Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  Put another way, why had no composer of Elgar’s stature emerged among the English since Henry Purcell, despite England’s preeminence throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries not only in politics and commerce, but also in literature, science, philosophy, architecture, and painting?4 After all, in terms of concert life and amateurism, nineteenthcentury Britain had one of Europe’s most active musical cultures.5 Given the rapid acknowledgment of Elgar as England’s leading composer after 1900, this puzzling historical paradox leads to a further question: In what sense was Elgar a distinctly English original? What did he invent and bequeath as a lasting dimension of Englishness to his English successors? Or was Britain’s sustained second “renaissance” in music in the twentieth century, after Elgar’s death and extending at least through the career of Benjamin Britten, only marginally national (apart from those few composers who pursued an explicitly nationalist agenda)?6 It can be argued that, after an eighteenth century when George Frederic Handel, Joseph Haydn, and Italian opera reigned supreme in public and domestic English musical culture, the revitalization of English music after 1900 was largely derivative of Continental trends, a replay of the pre-Elgar era when English musical life was dominated by Felix Mendelssohn and the music of Continental Romanticism.

  In Elgar’s music, as Vaughan Williams suggested in a 1935 short article, “What Have We Learnt from Elgar?,” a rhetorical grandiosity coexists with a restrained but intense intimacy and lyricism.7 Using the orchestra and an amalgam of influences, Elgar fashioned a late-Romantic idiom of expression (without resorting to so-called folk traditions that serve as obvious markers of national identity) that came to exemplify both an idealized attachment to the rural landscape and England’s bold and confident, if not imperious, spirit. Elgar’s melodic sensibility accomplished the former and his mastery of modern orchestral sonority and gesture the latter. One also hears in Elgar’s music a moral severity, an approachable melodic clarity, and a restraint and calm that together manage to transform subjective emotion into a compelling didactic engagement with the listener. And the composer’s presence, his personality and style, seems not so overwhelming and distinctive as, for example, Richard Wagner’s.

  Using the forms of both large-scale orchestral majesty and intimate string writing, Elgar gave voice to a proud but personal eloquence in which the musical rhetoric seemed to carry a public moral conceit that was also distinctly English. With self-awareness, Elgar lent carefully framed moments of musical beauty the aspect of ethical gravity. His musical phrases conveyed the personal and intimate but, presented in an elegant and refined manner, avoided the raw intensity of the confessional. Likewise, the dignity and grandeur of his large-scale works, even the most blatantly patriotic and national, while veering toward the pompous, always retained a sense of proportion. Elgar managed to lend imperial conceits not only a sense of propriety but also, through affecting beauty, justification. The composer thereby made it possible for his listeners to identify and appropriate sentiments, if not sentimentality, with an intensity of their own beyond mere admiration or enjoyment. Elgar’s music suggested the appearance of accessible objectivity. He provided the room and opportunity for listeners to respond with empathy and identification without a sense of excess, emotional distance, or impersonality.

  Elgar’s music resonated with his public as both particularly English and attuned to the historical moment. His success depended in part on the disciplined detachment with which sentiment, sweetness, solidarity, community, and confidence took musical form within the practices and vocabulary of late-nineteenth-Century musical rhetoric. Elgar helped fashion the markers and substance of the late-Victorian and early-modern English self-image without subordinating his own individuality.8 His reception as a great composer remains intertwined with his significance and popularity as a representative voice of the spirit and pride of England. His music is understood as expressing something authentic about the modern English character, landscape, and self-image. Because the gesture, rhetoric, and sonority he fashioned have come to locate the unique power, intensity, confidence, and refinement of the English, Elgar’s music has retained its role as an embodiment of Englishness, limiting his influence as a model for composers other than his English successors. The fabricated but lasting array of musical signs of a national sensibility, if not tradition, that continue to sound in the work of British composers and British culture is Elgar’s distinct and unique legacy.9

  Another reason for Elgar’s sustained and increased popularity in the concert repertory is that, in the context of twentieth-Century composition, Elgar wrote music that was clearly conservative in style, not unlike that of Richard Strauss (whom Elgar admired and who thought Elgar to be his finest English contemporary). Despite the complexity and adventuresome nature of Falstaff, Elgar remained committed to the rhetorical tradition of expressiveness that came under intense critical scrutiny by modernists after World War I and again after World War II. In the development of musical materials, Elgar, like Strauss, adapted Wagnerian harmonic practice and orchestral sonorities with a residual allegiance to classical and traditional technical means. Both Elgar and Strauss (like Brahms and in contrast to Wagner) acknowledged the weight of history and mirrored some degree of awe for the traditions of composition. This is persistently evident in the musical work of both composers. They reconcile in their orchestral music the seemingly competing strategies of so-called absolute music and program music. Despite recent efforts to construe Elgar as a modernist innovator, he remained within the framework of the ideas, conflicts, forms, and vocabulary of the late nineteenth century. A parallel to the case Arnold Schoenberg made in 1933 on behalf of Johannes Brahms as a “progressive” is difficult to make for Elgar.10

  Was there a connection between Elgar’s aesthetic conservatism and his Englishness? Since Elgar, why have so many prominent and successful English composers seemingly continued to resist dominant forms of modernism? Is this a prejudice of reception, where the public expects an Elgarian-invented “Englishness” from English composers the way it expects reductive signs of the Russian, the American, and the Mexican from composers of those nations? Although Elgar was influenced by Wagner and Brahms as well as Robert Schumann and Strauss, his successors—including those who participated in the pastoral and folk revival of the midcentury, composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Frank Bridge, George Butterworth, Arthur Bliss, and Gerald Finzi—were often inspired by the models of Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky. They appropriated Elgarian traits and pursued a synthesis between some English elements and a conservative adaptation of styles from outside of England. Unlike Béla Bartók, Stravinsky, or Debussy, neither Elgar nor his successors transformed national musical attributes as representing the universal (whether those national elements were invented in the nineteenth century or were authentically more historically remote, in the sense of “folk” music).

  Precisely on account of its ingratiating character, Elgar’s music has benefited from the decline and defeat of modernism after the mid–1970s. That collapse has led musicians and their audiences back to twentieth-Century music that was once derided as old-fashioned. Strauss, as much as Stravinsky or Schoenberg, is now considered a major figure of the twentieth century, a prophetic voice of postmodernism. Ironically, the influence of figures such as Elgar, Dimitri Shostakovich, Aaron Copland, and Jean Sibelius (as opposed to Stravinsky and Schoenberg) on subsequent generations of composers has been limited to their relevant national spheres. Neither Strauss nor Alexander Zemlinsky (whose compositions, for all their variety and commanding quality, never cut free from the aesthetic premises of the later nineteenth century) had significant imitators. In Elgar’s case, his musical gestures and rhetoric can be heard in most major English figures that followed him. Consider, for example, William Walton (despite Elgar’s reservations concerning the younger composer’s music), both in his early and late work. In Walton’s 1929 Viola Concerto the first and last movements reveal debts to Elgarian rheto
ric, and the 1939 Violin Concerto owes much to Elgar’s. As late as the 1962 Hindemith Variations, one hears echoes of Elgarian lyricism, expressiveness, and particularly the techniques of variation, rhythmic ingenuity, orchestration, and humor.

  Few composers have attracted and baffled critics and historians as Elgar has done. The composer is known for his plea on behalf of the primacy of music as “absolute,” a mode of life and expression possessed of its own logic and in no need of narrative or symbolic meaning:

  I hold that the Symphony without a programme is the highest development of art. Views to the contrary we shall often find, held by those to whom the joy of music came late in life or would deny to musicians that peculiar gift, which is their own, a musical ear, or an ear for music. I use, as you notice, a very old-fashioned expression but we all know what it conveys: a love of music for its own sake.11

  Despite this pronouncement, much of Elgar’s music, particularly for orchestra (including the symphonies), was either explicitly programmatic and narrative (including musical reflections of intimate feelings) or thinly veiled as such.12 Elgar was required to explain his admiration of Strauss “as the greatest genius of our days” by suggesting, counterfactually, that “I am sure Richard Strauss could give us a symphony to rank among, or above the finest if he chose.”13

  This apparent contradiction mirrors an ongoing and unresolved uncertainty, if not conflict, in the attempt to link Elgar’s music to his biography and his historical context. On the one hand, he is said to have been a composer motivated by personal intimacies. He was also a resentful outsider (as a Catholic born to a family of limited means, engaged in commercial trade) whose deep attachments were often secret. At the same time he appears to have been an adherent to a nostalgic, if not anti-urban, pastoral ideal of England. Although an autodidact in all arenas, including composition, he was possessed of overt literary and religious beliefs. The employment of both secret and explicit programs for instrumental music therefore fits both the man and the audience for whom he wrote.14

  On the other hand, Elgar has been characterized as a callow, socialclimbing boor, if not bore (someone who sold his Gagliano violin for a billiard table, disdained talk about music, and sported the image of the golf-playing squire); desperate to be accorded conventional external recognition (therefore eager for an inherited peerage); shrewd in his manipulation of the press; socially and politically conservative; enthusiastic about science (with a laboratory and patents to his name); a man who evinced deep religious feeling; and a booster of English imperial ambitions and conceits. His defensive and aggressive attitude to his privileged and academically trained contemporaries suggests at the same time an arrogant ambition to outshine all in his craft, popularity, international reputation, and aesthetic standards. Elgar’s rhetoric on behalf of the formal and aesthetic autonomy of music parallels his self-image as the English heir to traditions exemplified by Mozart’s Fortieth and Brahms’s Third symphonies.

  Elgar’s music provides evidence for both the private and public aspects of his image and personality. Unlike Wagner and Schoenberg (and for that matter, Mendelssohn, Bartók, Schumann, and Stravinsky, the last by means of ghostwriters and an amanuensis), and his own contemporaries C. Hubert Parry and Vaughan Williams, Elgar did not write about music (the Peyton Lectures notwithstanding) in a fashion that assists the interpretation of his music; even his letters are unhelpful in this regard. We are therefore left with only the music.15 On the one side are the well-known, small-scale intimate works (the music for strings such as the Elegy for Strings and the Introduction and Allegro) and the larger works with explicit, intimate content (the Cello Concerto, the Wand of Youth Suites, and The Dream of Gerontius). Explicit, symbolic, and indirect evocations of nature persist not only in the programmatic works, but in the symphonies as well.16 On the other side are the extroverted Pomp and Circumstance marches, the Coronation Ode, King Olaf, Caractacus, and aspects of the two symphonies that suggest an ambitious, public, and patriotic personality. At the center of this interpretive divide is Elgar’s most famous work, the Enigma Variations. If his “Land of Hope and Glory,” extracted from the Trio of Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1, has become a second national anthem, the “Nimrod” variation, for all its overt origin as a personal portrait of a dear friend, has become just as powerful a public evocation of something distinctly English. That fact highlights the biographical enigma.

  It has been alleged that in recent years devoted Elgarians have sought to downplay the patriotic gore in Elgar’s music and character. The rise of an anticolonial and anti-imperialist historiography since the late 1960s has led to readings of Elgar as not a mirror but a leading creator of the cultural ethos of late-Victorian and Edwardian political and cultural conceits, a musical equivalent of Rudyard Kipling. In this context, the dominant critical stance of the present, one of praise and near-deification of Elgar, has encountered serious challenge.17 This revisionism has in turn been challenged not merely by efforts to link Elgar with a benign English patriotism based in a pastoral nostalgia for premodernity.18 Rather, Elgar’s life has been scrutinized as possessed of a secret character, marked not only by successive attachments to two women apart from Lady Elgar (Alice Stuart-Wortley, whom the composer nicknamed “Windflower,” and in later years Vera Hockman), but also to men. A homoerotic interior, particularly within the Enigma Variations, has been persuasively argued, much to the dismay of more conventionally admiring scholars, some of whom share some distaste for the public, patriotic Elgar.19 That homoerotic dimension is clearly consonant with a powerful thread within late-nineteenthcentury English culture, apparent in literature, cultural criticism, religion, and painting.

  The irony in the pursuit of a homoerotic subtext is that its existence can be used to buttress arguments on both sides of the well-known, Janusfaced portrait of Elgar. The pressure to suppress homosexuality reflects massive changes in the attitudes to homosexuality and sexuality that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, accelerated by the redefinition of English manliness required by the military requirements of an empire.20 The trial of Oscar Wilde is the defining moment of that process. In his Peyton lectures, Elgar himself defined the task of modern music in England to assert a “healthy” robust manliness, set explicitly in opposition to an effeminate aestheticism. For English music, he wrote,

  there are many possible futures. But the one I want to see coming into being is something that shall grow out of our own soil, something broad, noble, chivalrous, healthy and above all, an out-of-door sort of spirit. To arrive at this it will be necessary to throw over all imitation. It will be necessary to begin and look at things in a different spirit.21

  These respectable public ambitions for musical art coincided with the celebration of sports in elite schools, the ideal of a healthy “out-of-door” sensibility, understood as compatible with manly adventure into the exotic and courage on the battlefield—all central experiences of the British Empire.22 The Elgarian mode, even in the legendary passages marked nobilmente, allowed the composer to express through eloquence and grandeur a disciplined and aggressive manliness, while at the same time signaling an intimacy of feeling that may have contained contradictory secrets and suppressed feelings. Understood therefore as a man torn by inner conflict, the two sides of Elgar become reconciled as complementary. There are miniatures of intimacy and calm evocations of landscape and solitude, but the primary ambition is neither one of mystical contemplation nor explicitly subjective aestheticism. The ideals of nobility and chivalry suggest a commitment to music as a public, civic art tied to the vita activa. The mores of the age force the personal to survive as a coded subtext to a public art, not as a direct confessional. Since the deeply personal demanded secrecy, the scale and public ambition of Elgar’s music offered the ideal cloak and protection. The contradiction between the pompous, brash, and nearly militaristic Elgar of the Crown of India and the searingly expressive emotionalism of the second movement of the Cello Concerto are themselves e
vidence of the complex and competing claims of the private and the public spheres on English artists and intellectuals of Elgar’s generation, particularly before 1914. The relative decline in Elgar’s popularity in England after World War I and particularly in the 1930s (a claim that is itself in some dispute) can then be understood as reflecting the gradual collapse of late-Victorian hypocrisies.23 Extreme sacrifices and compromises became increasingly unnecessary, as Britten’s rise to fame and fortune as England’s representative composer from the 1940s on would suggest.24

  There are, however, sources for understanding and interpreting Elgar and his music that are not contingent on debates concerning Elgar’s intimate life and the issues of his sexuality and gender identity, sources that are at once historical and biographical and that recast these seemingly contradictory dimensions. Elgar’s relationship to literature, religion, and painting offers important clues.

  In literature, it is useful to consider Elgar’s favorite author, and his mother’s—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The novel Hyperion was a treasured inheritance from his mother, and it was Hyperion that Elgar gave as a gift late in life to his last close female friend. Longfellow was the source not only for Elgar’s first successes, including The Black Knight, “Spanish Serenade,” “Rondel,” and most importantly, King Olaf, but also for his first large-scale oratorio, The Apostles.25

  In the realm of religion, the importance to Elgar of John Henry Cardinal Newman’s theological views and the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin demands reconsideration. Newman was not only the author of the text of what is perhaps Elgar’s masterpiece, Gerontius, but also the leading force in late-Victorian Catholic thought. Elgar was attracted by the explicit theology in Newman’s poem and also by the cardinal’s articulation of the place of Catholicism in modernity and its relationship not to the liberalism and evangelicalism of the 1830s but to the world of science and learning of the century’s last decades, when debates over papal infallibility and the cultural consequences of scientific progress were intense.26 It was the Newman of the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, The Idea of a University, and An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent who informs the intellectual context for Elgar. Though his traditional faith in God may have waned in later years, theology mattered to Elgar, even if indirectly through its consequences on the politics of culture. Basic constructs of meaning with regard to life and death and the human community influenced his version of the role that art, and therefore the musician, played in the public life to which he aspired.