Edward Elgar and His World (21 page)

39. Moore,
Letters of a Lifetime
, 81.

40. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
Hyperion: A Romance
(Philadelphia: David McKay Publisher, 1893), 8. The gender of this dead friend, who is recalled several times in the course of
Hyperion
, is never identified. In an uncharacteristic lapse, Moore writes that the protagonist of Longfellow's book “travels through Germany and Switzerland to forget an unhappy love affair,” but the only unhappy love affair alluded to in
Hyperion
occurs at the climax, some two-thirds of the way through the narrative (book 3, chap. 6). See Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 64.

41. Arvin,
Longfellow
, 118.

42. Longfellow,
Hyperion
, 163, 235.

43. Arvin,
Longfellow
, 117. For Elgar's uncanny ability to project himself into the personalities of others, including literary characters, see Byron Adams, “The ‘Dark Saying' of the Enigma: Homoeroticism and the Elgarian Paradox,” in
Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity
, ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitsell (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 230–31, 235, 237.

44. Letter of George Bernard Shaw to Virginia Woolf, 10 May 1940; quoted in Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 738. This incident occurred at a luncheon in March 1919.

45. Newton,
Longfellow
, 55.

46. Shortly after this incident, Mary Ashburton jilts the hero. Longfellow,
Hyperion
, 249–52.

47. Aidan J. Thomson, “Re-reading Elgar: Hermeneutics, Criticism and Reception in England and Germany, 1900–1914,” Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 2002, 114f.

48. Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 69; the quotation from Longfellow is in book 1, chap. 3. See Longfellow,
Hyperion
, 25.

49. Late in life Elgar sent a Christmas card that featured a quotation from
Leaves of Grass;
see Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 782–83.

50. Robert J. Buckley, “Elgar at ‘Forli'” in Redwood,
An Elgar Companion
, 113.

51. Brian Trowell, “Elgar's Use of Literature,” in
Edward Elgar: Music and Literature
, ed. Raymond Monk, (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 193.

52. Rose,
Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
, 4–5, 38–39, 126, 187.

53. De Cordova, “Elgar at ‘Craeg Lea,'” 118–19. Robert Anderson's convincing version of the mysterious appearance of the tattered old books is that “there was a bookseller who stored his stock in an Elgar loft.” Anderson,
Elgar
, 9.

54. F. G. Edwards, “Edward Elgar,”
The Musical Times
(October 1900), reprinted in Redwood,
An Elgar Companion
, 38.

55. Trowell, “Elgar's Use of Literature,” 192.

56. Rose,
Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
, 129–30, 128.

57. Ibid., 95, 130, 374. Of particular interest in light of Ann Elgar's poetical ambitions was the beneficent effect that Pope's translations of Homer had upon working-class women poets of the eighteenth century, an influence that may well have persisted into the nineteenth century (18).

58. Sassoon,
Diaries 1920–1922
, 223.

59. Quoted in Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 68–69.

60. Elgar told Buckley that his mother “read translations of the Latin classics, of the Greek tragedians and talked in the home of what she read.” Robert J. Buckley,
Sir Edward Elgar
(London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1904), 5–6. Brian Trowell has sensibly observed: “The fact that Anne [
sic
] Elgar read classical authors in translation evidently became garbled by double hearsay when Sassoon reported Schuster in 1922 as saying that ‘she used to sit up half the night reading Greek and Latin with him [Elgar] when a boy.'” Trowell,
Elgar's Use of Literature
, 300, n. 69.

61. See, for example, Rose,
Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
, 110, 374–75. For Ann Elgar's practice of reading poetry to her children, see Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 9.

62. Concerning “W.N.,” Anderson,
Elgar
, 315. The diary that Moore alludes to parenthetically is presumably that of Alice Elgar. Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 702.

63. There is so much literature on this aspect of Elgar's character that one particularly fine essay must suffice as an introduction: see Diana McVeagh, “A Man's Attitude to Life,” in Monk,
Edward Elgar: Music and Literature.

64. Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 586, n. 170. For further discussion of the Lesage quotation that Elgar affixed to the Violin Concerto, see the documents about the concerto presented by Alison I. Shiel in
Part II
of this volume.

65. John Ruskin,
Sesame and Lilies
, in
The Complete Works of John Ruskin
, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1905), 18:61.

66. Anderson,
Elgar
, 8. See also letter of E. W. Whinfield to Edward Elgar, 25 November 1886, in Moore,
Letters of a Lifetime
, 17. In his letter to Elgar, Whinfield writes that it “was a real pleasure to me to find out, accidentally, that you cared for Ruskin's books and had not got any: and I instantly made up my mind that I would set that last deficiency, right.” According to Moore, however, the edition of
Sesame and Lilies
owned by Elgar was the fourth edition, published by Smith, Elder and Company in 1867. See Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 323, n. 89. Ruskin delivered “Of King's Treasuries” on December 6, 1864, in the Town Hall, Rusholme. John D. Rosenberg, ed.,
The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings
(Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 296.

67. Charles F. Kenyon [Gerald Cumberland],
Set Down in Malice: A Book of Reminiscences
(London: Grant Richards, 1919), 86.

68. Trowell, “Elgar's Use of Literature,” 230.

69. Ibid., 229.

70. John Dixon Hunt,
The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin
(J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1982), 275.

71. Ruskin,
Sesame and Lilies
, 104, 106.

72. Ruskin taught art at the Working Men's College founded by F. D. Maurice in 1854. Hunt,
The Wider Sea
, 212. As for Ruskin being revered by the working class, see Rose,
Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
, 49, 119, 191–92, 418.

73. Edward Elgar,
A Future for English Music and Other Lectures
, ed. Percy M. Young (London: Dennis Dobson, 1968), 1–8.

74. Ibid., 86–87.

75. Ibid., 213. Of his editorial policy in regard to the use of italics, Young writes that “in the alternative versions of passages shown in the textual commentary all insertions, whether marginal or interlinear are italicized.” As for words given entirely in capital letters, Young writes that where “Elgar himself used underlinings such words or passages are in small capitals.”

76. Ruskin,
Sesame and Lilies
, 104.

77. The representation of Elgar's literary taste, and the implications of his taste as revealing of class status, was one of Alice Elgar's particular concerns. She bullied F. G. Edwards, for example, into dropping a mention of her husband's devotion to Dickens in an article written in 1900, because Dickens was perceived as a vulgar enthusiasm—that is, working-class. Trowell, “Elgar's Use of Literature,” 192–93. For the devotion of working-class readers to Dickens, see Rose,
Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
, 111–15. There is yet another possible reason for Elgar eschewing references to Ruskin: to spare the feelings of his friend Alice Stuart-Wortley, who was the daughter of Effie Gray, Ruskin's unhappy young wife who escaped him to marry the painter John Everett Millais. As the scandal—one of the truly spectacular ones of the Victorian era—still resonated in 1905, Elgar may have been reluctant to have Stuart-Wortley learn he was making approving citations of Ruskin's work.

78. Rose,
Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
, 338.

79. When exposed to Marx, many working-class autodidacts—like many sensible people, then and now—found
Das Kapital
opaque and dull; few ever made it beyond the first few chapters. Ibid., 305–7.

80. Anderson,
Elgar
, 2.

81. Elgar echoes his mother's convictions when he states: “The commonplace mind can never be anything but commonplace—& no amount of education no amount of the polish of a university, can eradicate the stain from the low type of mind we call commonplace.” Elgar,
A Future for English Music
, 155.

82. A case in point is Edward Dent's seemingly class-based denigration of Elgar's lack of formal education, as well as Francis Toye's gibes at the composer's supposed “velgarity.” See Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 594, 789–90.

83. Sassoon,
Diaries 1920–1922
, 169 (author's italics). What Sassoon may not have realized is that Elgar's Second Symphony was dedicated to the memory of the then reigning monarch's father, Edward VII; thus the composer's seemingly absurd anger over George V's putative negligence in requesting the manuscript of that work for the Royal Library at Windsor. Lady Maud Warrender (1870–1945), who, after the death of her husband lived in a lesbian relationship with the singer Marcia van Dresser (occasioning Sassoon's use of the transparent code word
Amazon)
, was the daughter of the eighth Earl of Shaftesbury and one of Elgar's loyal patrons and friends. See also Diane Souhami,
The Trials of Radcliffe Hall
(New York: Doubleday, 1999), 266.

84. Trowell, “Elgar's Use of Literature,” 198, 230.

85. Anderson,
Elgar
, 157.

86. Joan Solomon,
The Passion to Learn: An Inquiry into Autodidacticism
(London: Routledge, 2003), 182.

87. Ibid., 65, 170.

88. Elgar,
A Future for English Music
, 103. At least one working-class family cited by Rose owned an piano arrangement of the
Zampa
Overture; such popular works appealed to the musical tastes of working-class performers and listeners. See Rose,
Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
, 197.

89. Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 41. Brian Newbould has thoroughly investigated the impact upon Elgar's musical development of both Catel's harmony treatise (1802) and Cherubini's
Counterpoint and Fugue
(English translation by Hamilton and Clark, 1854). See Brian Newbould, “Elgar and Academicism 1: The Untutored Genius,”
The Musical Times
146, no. 1891 (Summer 2005): 72; and Brian Newbould, “Elgar and Academicism 3: Devices and Contrivances,”
The Musical Times
146, no. 1893 (Winter 2005): 31–33.

90. Rose,
Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
, 376, 372.

91. “Ernst Pauer,” in
Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians
, ed. Eric Blom, 5th ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1955), 7:595.

92. Elgar has underlined the words
heights
and
depths
in the penultimate paragraph on page 38. I am grateful to Chris Bennett of the Elgar Birthplace Museum for confirming this information.

93. John Ruskin,
The Queen of the Air
in
The Complete Works of John Ruskin
, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1905), 19:344.

94. Ernst Pauer,
The Beautiful in Music
(London: Novello, Ewer & Co., 1877), 47.

95. See especially Robert Schumann, “Charakteristik der Tonleitern und Tonarten,”
Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
2 (1835): 43–44.

96. Eduard Hanslick,
The Beautiful in Music
, trans. Gustav Cohen (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 8.

97. For example, Rimsky-Korsakov tried to distance himself from the program he supplied for
Scheherazade
as being too pictorial; see V. V. Yastrebtsev,
Reminiscences of Rimsky-Korsakov
, trans. Florence Jonas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 13; Trowell, “Elgar's Use of Literature,” 231.

98. Elgar,
A Future for English Music
, 171, 173. Percy M. Young, the editor
,
reprints the English translation of Hanslick's review of the premiere of Brahms' Third Symphony to which Elgar refers, see 154. Elgar was once taken to task by Ernest Newman for exactly the same kind of aesthetic waffling that the composer locates in Hanslick. In an article that appeared in
Manchester Guardian
on 9 November 1905, the day after Elgar's Peyton lecture on Brahms's Third Symphony, Newman indignantly writes: “Some of us may well sit up and rub our eyes in astonishment at [Elgar's] championship of ‘absolute music.'” Later on, Newman goes in for the kill: “If Sir EDWARD ELGAR'S thesis is rickety here, what are we to say when we apply it to his own case? How many pages has he written that are frankly descriptive? What is the prelude to ‘Gerontius,' for example, or the ‘Cockaigne' Overture or ‘In the South' but a series of musical ‘descriptions'? If he really believes now that music is at its height only when it concerns itself with nothing but purely tonal pattern-weaving, he is condemning all his own best work
en masse
.” See 105–6.

99. Pauer,
The Beautiful in Music
, 3–4, 46.

100. Johann Philipp Kirnberger,
The Art of Strict Musical Composition
, trans. David Beach (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 338.

101. Yastrebtsev,
Reminiscences of Rimsky-Korsakov
, 31.

102. Pauer,
The Beautiful in Music
, 23–24.

103. Ibid., 19, 21, 22.

104. Ibid., 24.

105. Ibid., 25.

106. Ibid., 25, 43.

107. For an extended discussion of Jaeger's place within the
Enigma
Variations and the
Dream of Gerontius
, see Adams, “The ‘Dark Saying' of the Enigma,” 229–31, 233–35. Even the usually unperceptive Dora Penny (the “Dorabella” of the tenth
Enigma
variation), wrote that “in the sudden
piano
[at the conclusion of the “Nimrod” variation], may one not see the composer's love for his friend?” See Mrs. Richard Powell (Dora Penny),
Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation
, 4th ed., rev. and ed. Claud Powell (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 130–32.