Edward Elgar and His World (10 page)

77. C. V. Gorton,
The Apostles, Sacred Oratorio by Edward Elgar: An Interpretation of the Libretto
(London: Novello and Company, [1903]); and
The Kingdom, Sacred Oratorio by Edward Elgar: An Interpretation of the Libretto
(London: Novello and Company, [1906]).

78. Elgar's use of Kramskoi's painting is an interesting case study of cross-cultural reinterpretation of a religious object. The painting is one of several by this late-nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox painter that depicts aspects of great men engaged in the public good, often at odds with their own desires.
Grove Art
notes that Kramskoi stated that “he wanted to convey to the viewer a sense of Christ's moral choice as an example applicable to their own lives when torn between serving an ideal or adhering to private concerns.” (Elizabeth K. Valkenier, “Kramskoy, Ivan,”
Grove Art Online
, Oxford University Press,
http://www.groveart.com
, accessed June 30, 2006). Elgar originally acquired a photographic reproduction of the painting from the Anglican canon C. V. Gorton (he compiled the libretto for Elgar's 1896 oratorio
The Light of Life
). Gorton may have been attracted to the human-looking Christ making a moral choice, but Elgar, in a letter to the singer David Ffrangçon Davies noted that it was “my ideal picture of the lonely Christ.” Geoffrey Hodgkins,
Somewhere Further North: Elgar and the Morecombe Festival
(Rickmansworth: Poneke Press, 2003, 36). Thus Elgar equated the painting with similar devotional images of Christ used contemporaneously by Catholics in Great Britain.

79. Rosa Burley and Frank C. Carruthers,
Edward Elgar: The Record of a Friendship
(London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972), 26.

80. See, for instance,
Catholic Directory, Ecclesiastical Register and Almanac
(London: Burns and Oates and Washbourne, Limited, 1932), 65.

81.
Catholic Encyclopedia
, s.v. “Oratorio.” In a telling remark, the entry names Elgar's contemporary Edgar Tinel “the most gifted of composers who have reclaimed the oratorio from non-Catholic supremacy.” Tinel, a Belgian composer, included a great deal of Gregorian chant and Palestrinian counterpoint in his oratorio
St. Francis
(1886–88). Elgar may have used Gregorian chant as a basis for his music in
The Apostles
, but he did not write a book on the subject, as Tinel did in 1890, and his counterpoint is certainly not touched by Palestrina. External and obvious reference to things Gregorian were a particular sign of Ultramontanism. John Butt theorizes that Elgar's “essentially English” musical style might have come from his work with Gregorian chant while organist at St. George's. Butt, “Roman Catholicism,” 107–8.

82. Edward Algernon Baughan, “‘The Apostles' and Elgar's Future,” in
Music and Musicians
(London: Lane, 1906), 202.

83.
One Hundred Ninetieth Thousand: The Explanatory Catechism of Christian Doctrine, Chiefly Intended for the Use of Children in Catholic Schools
(London: 1884), 57; quoted in Heimann,
Catholic Devotion
, 114.

84. The London marriage of Elgar and Alice Roberts might also have been for reasons of family tradition and lore. The composer's father, Henry, although he lived in Worcester at the time, married Ann Greening in 1848 in London as well. See Young,
Elgar, Newman, and
Gerontius, 82; Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 5. The liberal nature of the London Oratory on Brompton Road may have been preserved because at its 1884 dedication, Pope Leo XII proclaimed it to be “
the
Oratory” in England, much to the chagrin of Cardinal John Henry Newman. The oratory was richly appointed and garnered impressive donations from wealthy Catholics. In contrast, Newman's oratory in Birmingham was a “patchwork … with its factory roof, painted walls and worn benches.” See Meriol Trevor,
Newman: The Pillar of the Cloud
(London: Macmillan, 1962), 2: 611. Newman, feeling slighted, did not attend the dedication of the London Oratory in 1884, using old age as his excuse. He did, however, dispatch a gift and several priests of the Birmingham Oratory on his behalf, and attended a funeral at the London Oratory for the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk in 1886.

85. Hodgkins, “Providence and Art,” 16, 18.

86. See McGuire,
Elgar's Oratorios
, 178–83, for a discussion of the genesis of the compositions from the original grand design to shorter works.

87. Hodgkins, “Providence and Art,” 20.

88. Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 479.

89. Quoted in Doolan,
St. George's, Worcester
, 20.

90. Conversation between Elgar and the Leicester family, 17 June 1908, noted by Philip Leicester and quoted in Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 527.

91. Rudolph de Cordova, “Interview with Dr. Elgar,” in
The Strand Magazine
, May 1904, 538–39, quoted in Michael Kennedy,
Portrait of Elgar
, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987; repr. 1995), 23.

92. See Matthew Riley, “Rustling Reeds and Loft Pines: Elgar and the Music of Nature,”
19th-Century Music
26, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 155–77.

93. Edward Elgar, foreword to Hubert Leicester's
Forgotten Worcester
(Worcester: Ebenezer Bayliss/Trinity Press, 1930), 10–11.

94. Kennedy,
Portrait of Elgar
, 20–21. The interior quote is from an article by Ernest Newman in the
Sunday Times
(London), 23 October 1955.

95. Kennedy,
Portrait of Elgar
, 328–29.

96. Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 823. The squabbling over where the dying Elgar should be buried, with Granville Bantock and John Reith attempting to maneuver the composer's Catholic corpse into the Anglican necropolis of Westminster Abbey, makes for sorry reading; see Michael De-la-Noy,
Elgar the Man
(London: Allen Lane, 1983), 228–29.

97. If not sung by both congregations during Elgar's time, they certainly are today. See
Elgar's Cathedral Music
(dir. Donald Hunt; Hyperion: CDA66313, 1988), a compact disc that presents a mixture of Elgar's Catholic church music composed in Latin for St. George's along with some of the Three Choirs Festival psalm settings with English texts, sung by the choir of Worcester Cathedral and conducted by Donald Hunt, who was for many years their organist.

98. Boden,
Three Choirs
, 179–80. Boden's description is likely taken from “The Memorial Service in Worcester Cathedral,” in
The Musical Times
75, no. 1094 (April 1934): 313.

99. Ibid.

100. The capitalization in this passage is a direct transcription.
Nature
is a telling word in this case, especially since the obituary that precedes it conflates the natural Elgar with the modernists, speaking of a new love for Elgar by the “younger generation” who “are taking to Elgar's music, amid the dark ways of modernism, as they do to a burst of sunshine in cloudy weather.” “Edward Elgar,”
The Musical Times
75, no. 1094 (April 1934): 313.

101. A similar avatar, bridging Elgar to Anglicanism, appeared with the unveiling in the early 1980s of the Elgar statue, “midway between the High Street site of the Elgar family music shop and the cathedral, scene of so many performances of [Elgar's] music.” John C. Phillips, “The Elgar Statue,”
The Musical Times
121, no. 1649 (July 1980): 440. The statue faces the cathedral, its back to St. George's Catholic Church. While the popular view of Elgar might acknowledge his Catholicism, the acknowledgment is not important enough to stand in the way of a good metaphor.

102. In his essay “The ‘Dark Saying' of the Enigma,” found in
Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity
, Byron Adams broadly asserts that the Lygon family was Roman Catholic, noting that Evelyn Waugh based the Catholic Marchmain family of
Brideshead Revisited
largely on the Lygons (220). Although individual members of family may have partaken of Catholic rituals (Lady Sybil, for instance, was married in the London Oratory on Brompton Road) or even converted to Catholicism (a rumor based on Lord Beauchamp's repeated attendance at solemn masses), evidence for the family's supposed Catholicism is ambiguous at best. Generations of Lygons matriculated at Christ Church Oxford; several, including Frederick Lygon (B.A., 1852; M.A., 1856), John Lygon (B.A., 1806; M.A., 1808), and William Beauchamp Lygon (B.A., 1804; M.A., 1808) took degrees at that institution long before Catholics were allowed to do so in 1871. See Joseph Foster,
Alumni Oxionienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1715–1886: Their Parentage, Birthplace, and Year of Birth, with a Record of Their Degrees
(Oxford and London: Parker and Col., 1888), 3: 885. According to the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, Frederick Lygon was known for both his composition of an Anglican hymnal used at the family's private chapel at Madresfield Court and his Anglican High Church views, which his son William (the seventh Earl Beauchamp) thought were bigoted. William Lygon's opinion of his father leaves room to speculate about the later Lygons' Catholic sympathies.

Elgar the Escapist?

MATTHEW RILEY

One of the more serious charges that can be brought against Elgar is that his art is escapist. This criticism can be targeted in several ways. Most obviously, Elgar was committed to a late-Romantic expressive idiom, to overall monotonality (his works usually begin and end in the same key), and to diatonicism as a basic point of tonal reference. These factors meant that during the first two decades of the twentieth century Elgar's music began to lag behind “progressive” developments in European music. More specifically, some of the literary themes that interested Elgar point to a desire to forget the reality of the present. He embraced the Victorian cult of chivalry and peopled his works with brave knights and heroic kings. As he reached middle age, he wrote music for and about children that echoes a well-known vein of late Victorian and Edwardian literary whimsy (Frances Hodgson Burnett, Kenneth Grahame, J. M. Barrie).
¹
Finally, in his symphonic works there are moments when Elgar abandons the “musical present” to dwell on thematic reminiscences of earlier movements. At such points the past seems to take on an enchanted quality that the present can never match.

Since Freud, it is common to associate the notion of escape with regression. In this view, to be an escapist means not just to evade adult responsibilities but to suffer from a psychological disorder in which libido is arrested at an infantile stage of development (the “oral” phase). Furthermore, on a cultural level it could be alleged that escapist impulses are easily manipulated (and perhaps originally induced) by commercial or political forces that seek to cement their power and to dilute popular resistance.

But there is another possible perspective. A long tradition of English radicalism links dream, escape, and protest. Victorian medievalists such as A. W. N. Pugin, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Kingsley, and John Ruskin invoked a distant, alluring past in order to focus their passionate concern for the reform of contemporary society. William Morris's visual designs took inspiration from a medieval world where, he believed, the division of labor was unknown, the worker free. His utopian
News from Nowhere
(1890) imagined a future, post-revolutionary England steeped in beauty and innocent of money. These escapists wanted to change the world; they held up their dreams and visions as stimuli to action.
²
Perhaps the most eloquent plea for the value of escapism was made in the late 1930s by Elgar's fellow West Midlands Catholic, J. R. R. Tolkien (a direct literary descendant of Morris). In defending his attraction to “fairy stories,” Tolkien warned against confusing the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter: “Just so a Party-spokesman might have labeled departure from the misery of the Führer's or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery.” The companions of “escape,” he explained, are “disgust,” “anger,” “condemnation,” and “revolt.”
³

In this light, a reexamination of Elgar's escapist impulses seems feasible. The present essay sketches an approach to the task. The problem is too large to tackle systematically here: there are too many compositions that could be cited, too many aspects of the late Victorian and Edwardian worlds that are relevant to Elgar's outlook. Instead, this investigation takes several novel, and perhaps provocative, perspectives on Elgar. The first half examines his personality and attitudes by means of two comparisons. Fiction by Elgar's contemporary H. G. Wells and historical writings by his friend Hubert Leicester provide lenses through which to view his personal circumstances. They bring into play some sociological issues relevant to Elgar's escapism concerning class and religion, respectively. The second half of the essay turns to Elgar's compositions, focusing on his characteristic treatment of sudden tonal shifts and evaluating the specifically musical escapism that becomes possible in his works.

Mr. Polly

H. G. Wells, born nine years after Elgar, was another shopkeeper's son. His father's business failed, and he worked his way to national recognition through self-help and hard work. During the first decade of the twentieth century—when Elgar enjoyed his greatest public esteem—Wells wrote three semiautobiographical novels that featured young, lower-middle-class men:
Love and Mr. Lewisham
(1900),
Kipps
(1905), and
The History of Mr. Polly
(1909). In each case the main character is innocent and aspiring but ill educated and trapped in unpromising employment: all the ingredients for escapist behavior are in place.

The character most akin to Elgar is Mr. Polly, whose father owns a music and bicycle shop. Mr. Polly is imprisoned first in the routine of a dull job in a drapery emporium and then in marriage and a High Street shop in Fishbourne in which he foolishly invests some unexpectedly inherited capital. Mr. Polly receives an inferior education and constantly struggles against straightened financial circumstances and meager opportunities for self-improvement. Before his fortunate windfall, he alternates between the shop floor and the employment office. However, he never fully loses his sparks of imagination and wonder. Deep inside him there lurks the conviction that “there was beauty, there was delight; that somewhere—magically inaccessible perhaps, but still somewhere—were pure and easy and joyous states of body and mind.”
⁴
Mr. Polly therefore lives out a dual existence. He avidly collects books, and he prefers to lose himself in them than look after his shop properly. He is a keen cyclist, and at weekends goes on long rides to explore the countryside. His reading is totally unsystematic (and in this respect probably more like Elgar's than the latter would have admitted), mixing classics (Shakespeare, Boccaccio, Rabelais) with modern adventure stories and thrillers.
⁵
He falls in love in courtly fashion, after the manner of a character in a chivalric romance. As an autodidact, Mr. Polly is uncertain of the pronunciation of words he has seen only in print, but is enthusiastic in devising ringing phrases and sometimes ridiculous neologisms. He has a tendency to verbal pretence, but is also vulnerable to the conversational faux pas.