Edward Elgar and His World (15 page)

The last few years of Elgar's formal education, from 1869 to 1872, were spent at Francis Reeve's school, Littleton House, which was situated across the Severn River from Worcester Cathedral. Elsewhere in this volume, McGuire paints a vivid portrait of this institution, and the young Elgar was lucky indeed to attend what was, in essence, a modest Catholic “public” school run by a professional schoolmaster, for profit.
²⁵
How Ann Elgar managed to pay for Edward's schooling there is a wonder, given the slender household budget. Reeve must have been an effective teacher, since the adult Elgar once wrote him a brief encomium that declared, “Some of your boys try to follow out your good advice & training, although I can answer for one who falls only too far short of your ideal.”
²⁶
That Elgar remained in school until fifteen is a testament to his mother's steely determination in the face of both fluctuating income and the easygoing indifference of her husband.
²⁷

Through her love of reading, her own writing, and her taste in authors, Ann Elgar neatly fits the profile of a working-class autodidact of nineteenth-century Britain. To her granddaughter Carice, Ann wrote in 1897, “When I was a very young girl I used to think I should read all the books I ever met with.”
²⁸
(Recall Elgar's own testimony, quoted previously, that “I read everything, played everything, and heard everything I possibly could.”) Like many others of her class, Ann knew instinctively that learning would give her a greater measure of agency over her inner life. One working-class autodidact testified: “Life only becomes conscious of itself when it is translated into word, for only in the word is reality discovered.” Of this observation, Rose notes: “That was the autodidacts' mission statement: to be more than passive consumers of literature, to be active thinkers and writers.”
²⁹

A striking aspect of many working-class readers was a marked devotion to poetry. Furthermore, many of these working-class readers were not merely “passive consumers” of poetry, but wrote verse themselves. Ann Elgar was one such amateur poet; though lacking technical polish, her poetry is often touching in its sincerity and infinitely more readable than the technically accomplished verse, sadly marred by a simpering gentility, written by Edward's cultivated wife, Alice.

One of Ann Elgar's favorite poets was the American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, an enthusiasm she passed on to Edward.
³⁰
Longfellow's mellifluous verse struck a resonant and sustained chord in the hearts of British readers.
³¹
That he was fêted by the great reflected this: on an 1868 visit to England the American poet was granted degrees by both Cambridge and Oxford; was received at Windsor by Queen Victoria; and was handsomely entertained by the likes of Gladstone, Dickens, Ruskin, and Tennyson.
³²
As Newton Arvin remarks, “The most familiar of his poems—it will by no means do to say always his best—had entered, as it might seem ineradicably, into the popular consciousness.”
³³
An additional inducement for working-class British readers was that along with other American authors, Longfellow was published in inexpensive editions, for, as Rose observes, the “United States failed to sign an international copyright agreement until 1891… . Thanks to this availability, the literary conservatism so common among the working classes was reversed in the case of American authors, who were enjoyed by common readers long before they acquired respectability in critical circles.”
³⁴

Longfellow's poetry appealed to nineteenth-century readers such as Ann Elgar for several reasons: its suave, easy-to-memorize verse patterns; a surface propriety overlaying an intense and at times vaguely erotic romanticism; its vivid descriptions and lucid narrative flow; and its unashamed appeal to the emotions. Like many, Ann Elgar may have modeled her own verse after the American's more domestic lyrics.
³⁵
Ann's touching couplet evoking her daughter Ellen—“Slender, thoughtful tender maid,/Like a young fawn in the shade”—is reminiscent of Longfellow's “The Children's Hour,” with its touching description of his own daughters: “Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, /And Edith with golden hair.”
³⁶
In addition, chivalric romances enthralled Ann Elgar; her daughter Lucy once wrote that her mother's youth had “been peopled from noble books, and it was in their pages she had met her friends and companions—men romantically honourable and loyal, women faithful in love even unto death; both alike doing nobly with this life because they held it as a gauge of life eternal.”
³⁷

Ann's musical son was particularly drawn to Longfellow throughout the 1890s, setting the American poet's verse in two large choral scores,
The Black Knight
, op. 25 (1889–92) and
Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf
, op. 30 (1895). Elgar also used Longfellow's translation of Froissart for one of his finest songs, “Rondel,” op. 16, no. 3. (1894). Like his mother, Elgar was inspired by figures such as King Olaf; the dynamic passages extracted directly from Longfellow for
Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf
inspired some of the composer's most dashing music. Furthermore, Elgar modeled the third tableau of
Part I
of his oratorio
The Apostles
, op. 49 (1902–3), “In the Tower of Magdala,” on Longfellow's portrait of Mary Magdalene as found in the epic poem
The Divine Tragedy
. Although the composer's verses are drawn from holy writ, the dramatic progression of this tableau is indebted to Longfellow's portrayal of the penitent Magdalene.
³⁸

The book by Longfellow that held the most intense fascination for both mother and son was
Hyperion
(1839). In 1899 Elgar sent a copy of this volume to one of his great champions, the German conductor Hans Richter, along with a letter that confided, “I send you the little book about which we conversed & from which I, as a child, received my first idea of the great German nations.”
³⁹
One wonders what, if anything, Richter made of this sentimental gift, for Longfellow's book is an odd hybrid production that might have puzzled any native German. Cast in four volumes,
Hyperion
is a
Wanderroman
clearly modeled upon Goethe's
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
(1796). Longfellow retails the experiences of a young American, Paul Flemming, who, as he attempts to forget the death of the “friend of his youth,” journeys through early nineteenth-century Germany.
⁴⁰
Flemming's travels are drenched in German literature and culture; indeed, the American author has his protagonist “improvise” remarkably polished translations of contemporary German poets such as Salis and Uhland. This selection of verse tastefully decorates a travelogue through the Teutonic landmarks favored by American and English tourists during the nineteenth century—such as Edward and Alice Elgar, who took several holidays to Bavaria in the 1890s. Arvin shrewdly observes that
Hyperion
gave such travelers “an agreeable sense of moving among the
Sehenswürdigkeiten
of the Rhine valley, the Alps, the Tyrol—the Rhine itself, the Rhone glacier, Mont Blanc at sunrise, the Jungfrau as seen from the Furca Pass, the ancient castle at Heidelberg, or the Franciscan church at Innsbruck.”
⁴¹

Longfellow cheerfully uses his characters as mouthpieces for the expression of his own earnest aesthetic beliefs. A great many serious discussions ensue between the protagonist and a variety of interlocutors, often culminating in proclamations about the meaning of “Art” and the role of “the Artist.” Flemming and his friends are given to spouting aphorisms such as “The artist shows his character in the choice of his subject” and “Nature is a revelation of God; Art is revelation of man… . It is the creative power by which the soul of man makes itself known through some external manifestation or outward sign.”
⁴²
Although the dialogue of
Hyperion
is so stilted as to be virtually unreadable today, it made a deep impression upon Elgar. The young Elgar may have seen himself in Longfellow's protagonist, whom Arvin describes as “serious, intense, high-minded, a little humorless and prudish, but sensitive and imaginative.”
⁴³
Influenced early in life by the pronouncements that passed for conversation in
Hyperion
, the adult composer rose to such heights himself, as when he dismisses an opinion of Roger Fry: “Music is written upon the skies for you to note down… . And you compare that to a DAMNED imitation.”
⁴⁴

Elgar drew from
Hyperion
the text for his cantata
The Black Knight
—in particular Uhland's uncanny “Der Schwarze Ritter,” one of the hero's spontaneous translations that tend to pour forth at crucial junctures of the narrative. Although the surface of Longfellow's “romance” is genteel to the point of obliquity, the subject is German Romanticism, after all, and undercurrents of eroticism pervade the book. Newton Arvin comments that when
Hyperion
was published it “enjoyed at first a mild success of scandal”; perhaps American readers of 1839 knew just how to interpret obliquity.
⁴⁵
In any case, the protagonist's improvised translation of Uhland's grim poem comes at the most erotically charged moment in the novel: Flemming is alone with a comely young Englishwoman, Mary Ashburton, and is in the process of courting her. This poem describes how the Black Knight, a figure of supreme potency who combines both Eros and Thanatos, unseats the king's son in a joust and then dances with the king's daughter, causing the “flowerets” in her hair to fade and drop to the ground. She is thus deflowered as her partner “coldly clasped her limbs around.” Both son and daughter then wither and die before their father's eyes, poisoned by their shame as they drink “golden wine,” as the grim knight exults in the final line: “‘Roses in the spring I gather!'” After commenting that the “knight in black mail, and the waving in of the mighty shadow in the dance and the dropping of the faded flowers, are all strikingly presented,” Longfellow's hero remarks that Uhland's poem “tells its own story and needs no explanation.”
⁴⁶

Elgar's choice of this poem, which as Aidan J. Thomson has insightfully observed is the obverse of the narrative of Wagner's
Parsifal
, speaks to a darker inheritance that the young Edward may have received from his mother.
⁴⁷
Elgar constantly reenacted in his own life moments of tension between repression and disclosure such as those that figure in the Mary Ashburton chapters in
Hyperion
with some intensity. As Jerrold Northrop Moore points out, when Ann Elgar chose excerpts from Longfellow's volume for her scrapbook, “she copied out several passages from
Hyperion
bearing directly on the artist and his problems… . The first was from a scene in which the young hero contemplates the ruins of a high old castle above the Rhine, and seems to hear it say: ‘Beware of dreams! Beware of illusions of fancy! Beware of the solemn deceivings of thy vast desires.'”
⁴⁸

In its brevity and simplicity, Ann Elgar's couplet describing her son Edward evinces an acute psychological penetration: “Nervous, sensitive and kind, / Displays no vulgar frame of mind.” But most children are vulgar at times, and it is healthy for them to be so. Did Ann instinctively use
Hyperion
as an instrument for asserting her influence over her disconcertingly emotional and, even at an early age, obsessive son? Was this her very effective way of teaching him to police his own emotions, of keeping him from slipping into a “vulgar frame of mind”? If so, what, exactly, did she fear for him? That he might slip into some kind of “vulgarity” if not warned of the “solemn deceivings” of his “vast desires”?

The effect of their shared devotion to Longfellow's
Hyperion
on her son's psychological development cannot, perhaps, be gauged fully. It is certain, however, that Ann Elgar's taste in literature exercised a deep and lasting effect on the sort of poetry that her son set to music over the course of his career. When Elgar was moved to write poetry himself, such as for “The River,” op. 60, no. 2 (1909), his verse is reminiscent of Longfellow's in both mood and scansion, but such was the vogue: other writers, including Tennyson and A. C. Benson, provide the same patterns. Nevertheless, a great deal of the poetry set by Elgar features the smooth stress patterns and chiming rhymes favored by Longfellow and reflects his mother's taste for such lyric effusions. Elgar was rarely tempted to set poetry outside the canon of his own early tastes; although he knew Walt Whitman's poetry, he was, with Parry, one of the few British composers of the time to find no musical potential in this American's expansive verse.
⁴⁹

In his loyalty to the literary idioms of his youth, including classic authors, Elgar demonstrated a trait common to many working-class autodidacts: a tenacious and detailed persistence of memory. Elgar held fast to early aesthetic and literary experiences and returned to them repeatedly over the course of his adult life. In this process, acquiring used books played a large part. Like many penurious readers, Elgar soon became expert in the collection of old editions purchased at bargain prices. In Robert J. Buckley's early biography of Elgar, published in 1904, the author testifies: “The composer revealed himself as a book enthusiast, a haunter of the remoter shelves of second-hand bookshops, with a leaning to the rich and rare.”
⁵⁰
Intimidated by the ever-snobbish Alice Elgar, who sent him a detailed commentary on the interview before it appeared, Buckley turns Elgar's “haunting of second-hand bookshops” into evidence of the composer's connoisseurship—a “leaning to the rich and rare.”
⁵¹
Elgar may in fact have developed this habit in his youth because new books were expensive. Such constraints meant that working-class readers often favored literature of earlier periods, including the eighteenth century, which could be obtained in inexpensive popular editions, in secondhand bookstalls, in cheap reprints, or, as in Elgar's case, by happenstance.