Edward Elgar and His World (2 page)

Elgar's forebodings proved, alas, all too prescient. Severn House, furnished in part through the generosity of wealthy friends such as Edward Speyer and Frank Schuster, was expensive—ruinously so. Projects such as
The Crown of India
, op. 66 (1912), a sumptuous masque composed by Elgar for Oswald Stoll's lavish music hall, the Coliseum Theatre, were undertaken in part to provide much needed cash.
⁵
Elgar, who had become accustomed to ecstatic receptions for his compositions, such as occurred with both the First Symphony in 1908 and the Violin Concerto in 1910, was dismayed that his Second Symphony had garnered a much more restrained response from audiences and critics. At the 1911 premiere, he exclaimed in dismay to his friend W. H. Reed, “What is the matter with them, Billy? They sit there like a lot of stuffed pigs.”
⁶

Under the strain, Elgar's health, never very robust, began to fray. On May 28, Alice Elgar wrote in her diary, “E. very uneasy about noise in the ear.”
⁷
Elgar was diagnosed with Ménière's disease, a mysterious illness of the inner ear that often particularly affects middle-aged men. The composer's case of this chronic illness seems to have been confined to episodes of vertigo and tinnitus without significant loss of hearing, although hearing loss can, and often does, manifest itself in some sufferers. As Ménière's disease is made worse by adrenalin release, it is not surprising that Elgar suffered with particular intensity during this worrisome time, and the trauma of the diagnosis itself may have exacerbated matters.
⁸

But all of these problems—finances, illness, changes of musical fashion—paled into insignificance in August of 1914, when the familiar world came crashing down around his and everyone else's ears. From the windows of the frigid Severn House (virtually impossible to heat due to wartime fuel shortages), the Elgars watched the war intrude into the night skies over London: in her diary entry for September 8, 1915, Alice Elgar noted that she “ran to the window and then fled out to look through other windows … The sky was lit by flying searchlights—part of Zeppelin visible like a gilt box, and star-like shells bursting more or less near it, and the boom of guns sounding!”
⁹
Worn out from composing music to support the war effort, and battered by fluctuating war news as well as by the disruptions to concert life that inevitably brought financial disruptions in their wake, the composer continued to suffer from ill health. Elgar may have experienced a severe episode of vertigo related to Ménière's disease during a train journey in April 1916, and in March 1918 he had a tonsillectomy, at that time an acutely painful operation for a man of sixty-one.
¹⁰
In uncertain health and upset by the war, Elgar sought refuge in the countryside, in 1918 renting a very modest cottage in Sussex, “Brinkwells,” literally in the middle of nowhere. Here his creative faculties were renewed, and he completed the Cello Concerto as well as what William W. Austin called “the astonishing trilogy of chamber music.”
¹¹

Elgar's retreat from London to rural Sussex in the face of wartime anguish might at first seem evidence for Percy Young's construction, expressed in the headnote, which divides the composer into the public poet who lived in metropolitan splendor at Severn House and the private artist alone with his deepest, most authentic thoughts amidst the Malvern Hills. Young's vision of a bifurcated Elgar remains popular, and similar rhetoric shows up in analyses by commentators such as Frank Howes, who divides the composer into “the Elgar who writes for strings and the Elgar who writes for brass.”
¹²
The work of this protean composer cannot be parsed neatly, however. Elgar was deeply torn about his roots in Worcestershire: between his first unsuccessful 1890 sojourn in London and the success in 1899 of the Variations on an Original Theme, op. 36—the
Enigma
Variations—he spent a great deal of time in the West Midlands bemoaning his fate as an obscure provincial musician hampered by his status as a tradesman's son and a Roman Catholic.
¹³
Elgar's friend and employer Rosa Burley recalled that “he had at this time, and indeed never lost, a marked Worcestershire accent and was not then a young man of any particular distinction, yet he had the habit of speaking of Malvern in the condescending manner of a country gentleman condemned to live in a suburb.”
¹⁴
In fact, the young Elgar ached to get to London. As an aspiring youth he scrimped and saved enough money to take violin lessons in London from Adolphe Pollitzer, and once in the capital would attend concerts avidly. Until the mid–1920s, he continued to do so whenever he was in London. Without the varied musical venues of the metropolis, from concert halls to the soirees held in the London salons of influential patrons such as Frank Schuster, Elgar could hardly have attained either fame or honors so rapidly after 1899.

More to the point, Elgar's music simply cannot be divided up neatly into the extroverted urban and the introspective—and thereby somehow more authentically “English”—rural. Simple geography belies a convenient division into the pastoral or vulgarly imperial, for Elgar wrote his lively, brassy musical love letter to the capital, the
Cockaigne
Overture, op. 40 (1901, and suggestively subtitled “In London Town”) while residing in Malvern. Indeed, nearly all of Elgar's public and populist compositions, including all five of the
Pomp and Circumstance
marches, were composed in the West Midlands, and his anguished and, in spite of the large orchestral and choral forces employed, intimate reaction to the war,
The Spirit of England
, op. 80 (1915–17), was mainly composed in London. Interestingly, the most nakedly autobiographical and most private of his scores,
The Music Makers
, op. 69 (1912), was finished in the city. The day that Elgar completed this score, the self-dramatizing composer wrote to his friend Alice Stuart-Wortley: “I sent the last page to the printer … I wandered alone onto the [Hampstead] heath—it was bitterly cold—I wrapped myself in a thick overcoat & sat for two minutes, tears streaming out of my cold eyes and loathed the world.”
¹⁵

After Elgar's death in 1934, Vaughan Williams, Howes, and others sought to remold his history closer to their own ideological desires, co-opting Elgar's posthumous reputation for their own brand of English musical nationalism. In an obituary tribute penned in 1935 for a special memorial issue of
Music and Letters
, Vaughan Williams eulogized Elgar to suit his own agenda: “He has that peculiar kind of beauty which gives us, his fellow countrymen, a sense of something familiar—the intimate and personal beauty of our own fields and lanes.” Later in the same tribute, Vaughan Williams asserted that Elgar achieved a “bond of unity” with English listeners “not when he is being deliberately ‘popular,' as in
Land of Hope and Glory
or
Cockaigne
, but at those moments when he seems to have retired into the solitude of his own sanctuary.”
¹⁶
In the same issue of
Music and Letters
, Howes divided the composer's oeuvre into private “strings” and public “brass.” Such critics as Howes, faintly embarrassed by Elgarian exuberance, tended to prefer the introspective, pastoral music for “strings,” especially the Introduction and Allegro, op. 47 (1904–5), a work in which the composer comes tantalizingly close to quoting a Welsh folk tune.
¹⁷
Such efforts to recruit Elgar posthumously into their ranks of the “English Musical Renaissance” were doomed to fail, especially in the face of Elgar's quite public lack of interest in all of the signifiers that marked (to a greater or lesser degree) renaissance composers such as Vaughan Williams. As Elgar's friend W. H. Reed has testified, the composer “had no great affection for the Elizabethan composers … He liked Purcell, but would not join in the furore about Tudor music that arose amongst a certain set of young composers … He would not rave about folk-tunes … he held that the business of a composer is to compose, not to copy.”
¹⁸
Indeed, Elgar once exclaimed forthrightly, “I write the folk songs of this country.”
¹⁹

Rather than espousing an overt ideology, many biographers have preferred to concentrate on the composer's fascinating, contradictory, and infuriating personality. For some authors, Elgar has served as a pretext for indulging in an ill-advised nostalgia about the Edwardian era—actually a time of rapid scientific change and political upheaval—as if the entire period was a luxuriant perpetual summer before the carnage of the First World War. Of the reign of the grossly self-indulgent Edward VII, one distinguished Elgarian scholar once wrote that “life was more leisurely then, the countryside less spoilt, birds and butterflies more numerous, gardens more scented, most human beings less sophisticated and cynical… . There was
style
[author's emphasis] in that era and most of all a degree of innocence and charm which was to blasted away for ever
[sic]
by the First World War.”
²⁰
All of this expensive loveliness was enjoyed by a tiny percentage of the British population, however; the scented gardens and unspoiled countryside would have been an alien environment to industrial laborers working six days a week in “dark satanic mills” that spewed out pollution on an unprecedented scale.
²¹
Upward mobility was much less common than in today's Britain, and the process was extremely painful, as the diaries and letters of those working-class men and women who did better their lot (including Elgar himself) eloquently attest.

Recently, however, musicologists studying Elgar have begun to plot a course to avoid the seductions of nostalgia. Building on a foundation laid by Robert Anderson, Diana McVeagh, Jerrold Northrop Moore, James Hepokoski, Julian Rushton, and others, these scholars have started to examine Elgar using tools provided by critical theory, colonialist studies, and revisionist history, as well as intriguing multivalent approaches in music theory. A number of monographs and essay collections on Elgar have been published in recent years, encouraged in part by such distinguished journals as
Music and Letters, The Musical Times
, and, above all,
19th-Century Music
, in whose pages a series of searching articles on this British composer, some quite provocative, have appeared over the past few years. The essays that constitute
Edward Elgar and His World
advance this re-evaluation of the composer and his music by studying him in a series of different contexts—his worlds, so to speak. While the essays in this book are grouped by their relation to either Worcester or London, the essays themselves often suggest how porous such boundaries were for him (and are for us), as Elgar frequently seems to have a foot planted in each, unsure exactly to which world, if any, he really belonged.

Elgar's ambivalent vacillations between town and country, faith and doubt, high and low, set off resonances that chime from essay to essay in ways both revealing and unexpected. Charles Edward McGuire, in the first chapter of the “Worcester” section of this book, investigates Elgar's cultural Catholicism; Rachel Cowgill, in the final chapter of the “London” section, illuminates the ways in which Elgar's Catholicism pervaded his reactions to the First World War and affected the creation of his “war requiem,”
The Spirit of England
. Matthew Riley also touches upon Elgar's early Catholicism in the context of the composer's boyhood in Worcester and explores ways that this and other factors may have contributed to the view of Elgar as an “escapist” composer; both Riley and Cowgill use books by Elgar's contemporary H. G. Wells to explicate aspects of the composer's personality and work. In a counterpoint to McGuire's research on Elgar's Catholic education, I explore how the composer's self-tutelage, manifested in childhood and encouraged by his mother, acted both to tie him to and to liberate him from the modest class position into which he was born. Nalini Ghuman and Deborah Heckert organize their essays around Elgar's masque,
The Crown of India
, but while Ghuman uses the score to elucidate the fraught question of Elgar's possible collusions with imperialism, Heckert provides a portrait of the composer as a “public poet” who embraced modernity by entering into the vital popular culture of the Edwardian music halls. Daniel M. Grimley's essay on Elgar's musical populism, and the attendant charges of “vulgarity” leveled against the composer, might be read profitably alongside Aidan J. Thomson's lively investigation of those contemporary critics who were less than enamored of Elgar's music. While Thomson, Heckert, and Ghuman place Elgar in the context of his public life, especially in urban settings, Sophie Fuller demonstrates how a web of private social and musical connections served Elgar's career and molded his music. The world revealed by Fuller stands in contrast to the private spaces that the composer inhabited as a boy in Worcester, especially the uneasy intimacy of his family circle. It is to be hoped that readers will make many such connections throughout this volume, enriching their understanding of Elgar's music and character. By design, the two “documents” chapters are placed in the center of
Edward Elgar and His World
, functioning as a bridge between the two worlds: Aidan J. Thomson's reception history of Elgar's oratorio,
The Apostles
, looks back toward Worcester, the Three Choirs Festival, and the choral tradition of the West Midlands; Alison I. Shiel's documentation of the Violin Concerto looks ahead toward one of the composer's greatest triumphs in the concert halls of London.

As is customary with this series, Leon Botstein provides a summation that brings together many of the issues discussed throughout the volume. Botstein connects Elgar's aesthetics and ambitions to the work of Arnold, Longfellow, and Ruskin, as well as to the canvases of the Pre-Raphaelite painters Millais and Burne-Jones. Furthermore, Botstein aptly views Elgar's life and work though the lens provided by the writings of Cardinal Newman, whose poem “The Dream of Gerontius” provided the libretto for the composer's great oratorio. By providing a broad context that engages specifically with Elgar's cultural Catholicism, Botstein's thoughtful peroration suggests paths for future research.