Elgar’s own Catholicism is important to an understanding of his music. Although it wasn’t, as it was for Olivier Messiaen, the principal subject matter, it did create many of the internal tensions and frictions out of which flowed a profusion of deeply personal musical ideas. Whether it’s his struggle with its religious or moral teachings, or because it locked the doors that otherwise might have been opened to professional or social acceptance, Catholicism is the backdrop to every scene in Elgar’s creative life.
It’s easy to forget that less than thirty years before Elgar was born, the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 had finally allowed Catholics a degree of religious and civil freedom that they’d been denied for the best part of three centuries. Although the violence and martyrdoms of the reign of the first Elizabeth were more than two centuries in the past, there were still severe restrictions regarding worship, land ownership and employment until this change in the law. Indeed, when Elgar was born, Catholics were not able to attend Oxford or Cambridge Universities.
In Elgar’s day, Catholics themselves were socially divided and religiously polarised, which made them both defensive and timid. At one end of the social scale were Irish labourers, with neither a voice in England nor a say back home. Contrast them with the few surviving Catholic aristocratic families, the recusants, hidden away on their vast country estates; all they wanted was to be left in peace. When John Henry Newman, a man at the centre of the Church of England, embraced Rome, he encouraged others who wanted to become Catholics; his conversion made Catholicism intellectually respectable to those born within its walls; and, in a wider context over the remaining decades of the century, it influenced Roman Catholic theology itself.
Elgar’s religious life is easy to chart – or at least its recorded facts. It all began at St George’s Catholic Church in Worcester where Elgar’s father, William, was the organist. In 1848 William married Anne Greening, who, although an Anglican, used to accompany her husband to church regularly on Sundays. A few years later, she decided to convert to Catholicism herself. Elgar’s father, on the other hand, remained an agnostic until his deathbed conversion. Edward was born and baptised in 1857, and later attended small Catholic schools in the area. After he left school aged fifteen he began to assist his father at St George’s, arranging and writing music for the choir, and eventually taking over the post of organist. Soon afterwards he began to give violin lessons and among his pupils was Alice Roberts. When her mother died Elgar lent Alice his well-worn and annotated copy of a favourite poem: The Dream of Gerontius by Cardinal Newman. They soon became engaged and, in 1889, married at the London Oratory. They had a Catholic ceremony but without a Nuptial Mass as Alice was still a Protestant, but then three years later Alice was received into the Catholic Church at St George’s.
So much for the record. Exploring Elgar’s internal Catholic life is a different matter. In the 1890s, he was still attending Mass every Sunday, and often afternoon Benediction on the same day as well. He didn’t talk very much about his personal faith or lack of it but there are a few clues in some of his letters. In 1892 he wrote a touching letter to the children of some friends during a Bavarian holiday, taking up a third of the text to enthuse about the folk-Catholicism he found there: ‘No protestants … workmen carrying their rosaries … bells ringing at the elevation [in the Mass] at which people in the streets take off their hats and make the sign of the Cross … crucifixes on the roadsides … chapels to the blessed virgin…’
Also on vacation in the 1890s, Elgar made extensive notes in a travel book entitled Tyrol and the Tyrolese. The Victorian author’s anti-Catholic remarks about the priesthood and the peasant people obviously offended Elgar and his annotations can be clearly seen in the copy now owned by the composer David Matthews. The words ‘bigoted’, ‘superstition’ and ‘blind’ are vigorously crossed out by Elgar. Next to the author’s suggestion that sins of a sexual nature are thought less serious and more easily forgiven in Confession, Elgar has written, ‘That is a lie!’
It’s when we consider the background to his most Catholic work that the real clues begin to reveal themselves. When he decided in 1899 to set Cardinal Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius to music, he was taking an enormous risk. It was his first major commission and his career was all set to take off. To choose this deeply Catholic text in a country where ‘Papists’ were still a suspicious, despised and even ridiculed minority was a provocation courting disaster. Yet he went ahead, with total disregard for any possible censure or disfavour. It’s hard to believe that the words had no religious meaning for him at the time, especially as he was aware that his faith had been an impediment to his career. At the front of the score of Gerontius he wrote the bold letters: A.M.D.G. (Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam) – ‘To the Greater Glory of God’. This is the motto of the Jesuit order who, by the way, ran St George’s when Elgar was there. Elgar poured his soul into this work. He described it as ‘the best of me’ and said that he’d written out his ‘insidest inside’. When his publisher August Jaeger suggested that there was too much ‘Joseph and Mary’ about the work, Elgar replied, ‘Of course it will frighten the low-church party but the poem must on no account be touched! Sacrilege and not to be thought of … It’s awfully curious the attitude (towards sacred things) of the narrow English mind.’ For me, a narrow-minded, low-church, English teenager, fifty years after Elgar’s death, The Dream of Gerontius was an exotic plant indeed, and it turned out to be the very first step on the road to my own conversion to Catholicism.
But only weeks after its famously disastrous premiere, Elgar wrote again to Jaeger, ‘Providence denies me a decent hearing of my work: so I submit – I always said God was against art & I still believe it … I have allowed my heart to open once – it is now shut against every religious feeling & every soft, gentle impulse for ever.’ Although this sounds more like a temper tantrum than a reasoned rebellion against belief, it does suggest that Elgar’s Catholicism was more cultural than deep-rooted; also I think there’s a telltale clue in his use of the word ‘Providence’: a strained and un-Catholic view of God as Fate rather than Father.
This crisis after Gerontius appears to mark the beginning of a steady walk away from the Church, and of an increasingly black, depressive mood that would overshadow his emotional life until the end. Although after reading Shaw’s Man and Superman in 1904 he could still write, ‘Bernard Shaw is hopelessly wrong, as all these fellows are, on fundamental things: – amongst others they punch Xtianity & try to make it fit their civilisation instead of making their civilisation fit It.’ Nevertheless, there are revealing references that continue to pop up in letters mentioning Alice or their only daughter Carice being at church while he remained at home. For a Catholic to miss Mass on Sunday deliberately was considered a mortal sin, and to do so was a clear sign that Elgar’s institutional faith was nominal.
After Gerontius, Elgar began work on a trilogy of oratorios based on the life of Christ and his Apostles. He did his own research, read many biblical scholars, and consulted two Anglican clergymen. Catholic biblical scholarship at the time lagged far behind and some of the volumes piled up on his desk would also have been on the Vatican’s list of Forbidden Books. The first decade of the twentieth century was the high point of the modernism controversy, when a witch hunt was under way against certain theologians who had been making an attempt to reconcile aspects of modern science and philosophy with ancient doctrines. It’s likely that Elgar was conscious of these issues and he might have been troubled by some of the discrepancies being uncovered in the latest research, undermining his trust in the veracity of traditional Catholic teaching. He never completed this trilogy, only The Apostles and The Kingdom were finished. The Kingdom caused him greater birth pangs than any other work, according to his wife. It seems that he’d simply lost interest in the subject matter – the embers of belief were glowing very faintly indeed.
Over the years, Elgar’s attitude towards his Catholic faith degenerated from discomfort and indifference to
fierce antipathy. On his deathbed in 1934 he refused to see a priest, and asked for his cremated remains to be scattered on a favourite river. Until 1963, cremation was forbidden for Catholics, and so in itself this request was a demonstrable turning away from the Church. In the event, Elgar did see a priest and is buried next to his wife in St Wulstun’s Church, Little Malvern. The contrast with Gerontius’s preparation for death, set to music thirty years earlier, is a chilling drama in itself.
In 1913 he wrote to his old friend Nicholas Kilburn that the only quotation he could find to fit his life was from the Demon’s Chorus in Gerontius: ‘The mind bold and independent, the purpose free must not think, must not hope…’ To George Bernard Shaw, with whom he established a fond friendship, he’s said to have wished that the negatives of the Commandments could be removed and inserted into the creed: I do not believe in God; thou shalt commit adultery, and so on. And, speaking of which, by the middle of the Edwardian reign, Elgar had formed a new, engrossing attachment to another Alice – Lady Alice Stuart Wortley, or ‘Windflower’ as he nicknamed her. This relationship almost certainly remained unconsummated but its intensity and passion was clear even to his wife. We can still hear its power today in works such as the Violin Concerto and the Second Symphony, both of which were written under the Windflower spell. Many have lost their faith when required to choose between it and something of which it disapproves.
Nevertheless his witticism regarding ‘nots’ in the commandments and creed are more than just a frustrated reaction to the denial of some forbidden fruit. There’s an important and profound Christian reflex hidden here. Christ himself manifested a great intolerance of unnecessary rules and laws, which he described as heavy burdens on people’s backs that religious leaders refused to help lift. ‘The Italians make the rules; the Irish keep them’ is a quip that reveals candidly the scrupulosity flowing vigorously in the bloodstream of the Northern European Catholicism of the time. This way of thinking created a religious atmosphere, a repressive and reactionary fog, with which someone of Elgar’s background and generation would have been all too familiar. It gave little consolation or defence when someone was called on to face the doubts and darkness that often come in matters of faith.
To return, as I began, to St Thérèse of Lisieux. At the end of her short life, amid terrible physical suffering, she admitted that only her faith prevented her from committing suicide, and that even her belief in God was under assault. In his longer lifetime Elgar witnessed the collapse of England’s empire with regret, but he didn’t live long enough to benefit from the influence of both Thérèse and Cardinal Newman on the slow crumbling of the Vatican’s outer shell, and the subsequent revealing of a more gentle, consoling heart within – a Father not Fate, with all the tied ‘knots’ of alienation lovingly loosed.
Tchaikovsky didn’t commit suicide
Tchaikovsky didn’t kill himself. At least, there is no evidence that he did, and many reasons why he might not have. The Third Piano Concerto op. 75 is an exhibit I would definitely bring along to the trial – not as a verdict-clincher, perhaps, but something to help scotch the rumour that surfaced in the months following the composer’s death and that entered the textbooks by the early twentieth century.
This concerto was meant to be his Sixth Symphony, but a more famous and, it has to be said, a more wonderful piece pushed it out of the way. After he had finished writing the Pathétique Symphony he returned to his abandoned E flat major sketches and began to recast them as a piano concerto. Only one movement was actually finished before his death, and, unlike so much of Tchaikovsky’s music, it has a mainly cheerful spirit, with distinct Gallic echoes of Saint-Saëns and the most toe-tapping trepak I know. Only in the enormous cadenza does the heart really begin to beat faster, but that is more from the wild flurries of notes flying over the keyboard than from darker clouds of passion.
Tchaikovsky’s physician, Vasily Bertenson, who diagnosed his fatal illness, later wrote of him, ‘It is difficult to imagine a purer optimist. His bright vivacity, his love of life and of every living thing, his faith in the triumph of good and in people … never left him.’ I believe that the trial of Oscar Wilde, which was a contemporary event, and the wild hysteria it unleashed in the English-speaking world against homosexuality, had a lot to do with this verdict of suicide. It was a bit of scurrilous gossip that turned into a rumour and eventually became an assumed biographical fact. The self-loathing homosexual who took his own life fitted the post-mortem bill, explaining and excusing Tchaikovsky’s sexuality but ultimately damaging the way we think of him – as both man and musician. The Sixth Symphony is certainly a dark, tragic work and we could choose to regard it as the most beautiful suicide note ever written; but that scenario becomes less convincing when we hear what he wrote next: the jolly, rambunctious gaiety of the Third Piano Concerto.
Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto
Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. Every conservatory practice room, every teacher’s studio, every competition’s final round rings with those wretched opening D flat major chords. I avoided the work as a student and for years afterwards, despite being offered performances, and I was quite content for it to be the missing piece on my repertoire list. But then one day I was teaching it in a masterclass and it began to reveal itself. I began to see the particular conflicts within: the innocence of lost childhood singing poignantly alongside a searingly emotional adult world; the Classicism of the composer who admired Mozart above all, combined with the Romanticism of the composer whose heart and sleeve were bigger than all others. It seemed a work alive and on fire – inspired in every bar. Ideas about how I might play it started teeming in my mind and I realised that I really wanted to learn it.
What is it like to revisit a work like this with only hand baggage? To hear the piece that founded a style and forget the pieces that followed in its train? (It was the first time in musical history that symphonic argument and self-conscious virtuoso display would unite in a concerto.) The problem with well-known pieces is that we think we know them, and there are few pieces more ‘set in their ways’ than Tchaikovsky’s First. But what if its famous opening chords were originally not punched-out fists of notes strutting confidently up the keyboard, but instead, sprigs of spread, harp-like arpeggios accompanying a slow waltz – one in a bar? (This is indeed what the original version of the score shows.) And what if the second movement’s opening theme is not a tragic romance but instead a little girl’s song on Christmas morning, all winter dreams, marked Andantino semplice (‘faster than walking’, ‘simply’)? And what if the whole piece is not the product of a self-hating neurotic who wallowed in his suffering until he ended it all by his own hand, but rather by a man beloved of children, hard-working, generous, humorous and full of sheer good fun? Listen to the last movement of the Second Piano Concerto for evidence of that!
‘It’s a complete mess, but come in. You’re welcome.’ Not his craftsmanship, of course (not for nothing was Mozart his favourite composer); but the emotional chaos and naked vulnerability of Tchaikovsky’s life is channelled through, wrestled with and poured out in his music with such disarming honesty that it invites the listener into a unique intimacy. We can refuse to enter his world, and many do, but once inside, his mess becomes ours. In the sparkle of the Nutcracker’s naivety or in the tug of despair in the Sixth Symphony we see our lost childhood, our grown-up pain; and we find we have a new friend who understands this and gives melodious voice to the turbulence within.
Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto: why I changed the second movement
On my recording of the complete Tchaikovsky concertante works there are three different versions of the slow movement of the Second Concerto. In the context of the entire piece we played the original version – not a note changed or cut; but, as an appendix, we offered two solutions to the problem of this movement – one contemporary with the composer, the other contemporary with the pianist.
At early performances of this concerto cr
iticisms were raised about two issues: its length, and the lack of prominence of the solo piano part in the second movement. It seems from Tchaikovsky’s letters that he acknowledged these problems in the piece, and he suggested some cuts himself as well as handing over the score to his friend and pupil Alexander Siloti for further amendments. Siloti incorporated the composer’s first-movement cut (in the orchestral tutti of the development section) but when it came to the second movement, instead of some judicious tweaking here and there, he rewrote it entirely, slashing it to bits, reducing its length by 50 per cent and, as a result, changing a serious, deeply expressive movement into a lightweight intermezzo. Tchaikovsky was horrified when he saw what Siloti had done, and absolutely refused to accept his changes. There are at least three letters in which he makes this clear in the strongest terms, yet this version was not only published after the composer’s death, but it became the only version heard for fifty years or more. (And thus became the version choreographed by George Balanchine.) Although I would never dream of playing it in the context of a performance of the piece, I thought it would be interesting to include it on my recording as a historical document.
Rough Ideas Page 17
