexity that made The Spirit of England such a powerful work expressing a righteous idealism tempered by grief and attrition as the war dragged on. H. G. Wells concludes his 1916 novel with an ambiguity that echoes Elgar’s final measures. Adopting the persona of Mr. Britling, whose only son is killed in action, the author works through his emotional and rational responses to the war toward a declaration of faith in “our sons who have shown us God”; but the seemingly serene pastoral sunrise with which the novel concludes is tainted by the inevitability of further bloodshed, especially in the chilling final line (“From away towards the church came the sound of an early worker whetting a scythe”).105
Elgar conducted the completed Spirit of England on October 31, 1917, (the eve of All Saints’ Day), along with The Dream of Gerontius, in a Choral Union concert at Leeds Town Hall, and again on November 24 at a Royal Choral Society Concert at the Royal Albert Hall. For twenty years or so afterward, the composer continued to direct cathedral performances of “For the Fallen” at the Three Choirs Festival and, as previously noted, for Armistice Day services and concerts broadcast by the BBC.106 In The Spirit of England Elgar reengaged with eschatological themes familiar from The Dream of Gerontius and his fraught oratorio project that culminated in the abandonment of The Last Judgement—namely, afterlife, purgatory, and redemption. This vein of Roman Catholic doctrine was combined with a reflective and consoling, though ultimately inconclusive message to his fellow countrymen and women tested to extremes in the worst excesses of the war that theirs was a divine cause, and their physical and spiritual suffering necessary for the emergence of a newly purified Europe: “redemption by the shedding of blood.”107 The Catholic elements discussed here are discernible but never brought conspicuously into the foreground, Elgar demonstrating again his ability to explore aspects of his own spirituality in music without disturbing Protestant sensibilities. Indeed, The Spirit of England seems in many ways to anticipate the more ecumenical and internationalist outlook that emerged among Anglicans in the years after the war—a step on the way to John Foulds’s World Requiem (1919–21), dedicated to “the memory of the Dead—a message of consolation to the bereaved of all countries.”108 With its eclectic text, combining passages from the Latin Mass for the Dead, John Bunyan, and the fifteenth-Century Hindu mystic Kabir among others, Foulds’s score was certainly far removed from the traditions of English oratorio prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in which England, through metaphor, is depicted as a Protestant bastion in a sea of decadent and minatory Catholicism.
The contexts in which The Spirit of England were heard over the airwaves in the years after 1918 also seem to point to the future, although it is not always clear how far programming decisions were influenced by Elgar himself. On November 11, 1924, in a BBC concert broadcast from Birmingham, the cantata was heard in the midst of a miscellaneous sequence apparently assembled to create a narrative from mourning to jubilation: the hymn “O God Our Help in Ages Past”; Sullivan’s Overture In Memoriam; Elgar’s The Spirit of England; a “dramatic recital” of poetry by Rupert Brooke; “I Know that My Redeemer Liveth” from Handel’s Messiah; Elgar’s “The Immortal Legions” from his recent Pageant of Empire music; as well as the first Pomp and Circumstance march.109 In 1925 Elgar conducted the London Wireless Orchestra in the introspective third movement of his First Symphony and the “Meditation” from his Lux Christi (an instrumental interlude from Elgar’s first oratorio that is saturated with themes associated with Christ in that work) as a prelude to the commemoration service at Canterbury Cathedral; this was followed immediately by the complete Spirit of England, and later in the evening by the first and second Pomp and Circumstance marches.110 And Elgar’s Enigma Variations, op. 36, and “For the Fallen” concluded the radio program In Memoriam 1914–1918: A Chronicle, compiled by E. A. Harding and Val Gielgud, and broadcast from all BBC stations on Armistice Day evening in 1932. Poetry reading formed the main part of this program, which combined the voices of soldier and noncombatant poets alike, in a selection drawn from John Masefield, Rupert Brooke, Herbert Asquith, Laurence Binyon, Julian Grenfel
l, Alan Seeger, Wilfrid Gibson, William Noel Hodgson, Edward Shanks, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Richard Aldington, Lord Dunsany, and Thomas Hardy.111 One can only wonder what sort of impact these events might have had on the young Benjamin Britten—then a schoolboy—and how much, if anything, he may have later recalled of such broadcasts as he began to interleave texts drawn from the requiem mass with poems by Wilfred Owen, preparing to commemorate the dead of another war in his War Requiem of 1961 for Coventry Cathedral.112
NOTES
My thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (United Kingdom) for supporting part of this research, and to the staffs of the Elgar Birthplace Museum; Brotherton Library Special Collections (University of Leeds); British Library; BBC Written Archives; and St. Mildred’s Church, Whippingham, Isle of Wight for their assistance. I am grateful to Byron Adams, Charles Edward McGuire, Derek Scott, and Aidan J. Thomson for generous suggestions and comments on an early version of this essay read as a paper at the Second Biennial Conference of the North American British Music Studies Association, August 2006, as well as to Julian Rushton for his thoughts at various stages of the project.
1. Epigraph: H. G. Wells, The War That Will End War (London: Frank & Cecil Palmer, 1914), repr. in W. Warren Wagar, ed., H. G. Wells: Journalism and Prophecy, 1893–1946 (London: Bodley Head, 1965), 57.
2. Richards argues that The Dream of Gerontius “may not be a directly imperial work, but it contains something of the spirit of Elgar’s Empire, the idea of Empire as a vehicle for struggle and sacrifice.” Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and Music: Britain, 1876–1953 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), 60–61.
3. W. H. Reed completely ruled out discussion of Elgar’s faith in his memoir, Elgar as I Knew Him (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936). Though acknowledging the “very strong trait” of “mysticism” that “came out in all [Elgar] did, and of course found its way into his music,” Reed declared this “is no place to discuss creeds or religions, or what he believed and what he did not.” Citing the third movement of Spirit of England and a secular partsong of 1909, he continued, “[Elgar] has more of that quality which we call—for want of a better word—spirituality than perhaps any other composer. One can open the pages of almost any of his works—oratorios, symphonies, or short works like “For the Fallen” or “Go, Song of Mine” [op. 57]—to find this quality evident and unmistakable” (138–39).
4. See Byron Adams, “Elgar’s Later Oratorios: Roman Catholicism, Decadence and the Wagnerian Dialectic of Shame and Grace,” and John Butt, “Roman Catholicism and Being Musically English: Elgar’s Church and Organ Music,” in The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, ed. Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 81–105; 106–19.
5. Jerrold Northrop Moore, Spirit of England: Edward Elgar in His World (London: Heinemann, 1984), 56.
6. Ibid., 150.
7. Donald Mitchell, “Some Thoughts on Elgar,” An Elgar Companion, ed. Christopher Redwood (Ashbourne: Sequoia Publishing, 1982), 284. Mitchell’s perception has been reinforced through the recording history of the work: The Spirit of England is often paired with Elgar’s Coronation Ode and packaged with cover art based on images of the British monarchy, billowing Union Jacks, etc. See, for example, the 1985 Chandos recording (CHAN 8430) that reproduces an image of “The King as He Will Appear in Coronation Robes” from a Colman’s Starch trade card issued just before the coronation of Edward VII in 1902 (Mary Evans Picture Library, ref. 10083782).
8. See also Basil Maine’s description of this section, in Elgar: His Life and Works, 2 vols. (London: G. Bell, 1933), 2:239. Maine makes a clear distinction, however, between the tone of The Spirit of England and that of other, imperialist Elgar works: “The conception is grandiose, but not as the ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ Marches are. It moves along with no less splendour, but with a more austere deliberation.”
9. See, for example, Bernard Porter’s summary dismissal of The Spirit of England in “Elgar and Empire: Music, Nationalism and the War,” in Oh, My Horses! Elgar and the Great War, ed. Lewis Foreman (Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 2001), 148–49. Porter does concede that the third movement (“For the Fallen,”) “may be thought to compensate for the bitterness (but not the jingoism, still) of the rest.” Porter, “Elgar and Empire: Music Nationalism and the War,” 149.
10. For a detailed discussion of Elgar’s early training as a Catholic, see Charles Edward McGuire’s essay in this volume.
11. Letter from Elgar to Frank Schuster, 25 August 1914, in Edward Elgar: Letters of a Lifetime, ed. Jerrold Northrop Moore, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 276–77.
12. On the fate of the horses at Mafeking, see Robert Baden-Powell, Lessons from the ‘Varsity’ of Life (London: C. A. Pearson, 1933), 207–9. Robert Anderson also reads Elgar’s remark in the light of the mass mustering of horsepower undertaken by Britain, Russia, Germany, and Austria in the first weeks of August; see Robert Anderson, Elgar and Chivalry (Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 2002), 341.
13. Elgar to Schuster, 25 August 1914, Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 276. Declaring his age (fifty-seven) on a “Householder’s Return” for a Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, Elgar stated, “There is no person in this house qualified to enlist: I will do so if permitted”; quoted in Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 283.
14. Cammaerts was a geographer by training (via the University of Brussels and Université Nouvelle) and something of “un homme de lettres.” Though Belgian by birth, he was a devout Anglican, and was deeply committed to the Anglo-Belgian Union. He had moved to England in 1908, married the Shakespearean actress Tita Brand, and in 1931 would become professor of Belgian Studies and Institutions at the University of London. Carillon was Elgar’s contribution to an anthology assembled by the novelist Hall Caine to raise funds for the citizens of occupied Belgium, King Albert’s Book: A Tribute to the Belgian King and People from Representative Men and Women Throughout the World (London: Daily Telegraph, Christmas 1914), 84–89. For a summary of Elgar’s activities during the war years, including the periods in which he was working on The Spirit of England, see Andrew Neill, “Elgar’s War: From the Diaries of Lady Elgar, 1914–1918”; and Martin Bird, “An Elgarian Wartime Chronology,” in Foreman, Elgar and the Great War, 3–69; 389–455. On the revision of “Land of Hope and Glory,” see Moore, Letters of a Lifetime (London: Elkin Matthews, 1914), 277–83.
15. According to Robert Anderson, the copy of Binyon’s The Winnowing-Fan: Poems on the Great War (London: Elkin Matthews, 1914) which Elgar worked from and annotated is held at the library of the Elgar Birthplace Museum (hereafter EBM); see Robert Anderson, Elgar in Manuscript (London: British Library, 1990), 197. At present the copy cannot be traced. Elgar’s work on The Spirit of England began in early February: Alice Elgar records an afternoon visit from Binyon and several other friends on February 7, 1915, two days after which she notes in her diary, “E. put off going to Tree’s Dejeune [sic] & composed violently.” Bird, “An Elgarian Wartime Chronology,” 397.
16. See Lewis Foreman, “The Winnowing-Fan: British Music in Wartime,” in Elgar and the Great War, 125; and David Cannadine, “War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain,” in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (London: Europa, 1981), 223–24. On With Proud Thanksgiving, see Robert Anderson and Jerrold Northrop Moore, foreword to Elgar Complete Edition 10:x-xi. This commission may have been prompted by Kipling’s recommendation that the Whitehall Cenotaph be inscribed with Binyon’s quatrain: Kipling had been deeply moved by the poem, which was sent to him by a soldier at the front on hearing that the author’s only son, John, was missing in action (in fact, killed) at Loos in 1915; see John Hatcher, Laurence Binyon: Poet, Scholar of East and West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 210–11. Elgar produced the orchestral version of With Proud Thanksgiving for the jubilee of the Royal Choral Society and the Royal Albert Hall on May 7, 1921.
17. Ronald Taylor l
ists six live broadcast performances of The Spirit of England (and four partial performances, presumably of “For the Fallen” as a self-standing item) between 1922 and 1934; see his “Music in the Air: Elgar and the BBC,” in Edward Elgar: Music and Literature, ed. Raymond Monk (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 336. See also Jenny Doctor, “Broadcasting’s Ally: Elgar and the BBC,” in Cambridge Companion to Elgar, 202–3.
18. Letter from Elgar to Alice Stuart-Wortley, 12 September 1923, in Edward Elgar: The Windflower Letters. Correspondence with Alice Caroline Stuart Wortley and Her Family, ed. Jerrold Northrop Moore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 284. See also Maine, Elgar 2:240. Ultimately it would be “Nimrod” from the Enigma Variations that would be established as Elgar’s contribution to the rites of war remembrance. On the music of Armistice Day and Remembrance Day, see Richards, Imperialism and Music, 152–64.
19. See James Morgan Read, Atrocity Propaganda 1914–1919 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), 7.
20. Colvin to Elgar, EBM L3453.
21. Quoted in S. Levy, letter to the editor, ‘“For the Fallen,”’ Times Literary Supplement, 23 November 1946, 577.
22. Hatcher, Laurence Binyon, 190–91. On Binyon’s own religious beliefs, see 129–34 passim.
23. Ibid., 195. For Binyon’s published work, including his studies of Eastern art, Blake, and later studies of Christopher Smart, Dante, and others, see 299–310. Other composers were also drawn to “For the Fallen,” including Cyril Rootham, whose setting slightly predated Elgar’s and from whom Elgar encountered considerable obstruction during the composition of The Spirit of England; see John Norris, “The Spirit of Elgar: Crucible of Remembrance,” in Foreman, Elgar and the Great War, 241–44. The composer and war poet Ivor Gurney toyed with setting the poem for baritone and piano while at the front; see letters from Gurney to Mrs. Voyrich, 16 September 1916, and to Marion Scott, 11 January 1917, in Ivor Gurney: Collected Letters, ed. R. K. R. Thornton (Ashington and Manchester: Mid-Northumberland Arts Group and Carcanet, 1991), 148–49,184.
