Edward Elgar and His World (12 page)

Elgar's letters contain an abundance of references to the distant past of his own life, many of them associated with his childhood and early adulthood in Worcester, and, especially in later years, infused with passionate regret and longing for a lost idyll.
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Leicester's books, too, have their warm domestic aspects: they blend personal and family memories, legend and hearsay, and genuine historical findings, merging personal and collective memory. To be sure, aside from the decision to set Cardinal Newman's “The Dream of Gerontius”—at the time a controversial move—Elgar seldom advertised his attachment to the mystery and majesty of Catholic worship, and he certainly did not utter public polemics on the subject: he was a cultural Catholic rather than a militant believer.
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Still, in 1931 he could write about the College Hall in Worcester: “The College Hall is a favorite subject for meditation with me, carrying, as it does, the happiest memories of great music, with a halo of the middle ages combined with an odour of sanctity which even the sacrilege of the reformers has not wholly destroyed.”
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(This sensual description resonates with Elgar's more general attachment to display and ceremonial, his liking for “colorful” music, and his impatience with the English taste for the plain.)

But Leicester's most significant parallels with Elgar are found at the levels of tone and rhetoric. Leicester's books are marked by an undercurrent of loss and anger and a sense of belatedness. The distant past is characterized by perfect unity; this was the time of “what had always been the ‘one faith' of Christendom.”
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Past and present worlds are separated by a definitive break at 1540, a break violently imposed by external forces against which the inhabitants of England, and Worcester in particular, are helpless. Although Leicester looks forward to the future unification of the Anglican and Catholic churches, his remarks in that regard sound as much like pious formulae as real hopes. When he lets down the guard of the respectable citizen and diligent antiquarian, Leicester emerges, like Elgar, as a man of contradictions: an accountant who hates commercialism and a Catholic with a sense of disinheritance within the city to which he professes devotion. As with Elgar, there is in practice no easy way out of this predicament. For the present, a better world can be glimpsed only through memory and imagination.

Some Musical Escape Routes

Rather than presenting a comforting illusion, Elgar's best music occasionally stumbles across the intuition of a happy existence that for the most part remains out of reach. It is escapist in this sense, and numerous passages and techniques could be cited in illustration. The pastoral interludes in the choral and symphonic works
(Caractacus, In the South, Falstaff
, the symphonies) could be viewed as isomorphic to Mr. Polly's weekend excursions: they are wonderfully idyllic, but they do not last. Thematic reminiscence in Elgar's works—the recollection of material from an earlier movement in a later movement—is often as sensual as his memory of College Hall in Worcester: the recollections are prepared portentously, presented mysteriously, and cloaked in a hazy atmosphere. The cadenza of the Violin Concerto and the slow movement of the Second Symphony contain wellknown examples. (By contrast, the musical “present” of the later movement is usually far more prosaic.) There is a common process in Elgar's symphonic works whereby a grandiose climax swiftly recedes and gives way to intimate, introspective music—a process known in the literature as “withdrawal.”
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During the 1910s, Elgar developed a tendency to conclude his major compositions with bitter irony or with palpable, unresolved duality. His last two substantial symphonic works,
Falstaff
(1913) and the Cello Concerto (1919), along with
The Music Makers
(1912), endure painful ruptures in their final bars, which push dream and reality, memory and present consciousness into stark oppositions. In all these examples, escape is characterized by displacement: digression from the main “argument” or “frame” of a piece. Such displacement is almost always corrected in the end. Interludes recede, reminiscences fade, and movements end with the reiteration of their “proper” frame and close in the “home” key. It is very unusual for a movement in one of Elgar's scores to be permanently disrupted by an escapist digression and its overall course altered. Just as in Elgar's life, there is no equivalent to Mr. Polly's successful act of resistance. Despite their shared determination to succeed in a caste-bound society, Elgar possessed little of Wells's resilience or enterprise, traits the author drew upon and transmuted to create the character of Mr. Polly. This is not to say the displacements leave no mark on Elgar's music. Reality prevails, but at a price: it is diminished and discredited. In the final bars of Elgar's later symphonic works, closure is achieved, but resolution is absent.

A related form of escape by displacement is illustrated by Elgar's characteristic use of abrupt tonal shifts or slippages. In many cases these shifts are soon reversed, allowing the music to resume in its original tonal sphere. They are parenthetical utterances, indicating moments of distraction or fleeting reverie. A late but charming example is found in a piece titled “Dreaming,” from the 1931
Nursery Suite
(
Example 1
). Drowsiness turns briefly to deeper slumber six bars after rehearsal number 57, as a 6–4–2 chord on D
enters, the parts marked lento, espressivo
,
pianissimo, and the double basses entering briefly to darken the color. But the music soon finds its way back to the tonic E
and continues on its way. The examples could be multiplied. For instance, the songs from Elgar's incidental music to the stage play
The Starlight Express
—given to a character known as the Organ Grinder—contain three such digressions—again flatward—each of which coincides with a call for a return to the dreams and enchantment of childhood. The reassertion of the mundane adult world is effected briskly, and sometimes brutally. The opposition between dream and reality is starkly underlined.
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In the symphonic works, tonal displacement occasionally receives more complex treatment. Although in the final analysis an uncomfortable duality is upheld, the effect of the displacement is felt longer. In
Example 2
, for instance, from the Adagio of the First Symphony, a movement cast in D major, a sequence in A major underpins a rising diatonic linear pattern in the upper voice, beginning C#–D–E–F# (
Examples 2a
and
2b
). The sequence stops when the progression turns to G# instead of G#. This turns out to be a chromatic passing note that merely delays the appearance of dominant harmony (with G#s) and then tonic harmony, completing an implicit progression of a sixth in the upper voice: C#–A. The sequence then begins again. But in the meantime the G is expanded by means of a G major chord and its applied dominant. During that expansion, the regular progress of the sequence is halted; the pulse is less marked; the texture broadens; musical time slows. This example does not present an absolute duality: the music of the sequence already possesses an idyllic tone, and the G major harmony is well integrated into the musical paragraph by virtue of the underlying voice-leading. Indeed, the broadening of the textual and rhythmic dimensions impels the music onward and allows, as it were, the sequence to unfold all the more expansively on its repetition. In this view the G major music stores up a kind of potential energy, which is released on the return to A major, the overall key of this passage.

Example 1. “Dreaming,” Nursery Suite, rehearsal nos. 57–58

In
Example 3
, from the Larghetto of the Second Symphony, the mustering of forces for a grand climax is interrupted and partially reversed by a shift from a B-flat major/G minor sphere to D major, combined with a slowing of tempo, a sudden reduction in dynamics, and a fleck of color from the clarinets. Here the sense of purpose and drive of the preceding bars is sapped—not altogether, but the gradual buildup taking place during this section has to begin all over again in the new key, D major. The music finds its way back to the tonal center of this section of the movement—F major—although much more gradually than in the excerpt from the Adagio from the First Symphony cited in
Example 2a
. Still, F major is asserted unambiguously at the climax of the Larghetto (see full score, rehearsal number 76) and is stabilized thereafter, so the section overall is tonally closed.

Example 2a. Adagio, Symphony no. 1 in A-flat Major, op. 55.

Example 2b. Adagio, Symphony no. 1 in A-flat Major, op. 55, voice-leading reduction.

The Adagio of the Cello Concerto is perhaps the closest Elgar ever comes, from the perspective of tonality, to a wholly “escapist” movement. The piece is framed by an eight-bar period in B-flat at its beginning and end, but otherwise the tonality is fluid. A few ideas are repeated in irregular sequences, moving swiftly through distant modulations with no apparent rationale for the choice of keys that are briefly established. In
Example 4
, where the harmonic progressions are based around chromatic motions in parallel sixths, the abrupt tonal shifts are coordinated with changes of instrumental color (woodwind replacing strings) and, for the soloist, upward leaps to 9–8 appoggiaturas. The movement as a whole amounts to a reverie, which acquires a kind of coherence only through the consistency of its waywardness. Its melancholy quality arises not just from its obsessive dwelling on a handful of ideas but from its determination to be always distracted by them.
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Still, this attitude is sustained for only sixty bars; the opening of the finale reasserts conventional rhetoric and function and gets the concerto back on course.