Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  Finally, Elgar’s allegiance to Longfellow and his internalization of assumptions within Victorian English Catholic thought corresponded to a lifelong affection for the work of specific Pre-Raphaelite painters and other examples of imaginary and idealized realism, notably Ivan Kramskoi’s 1872 painting, Christ in the Wilderness. These three sources—literary, religious, and visual—illuminate the tensions within Elgar the man as well as his powerful but eclectic amalgam of musical debts to the past, from Bach, Mozart, and Mendelssohn to Wagner and Brahms.

  Arnold and Longfellow: The Transcendence of the Philistine

  The framework most pertinent to Edward Elgar’s career was the intense debate in Britain during his formative years regarding the political, social, and moral place of art and culture—the public consequences of the cultivation of education, taste, and judgment in the face of the power of religion in a secular material culture. At the center of this discussion was Matthew Arnold, whose 1869 Culture and Anarchy did much to frame the discourse and establish its terms. Elgar certainly knew of Arnold as a poet, having studied his verse.27 The terms Arnold made famous in his prose—the categories of “Barbarian” (the landed aristocracy), “Philistine” (the middle classes), and “Populace” (the working classes), as well as his opposition to Hebraism and Hellenism, were sufficiently well-known to enter the language of a 1915 review of Elgar’s The Starlight Express.28

  Elgar’s personal position in Arnold’s polemical social geography, the composer’s resentments and ambitions notwithstanding, was clearly that of the Philistine. In Elgar’s self-assessment, pride of achievement was mixed with defensiveness and shame. He never forgot that, unlike Parry (whom he liked and admired) and even Charles Villiers Stanford (whom he derided), he was without either aristocratic provenance or family means and therefore had made his career the hard way, in the provinces and without benefit of academic training or standing.29 Arnold’s plea was for the betterment of the Philistine, the transformation of the middle classes of Elgar’s type through culture. The hope for the future of civilization was not in the all-too-common imitation of regressive Barbarian mores by the economically successful middle classes or, far worse, the descent into chaos, amorality, and violence characteristic of the Populace. Rather, the cultivation of “sweetness and light,” of the Hellenic sensibility that “speaks of thinking clearly, seeing things in their essence and beauty, as a grand and precious feat for man to achieve,” was necessary to transform the Philistines whom Arnold credited with making England economically great.30 The Hellenic had failed in previous ages of history because it was “premature” in the development of humankind.31 The historical moment was made imperative not only by the danger from the masses below but also by the material achievements of the middle classes.

  The central role Arnold accorded culture as a social idea, as a means of civilizing modernity, was influenced by his awareness of the progress not only of industry and commerce but of science and reason as well. As Arnold’s deep respect for Newman suggests, he believed that although religion, particularly in its Hebraic form, needed to be resisted and overcome, its contribution had not been trivial. The social, scientific, and economic progress of modernity was the result of mechanical and material efficiencies, and the primacy placed on work and labor all derived from religious doctrine. Hebraism’s “wonderful strength” was its “strictness of conscience” that centered on the fear and avoidance of sin.32 Whether in its Puritan or Jewish modes, Hebraism, like Hellenism, responded to real “wants of human nature.”33 It led to work and discipline, a taste for the practical and mechanical—what Max Weber in 1905 would term the “spirit of capitalism” that derived from the explicit sacred dictates and secular consequences of inner-worldly asceticism.34

  In contrast, the Hellenic revealed the “spontaneity of consciousness” of human nature, by which ignorance is eradicated, clarity of sight developed, and with that clarity, a sense of beauty.35 Hellenism invested human life with an “aërial ease, clearness, and radiancy,” wrote Arnold, and was therefore the achievement of “sweetness and light” in humanity.36 If the Hellenic highlighted the human as “a gentle and simple being, showing the traces of a noble and divine nature,” then the Hebraic defined the human as “an unhappy chained captive, labouring with groanings that cannot be uttered to free himself from the body of this death.”37

  For Arnold the time had come, partly out of fear of the power and violence of the populace, for the Philistines to shed the Hebraic and embrace the Hellenic.38 This was not a plea for aestheticism or for radical individuality. Quite the contrary. Hellenism “is the impulse to the development of the whole man, to connecting and harmonising all parts of him, perfecting all, leaving none to take their chance.”39 In place of the Hebraic insistence on strict morality, obedience, action, and therefore industry, Arnold called for a Hellenic movement that would allow all of mankind—not a few—to recognize the intelligible laws of nature that reveal that “many things are not seen in their true nature and as they really are, unless they are seen as beautiful.”40 That historical moment had arrived. Although the dominance of the Hebraic, with its unnatural stress on rigid rationality and its “defect of … feeling” had resulted in the material advances of modern life, the “loss of spiritual balance” had reached a critical point that challenged all order, authority, and, above all, beauty and culture.41

  The disciplined Philistines, who were “particularly stiff-necked and perverse in the resistance to light and its children … who not only do not pursue sweetness and light, but who even prefer to them that sort of machinery of business, chapels, tea-meetings” and political speech making, needed to be weaned of what in the twentieth century came to be termed as cheap popular taste or middlebrow culture.42 Basic utilitarian literacy and the work ethic, combined with a highly disciplined moral code sufficient for industry, could not erect the barriers against, nor defeat the onslaught of, mass vulgarity and immorality with its penchant for brutality and resistance to legitimate order and authority. That was the real danger, even though the optimistic utopian possibilities of a civilized modernity led by a transformed middle class pervade Arnold’s text: he believed the spread of true culture and discernment could transform the values by which individuals and society lived.

  Arnold’s version of English historical evolution and its society was influential, but his sense of the necessity and propitious character of the historical moment was not exceptional. Indeed, within the arena of music, a field most certainly of “feeling” and “sweetness and light,” the self-conscious realization among leading English figures that the time was ripe for an English return to a cultured aesthetic, and therefore a renaissance of English music, was common. By midcentury, calls within the Anglican Church for a renewal of the liturgical role of music through choral singing were well under way, inspired in part by the Oxford Movement and, after 1850, by the perceived threat of Catholicism.43 The impetus for the so-called choral revival included an Arnold-like demand that the aesthetic dimension, and with it the community of feeling, needed to be disseminated to solidify not only faith and the place of the Church but also a larger social and cultural commitment on the part of the English to civilized order.44

  The most prominent and popular of Elgar’s predecessors, Sir Arthur Sullivan, adapted the historical narrative implicit in Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy in an address he gave at Birmingham’s town hall in 1888 titled “About Music.” Sullivan told his audience—precisely the segment of the population in a city that embodied the achievements of English industrialization and on whom Arnold hoped to visit his project of secular cultural reformation—that

  I will not go into the causes which, for nearly 200 years, made us lose that high position, and threw us into the hands of illustrious foreigners, Handel, Haydn, Spohr, Mendelssohn (so long the favourite composers of the English), and of the Italian Opera, which exclusively occupied the attention of the fashionable classes, and, like a great car of Juggernaut, overrode and crushed al
l efforts on behalf of native music.45

  Nonetheless, he offered this conclusion, which praised and pointed to his audience and distinguished them from Arnold’s Barbarians—whom Sullivan termed the “fashionable classes” (and to whom, in Arnold’s view, a legitimate historical debt needed to be acknowledged):

  My belief is that this was largely due to the enthusiasm with which commerce was pursued, and to the extraordinary way in which religious and political struggles, and, later still, practical science, have absorbed our energies. We were content to buy our music, while we were making churches, steam-engines, railways, cotton-mills, constitutions, anti-Corn-Law Leagues, and Caucuses. Now, however, as I have already said, the condition of things is changing—it has changed. And yet I cannot but feel that we are only at the entry of the Promised Land. Habits of mind and modes of action are still to be found which show that we have much to do before we become the musical people that we were in the remoter ages of our history.46

  The self-consciousness of the historical moment, an British national pride in the revival of a distinctly British musical culture and therefore, in the sense of Arnold, the salvation of order, culture, morality, and authority, helped shape Elgar’s ambition. His persistent rehearsal of the presumed deficit of the circumstances of his birth noted by all his biographers and commentators—modest means, provincial origins, and low social station, marked by trade and commerce—was a calculated rhetorical use of facts. The highlighting of the extent that he, Elgar, was neither an aristocrat, nor an academic, nor a member, in Arnold’s sense, of the Barbarian class, which despite its privileges seemed to have passed its prime and historical significance, was a sign of his recognition of a mission and opportunity to which he was uniquely suited. He, someone who was not born into the gentry, could achieve national fame and assume the leadership of a new generation.

  Therefore Elgar willingly exploited the fact that he was self-taught, had no advantages, and was entirely responsible for his own success, owing nothing to institutions or patrons. He was the model of English achievement in a highly competitive world filled with residual social privileges and prejudices. He earned that stature through merit and hard work, measured not by popularity but by the judgment of the cultured public. Consequently he understood not only the genuine standards of culture, but the public Arnold sought to reach.

  This conceit helped Elgar reach a large audience of discerning and cultivated listeners (not an “indiscriminating crowd”) implied by the growing numbers of participants in the amateur instrumental and choral life of the country, much of it centered outside of London.47 These participants resembled him more than they did Parry or the old aristocracy, Arnold’s Barbarians. Elgar not only credited newspaper criticism (the quintessential medium of the Philistines) with a leading role and place in English musical life, but also assiduously, if not obsessively, cultivated them and shrewdly used the powerful medium of music journalism to advance his career and reputation.48 Indeed, the symbolic and substantive importance of Elgar’s modest social origins was not lost on George Bernard Shaw. They seemed for Shaw to prove Elgar’s reputation as an innovator, a new Beethoven. Since he had no access to the conventional modes of training he could not be an imitator. In Shaw’s view, Elgar’s modesty led him to eschew fashion; his originality was superior to fashionable moderns (for Shaw, that meant Stravinsky and Debussy), free from pedantry, devoid of pretension. The irony evident in Elgar’s personal style and manner was not lost on Shaw. Elgar came across as indistinguishable from any other “very typical English country gentleman who does not know a fugue from a fandango.”49 The cultured, self-made artist succeeded in passing for a Barbarian.

  Notwithstanding his facade of aristocratic nonchalance with respect to matters of art when in the company of others, after his rise to prominence Elgar saw himself as a force for the improvement of the standards of amateur musical life among his countrymen.50 His public, however, was not the “general POPULAR public.”51 Elgar wished to use music to emancipate the best of his fellow middle-class citizens from the “commonplace” with something distinctly English—inspired by “their own country, their own literature … their own climate,” absent of “sentimentality or decadence.”52 Elgar called for a greater civic investment in musical institutions of high standards so that music could function as “ennobling.”53 In the place of “frivolous and squalid” music (that “we ourselves would avoid like a plague”), Elgar, like Sullivan, wished that “we may once again be a musical land and produce a ‘school’… of serious English music which shall have a hold on the affections of the people, and SHALL be held in respect abroad.”54 Arnold’s project from earlier decades is recalled and rehearsed, only strengthened by the more blatant chauvinism characteristic of the decades immediately preceding World War I. Elgar, like Arnold, distinguished the audience from the crowd, and emphasized institutions directed at the middle classes, those who respected professionalism, who realized that “hard work is apparently the only way to achieve success in art[,] business or politics.”55 For Elgar as for Arnold, Hebraic discipline was the necessary foundation for the triumph of the Hellenic in music. The mores of middle-class discipline could be turned to elevating the cultural standards of his own people, Arnold’s Philistines.56

  Elgar’s ambition with respect to leading a school of music that could have a significant civic and cultural impact on England was mirrored in the manner and style of the music he sought to compose. He wished to craft music that was at once modern and up to date, capable of receiving international recognition, and yet neither decadent nor obscure. At the same time, he eschewed mere popularity as well as imitation. He wanted to reconcile wide-scale comprehensibility and immediate response with originality and qualities that garnered the praise of amateur, connoisseur, critic, and colleague alike. Elgar’s preferred genres were those with large publics—choral music and orchestral music. The modern orchestra was a reflection of historical progress and modernity, and the proper vehicle for communicating on a grand scale, just as writing for the major choral festivals ensured fame and a following. Elgar’s enthusiastic embrace of the BBC, radio broadcasting, and gramophone recording later in his career reveals a logical extension of his attachment not only to the civilizing dimension of music but to a conception of what serious modern music needed to be in its synthesis of historically validated high aesthetic norms and immediate but wide accessibility.57

  The model for Elgar’s particular compositional ideal came not from music but from literature. Much has been made of Elgar’s early exposure to scores and performances and his process of self-teaching, particularly his discovery of Mozart and Beethoven.58 What has been overlooked, despite the many seminal musical works of Elgar based on Longfellow’s texts, is the powerful influence the poet exerted on the composer. Elgar closely identified Longfellow’s Hyperion with his mother, who introduced Longfellow’s novel to him in his childhood. (For a synopsis of Hyperion, see Byron Adams’s essay in this volume.) As he wrote in 1899 to Hans Richter (to whom he sent a copy), it was through Hyperion that “I, as a child, received my first idea of the great German nations.”59 In fact, Elgar had visited Heidelberg in 1892 to see the place he had read about in Longfellow.60 The Longfellow attachment lasted Elgar’s entire life, as is suggested by his fleeting notion in 1923 of setting a Longfellow poem whose text he sent to his publisher.61 And there is, of course, the gift in December 1931 of Hyperion to Vera Hockman with the comment “I am going to give you a little book—Longfellow’s Hyperion—which for many years belonged to my mother; since then it has gone with me everywhere. I want you to have it because you are my mother, my child, my lover and my friend.”62

  Jerrold Northrop Moore’s view is that Elgar’s early encounter with Longfellow inspired the composer’s pastoral and nostalgic side. “Actual” feminine attraction was “replaced by the feminine symbolism of Nature and season and countryside—of reality defeated by an ideal.”63 Hyperion was, writes Moore, an “exemplar for Edward.”64 Th
e deep connection Elgar’s mother and her son felt to Longfellow was hardly exceptional. For a musician of Elgar’s generation, the link was not uncommon, as evidenced by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s successful setting of “Song of Hiawatha” as well as the apparent link between the poem and Antonín Dvo . rák’s Ninth Symphony.65 Today Longfellow may be remembered, if at all, for his romantic characterization in verse of the Native American, particularly in “Hiawatha.” But that memory, as Christoph Irmscher’s fine book on Longfellow makes clear, is a distortion.66

  Longfellow, as Irmscher writes, “invented poetry as a public idiom.”67 No poet or writer was so well-known or so widely read, in part owing to cheap editions, throughout the United States and even the rest of the world. Longfellow may have been the first American to earn a living by writing poetry. What was remarkable about his career was his ambition to objectify the poetic voice and use it to disseminate cultural literacy. The assumption of an overpowering authorial subjectivity, with which we often associate poetry, was absent. In its stead were two ambitions. First, Longfellow sought to incorporate and transmit, in an accessible form, the traditions of learning and history from the advent of Christianity and the age of Dante to German Romanticism. Hence the story of Hyperion, which incorporates a translation and adaptation of a poem by the German poet Ludwig Uhland. Though Edgar Allan Poe’s searing criticism of Longfellow as an author who stole others’ works may have been extreme, it was partially on point. Longfellow’s project was one of democratic didacticism, not in Walt Whitman’s sense of displaying invention, individualism, and modernity, but in the sense of connecting a community of readers with the history, traditions, and cultures of the world.68