Edward Elgar and His World

by Adams, Byron

  Longfellow succeeded in North America as well as in Europe, and not merely as a voice of the exotic, as indicated by Franz Liszt’s The Bells of Strasbourg, an influential setting of a passage drawn from Longfellow’s “The Golden Legend.”69 Elgar’s reliance in The Apostles on Longfellow’s version of the story of Judas and Mary Magdalene in “The Divine Tragedy,” as well as the poet’s deep affinity with Catholicism and its heritage, had a European precedent in music, one that helped inspire Wagner’s last foray into Christian legend, Parsifal.70

  Second, Longfellow sought to break down the barriers of so-called high culture. The spread of musical culture during Elgar’s lifetime, measured by the rise of publishing houses and sales of instruments and the growing popularity of musical instruction, followed quickly on the heels of the extension of literacy.71 New simplified modes of choral notation helped spur membership in amateur societies, and concert life expanded throughout the country. Poetry, long regarded as a privileged form of expression requiring more than rudimentary literacy, had been, like music, an aristocratic pastime. Self-expression through cultural mediums such as poetry and musical composition had been limited to the gentry by mere virtue of the restriction of access to education. Longfellow understood that with the extension of literacy, the writing of poetry could become a widespread, middle-class hobby.

  Longfellow managed to reach a mass audience by providing a model of poetic construction that could be imitated. As Alice Elgar’s poetic efforts suggest, poetry became a pastime, much like the amateur music making Elgar experienced in his childhood.72 Borrowing freely from the rich repository of Western culture, Longfellow, through his adaptations, found a way to submerge his own personality and encourage his readers to use poetry to express their sentiments. Longfellow’s poetry, as viewed from the perspective of his many and diverse readers, generated what Irmscher aptly construes as a “sentimental collaboration” between reader and writer, not dissimilar to the emergent function of listening to music in public spaces, an event in which meaning is imagined and invented by the individual listener in response to a composer’s work.73 Longfellow inspired readers to empathize with profound emotions by writing poetry of their own. Through the utilization of tradition, ultimately realized by Longfellow in his translation of Dante, a new population of readers was introduced to a cultural world otherwise accessible only to those few privileged enough to attend university. Longfellow gave them confidence that they could command the poetic and aesthetic tools that could unlock if not unleash in themselves an imaginary and ideal world of feeling and thought ordinarily closed to them.74

  Elgar and his mother, Ann, were exemplars of Longfellow’s public. The paradoxical and perhaps unsettling fact is that Longfellow, somewhat like the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, is at best now regarded as no more than a historical figure of passing interest, and at worst as a sentimentalist rejected with reason by the generations that followed. Yet it is no more possible to dismiss Longfellow as part of an ephemeral, noncanonical popular literature of the past than it is to reduce Meyerbeer’s works to the status of kitsch or, in Elgar’s terms, “frivolous and squalid music.” Longfellow was taken seriously in his lifetime as a learned and serious writer, just as Meyerbeer, despite his detractors, was widely admired by discerning contemporaries, including Liszt. Both Longfellow and Meyerbeer possessed a nontrivial craft for which we have lost the emotional and critical capacity of appreciation.

  Nonetheless, Longfellow’s formal strategy—his creation of a public, poetic rhetoric through which ideas and feelings could be spread, creating a community of admirers, imitators, and readers, all of whom believed they had a personal relationship with the author—parallels Elgar’s achievement. By using techniques adapted from Continental traditions ranging from Mendelssohn to Wagner, Elgar used the modern vehicle of orchestral and large-scale choral genres to craft a distinctly objective-sounding musical rhetoric that listeners found expressive of landscape, national pride, intimacy in the form of friendship, and religious sentiment, even in works without explicit programmatic meaning. By eschewing the extremes of musical practice, which he deemed decadent or imitatively academic, and by focusing on melodic and harmonic transparency, Elgar achieved a Longfellow-like accessibility without making cynical concessions to popular taste or sacrificing the highest cultural markers of craft and art. By adhering to recognized forms and musical vocabulary, he could reach a public like himself, one new to the practice of the arts, while avoiding for the most part the blatantly sentimental and crude. The public in question was none other than Arnold’s Philistines. Elgar, like Longfellow, became a didactic if not prophetic figure in the process of improving the culture of the nation, reaching even the working classes.75 As he opined in a 1905 interview:

  We Englishmen have in our naval and military history, in our religious struggles and traditions, in our national temper and qualities, in our literary and social achievements, and in our legends and tales, sufficient material to inspire and hearten the weakest and most cold-blooded of men. It is impossible for us Englishmen to do great work and have a school of music of our own, until we embody in it our national characteristics.76

  His task was derivative of Arnold’s: to use secular culture in the form of music to effect a national transformation, preserving the manly, industrial, and imperial discipline but elevating the citizenry to a Hellenic sensibility that in turn could fashion a sense of national community and tradition. Ironically, the key inspiration came from an American who successfully introduced, through poetry, the Hellenic values of a cultural tradition not only to his Philistine countrymen but Britain’s as well.

  Elgar transferred the unique and dominant contemporary impact of Longfellow into music, first by setting his poems and then by subsuming his works into purely instrumental music. The composer understood his public because it mirrored the cultural class to which he belonged, along with his mother and his wife (an amateur poet similar to Longfellow’s many correspondents). And the public returned to Elgar the same sympathy and empathy Longfellow had inspired in his readers. This was no more apparent than during World War I when Elgar, initially reluctant to turn against German colleagues who had been so generous and important to him, found himself at the center of the expression of patriotism and nationalism through music.77

  Ruskin, Newman, and the Construct of Community

  Edward Elgar was at once proud and defensive about his status as an autodidact. Although on occasion he feigned a gentleman’s disdain for serious conversation, at the same time he acted in a manner (including writing letters to editors) designed to display his erudition. Spurred by Brian Trowell’s extensive 1993 essay, a scholarly debate concerning the degree and extent of Elgar’s learning and reading has emerged.78 Among the prominent English writers Elgar explicitly cited (but unlike Longfellow, never directly utilized as a framework for musical composition) was John Ruskin, whose words appear on the last page of the autograph score of Gerontius. Indeed, Ruskin was perhaps the most influential and prolific writer on the connections between art and society.79 As in Arnold’s case, Ruskin’s many-sided and prodigious output—ranging from social reform to art and architecture—drew much of its inspiration from the intense religious debates of mid-nineteenth-Century England. Dissatisfaction with what appeared to be a cold, emotionally bankrupt, and theologically compromised but politically vital Anglican establishment led to the Tractarians and the Oxford Movement. At the time of the birth of the Oxford Movement, the primary religious movements competing with the established church were, as Newman claimed, evangelicalism and a liberalism that heralded secularism (it was this latter enthusiasm that drew Matthew Arnold away from religion).80 Anglo-Catholicism emerged at midcentury as well as a Catholic revival, both in response to the evangelicals and the liberals of the 1830s and 1840s.

  By the mid–1870s, the renaissance in English Catholicism had two seemingly contradictory trends. The first was a mystical spiritualism associated with Catholic doctrine and liturgy, whic
h would become closely allied with fin-de-siècle aestheticism and decadence. The deathbed conversion of Oscar Wilde can be taken as an example of this. The second trend was the development of a liberal Catholicism linked to the trajectory of Newman’s thought after his conversion in 1845. Elgar’s pronounced Tory political and social conservatism (he resigned in protest from the Athenaeum when Ramsey MacDonald was elected) and his ambitious patriotism suggest that his affinities to the Catholic religion into which he was born and to which his mother was devoted were not so much mystical as devotional; he was attracted to the authority and legitimacy of Catholicism and therefore its traditions and history. Likewise, Elgar’s love of science would have made him sympathetic to Newman’s later efforts to reconcile the more contemporary liberalism of the second half of the century with Catholicism. Newman encouraged within Catholicism the symbiosis of reason in science and reason in faith (in part through the positing of an “illative sense” that resided alongside an acceptance of the rules of evidence and methods of modern knowledge).81

  Religion, in Elgar’s lifetime, particularly in the years before World War I, was a serious concern among educated English men and women, as the cases of George Eliot and Christina Rossetti suggest. The issues were not only explicitly political, as suggested by the debate over the disestablishment of the Irish Church or revealed by the crisis surrounding the restoration of a Catholic hierarchy in England by the Pope. The issues mediated by religion were deeply personal and related to fundamental questions regarding life and death and the meaning of the individual’s temporal existence. There is a tendency in contemporary scholarly literature to reduce the engagement with religion, particularly the Catholic revival and the rise of Anglo-Catholicism, with dimensions of the struggle within Victorian society to deal with shifting conceptions of gender and sexuality, particularly homoeroticism and homosexuality.82 Elgar’s choice of Newman’s “The Dream of Gerontius” at a crucial juncture in his career reveals all the dimensions of the centrality of religion.83 The author was notorious for his conversion and role as Tractarian. The political significance of the poem lay in the aura surrounding the death at Khartoum of General Charles Gordon, on whose corpse was found an annotated copy of the poem. Above all, the poem’s subject matter is profoundly theological in its portrayal of a man’s journey from life to death and his subsequent entrance into purgatory. At its core are theological claims regarding the divine judgment and eventual receipt of grace.

  One clue to Elgar’s personal reading of the poem, which he edited for use as a libretto for a work that is part opera, part cantata, and part oratorio, lies in his decision to attach a quotation from Ruskin at the end. As Trowell suggests, there is much in Ruskin with which Elgar would not have sympathized, notably his social radicalism. But they shared the notion that music possessed ethical significance, that it could help form a national community, and that it was in the national interest to do so. But apart from their shared enthusiasm for certain Pre-Raphaelite painters, the importance of Ruskin is the link between Ruskin and Elgar’s conception of the religious significance of the public vocation of the artist.84 Gerontius was one of the few Elgar works to achieve a real following on the Continent, particularly in German-speaking Europe, and then mostly in Catholic regions, such as Düsseldorf and Vienna.85 The theology of the work was as much the object of critical debate as the music.

  Elgar selected the passage from Ruskin’s book Sesame and Lilies, which consisted of three lectures in the edition published in 1871.86 As Ruskin made clear in the preface, the impetus for his lectures, directed at the young, was that they were “written in the hope of awakening the youth of England, so as far as my poor words might have any power with them, to take some thought of the purposes of life into which they are entering, and the nature of the world they have to conquer.”87 The influence of reading Ruskin on Elgar can be surmised as having two dimensions. The first is stylistic, by which the character of Ruskin’s prose, not unlike the influence of Henry Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson on Charles Ives, can be considered. Ruskin’s form of eloquence is self-consciously aesthetic and the structure of his arguments in Sesame and Lilies intentionally tangential and elaborate, as elegantly designed as a complex garden. Ruskin’s style transcended the conventions of prose as mere utilitarian instrument of logic and information, without conceding a veritable boundary between the language of argument and that of fiction. This prose style—elaborate, theatrical, and disarmingly engaging with overlong stretches of extended argument—has more than an incidental connection with the musical rhetoric in Gerontius. Elgar’s encounter with Ruskin’s use of language may well have encouraged the composer’s adaptation of Wagnerian mannerisms into his own deeply personal and theological framework in which divine grace, truth, and salvation were at stake far more plausibly than in Parsifal (despite its Christian surface).

  This hypothesis has its own, albeit unsympathetic, advocate in one of Elgar’s contemporaries, the writer E. M. Forster. Although Forster had a deep interest in music, he seems to have had no contact with Elgar. But in his novel Howards End, published in 1910, the insurance clerk Leonard Bast, in a manner curiously reminiscent of Elgar’s well-known biography, is an autodidact seeking to acquire culture in order to improve himself, much in the spirit of Arnold’s transformation of the Philistine. Bast reads and goes to concerts. This is what Forster made of Bast’s reading of Ruskin: “Leonard was trying to form his style on Ruskin: he understood him to be the greatest master of English prose… . He felt that he was being done good to, and that if he kept on with Ruskin, and the Queen’s Hall Concerts, and some pictures by Watts, he would one day push his head out of the grey waters and see the universe.”88

  Forster appears not to have been a particular admirer of Elgar’s. In the fifth chapter of Howards End a music concert is described in detail. Beethoven is held up as the unsurpassable model (a view that Elgar may have shared), but Brahms’s “Four Serious Songs” come in for derision and Mendelssohn is dismissed. A discussion of English music ensues with a particularly sharp rejection of Elgar, which is then followed by the characters in the chapter beating a fast exit from Pomp and Circumstance. Forster expresses extreme skepticism regarding the self-consciously national element of English music as involving too great a sacrifice of the apparent universality of the instrumental repertoire of Viennese classicism and early Romanticism, particularly Beethoven.89

  Indeed, as his two essays on music from 1939 and 1941 indicate, Forster was a strong devotee of the idea that the best music is “untrammelled and untainted by reference.”90 His is a Ruskin-like position that music as a transcendent art cannot be captured by language. The difference is that Ruskin does not deny music meaning in the sense Forster wishes to. Elgar may have tried to balance programmatic with so-called absolute music, and may have expressed a preference for the latter, but his fame rested on music that he himself freely admitted had extramusical significance, whether personal, dramatic, or political. Therefore Forster’s implicit disdain for Elgar is not surprising.

  In his preface to the 1882 edition of Sesame and Lilies, Ruskin identified his readership as “chiefly … young people belonging to the upper, or undistressed middle, classes; who may be supposed to have choice of the objects and command of the industries of their life. It assumes that many of them will be called to occupy responsible positions in the world, and they have leisure, in preparation for these, to play tennis or to read Plato.”91 Ruskin’s readers were Arnold’s Philistines (with a smattering of Barbarians) and Longfellow’s admirers. But the text, as the generous allusions and citations suggest (along with Ruskin’s own apology that the third lecture, “The Mystery of Life and the Arts,” might read like a sermon), is driven by an underlying religious and theological premise. In this regard it differs markedly from the surface secular character of Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy.

  Ruskin wished that his readers would not waste time with “books of the hour” but those of all time.92 As with literature, art,
too, needed to be of the highest character and quality. The exemplars were Milton and Dante. But the underlying criterion was the artist’s motive with respect to the meaning of life and fact of death. “Nothing I have ever said,” wrote Ruskin, “is more true or necessary … than my strong assertion that the arts can never be right in themselves, unless their motive is right.”93 For Ruskin, aesthetic criteria were tied inextricably to ethical criteria and social imperatives. This included, besides the necessities of life, providing the populace with proper books in aesthetically pleasing form. Such a synthesis of aesthetic judgment and moral claims derived from Ruskin’s attachment to a view of life rooted in faith regarding the “ends of life.”94 The highest achievements of life, those that transcended speech and language and lay closest to its mystery, were in the realm of art. Ruskin’s Christianity was a religion of charity and compassion in which the greatest and highest of gifts was the possibility of realizing the “strength of England” by turning a new generation’s “intellect from dispute of words to discernment of things.”95 That power of discernment lay in the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility.