Edward Elgar and His World (4 page)

For the window's dedication, “Nimrod” from the Variations on an Original Theme, op. 36 (the
Enigma
Variations) followed Ludwig van Beethoven's
Drei Equale
for trombones. An afternoon performance of
The Dream of Gerontius
(in the time slot traditionally reserved at the Three Choirs Festival for Felix Mendelssohn's
Elijah
) completed the day's events.
⁴

That these memorials were appropriate to Elgar is not in question. After all, at the time of his death on February 23, 1934, he was Britain's “official composer,” a status publicly acknowledged by his being made a baronet and awarded the Order of Merit, and in his position as Master of the King's Musick. Even if his music was not at the time as revolutionary or relevant as that of a younger generation of British composers, the program to proclaim him as “essentially English” or even “quintessentially English”—and therefore a totem of nationalism—had already begun.
⁵
Worcester was proud of its native son, and there was no place more appropriate to begin memorializing him than within the walls of its most famous building.

Yet both Elgar's memorial window and plaque would not have been deemed appropriate in Worcester Cathedral at the time of the premiere of
Gerontius
in 1900. After the English Reformation, the cathedral had become an Anglican building. Elgar at his own death was at least nominally a practicing Catholic and the texts chosen for both memorials were from “The Dream of Gerontius,” a poem by the notorious nineteenth-Century Catholic convert, Cardinal John Henry Newman. Although Elgar softened some of the doctrinal edges of the poem, his oratorio remained a celebration of mystical, even fervent Catholicism—so much so that its performance was banned for nearly a decade in Gloucester Cathedral as “inappropriate,” and performances in the Anglican cathedrals at Worcester and Hereford took place only after large segments of the text were bowdlerized, removing the more objectionable Catholic elements.
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In the space of three decades, then, Elgar's religion was deemphasized and defused enough by his fame that he could be seen not as Catholic but as a sort of pan-Christian.

The risk of such an interpretation of Elgar is that it both oversimplifies and undervalues his Catholic influences. To have been memorialized so easily within a church of a different faith calls into question the strength and importance of his faith. One conclusion could be that Elgar's faith was weak. Through numerous anecdotal examples, Jerrold Northrop Moore offers this opinion in his biography
Edward Elgar: A Creative Life
. Discussing the confirmation of Elgar's daughter, Carice, Moore presents Elgar as having a lack of regard for both religion and his daughter. Moore states that neither Edward nor Alice Elgar attended Carice's confirmation—the sacrament in which a Catholic publicly proclaims his or her religion. Instead, Moore maintains, the Elgars deputized Rosa Burley—not herself a Catholic—to take care of the effort on June 11, 1903, while Elgar stayed at home to work on
The Apostles
.
⁷
The anecdote is an interesting one, and it does a great deal to solidify Moore's case; however, it is not true. Carice Elgar was confirmed on May 19, 1907 (Pentecost), long after Moore's date of 1903, as is made clear in Carice's letter of 24 May 1907 to the Leicester family and by the confirmation register at Belmont Abbey (
figure 3
).
⁸
Rosa Burley had nothing to do with the matter. May Grafton, Elgar's niece who
was
a Catholic, acted as Carice's sponsor, and both Edward and Alice Elgar attended, along with Alfred Kalisch and Julia “Pippa” Worthington; according to Alice's diary, they had tea with the bishop after the ceremony.
⁹

Figure 3. The confirmation register at Belmont Abbey.

Such anecdotes make for lasting impressions, however, and Moore and others use them continually to press an interpretation of Elgar's faith as weak. This has become the position of the popular Elgar press, maintained at the time of this writing on the Web site of the Elgar Society:

It is therefore perhaps inevitable that, when he produced
The Dream of Gerontius
, a setting of a poem by a Roman Catholic Cardinal which explores various tenets of the Catholic faith, people should jump to the conclusion that his Catholicism underlay his whole life. But his faith was never that strong.
¹⁰

Faith, of course (or lack of it), is not the point. Even if Elgar's faith was “never that strong” the experiences he had as a Catholic youth and a composer rising to fame affected his compositional output, his relationships with others, and, in short, his whole life. No matter what the state of his faith, Elgar was—and remained—culturally Catholic. His early Catholic roots influenced his view of the world around him and conditioned Britain's view of him. The popular presentation of faith “never that strong” is an anachronism. It takes a view from the late twentieth century, when ritual secularism largely replaced religion in Great Britain, and ascribes it to an age when all Christian religions, including Elgar's Catholicism, were steeped in ritualistic practices that were both spiritual and cultural.

The popular negating of Elgar's Catholicism both at his death and today serves an obvious end: it makes Elgar's music safer, more palatable for a British audience. In essence, it creates an avatar for Elgar as the “essentially English composer” beyond the reach of any of the complicating factors of partisan religion. An avatar is the embodiment of an archetype. As a manifestation of a symbol or a motif, it is akin to both an interpretation (when applied to an individual from an external person or source) and a disguise (when applied to an individual by him- or herself). The avatar might be built from certain elements of the individual, refracted and interpreted to point toward a specific meaning, or it might be an honest representation of that individual. The Elgar memorialized in Worcester Cathedral in 1935 was interpreted by those around him as “Pan-Christian,” just as many today interpret a lack of faith in Elgar as another avatar, “Weak Faith.” It is not surprising that both academic and popular scholars would attempt to transform Elgar in such a way. Doing so sheds responsibility for some of the more problematic compositions Elgar created, including
The Apostles
and
The Kingdom
, and allows us to concentrate more on his secular instrumental compositions.
¹¹
Creating a newer avatar for Elgar also seems wholly rational and reasonable, given that Elgar himself devised so many over the course of his own life, from the itinerant Victorian-era inventor to the English gentleman, uninterested in music.
¹²
Contriving the Weak Faith and the Pan-Christian avatars satisfies the need to safely negate his Catholicism—what John Butt presciently called the “most ‘foreign'” aspect of Elgar's background—while making the composer safely “English.”
¹³
Further, this strategy serves to validate the often banal and even boorish statements Elgar made to interviewers, anecdote-publishing friends, and the like.

The purpose of this essay is to trace Elgar's history of, and responses to, Catholicism against the backdrop of Catholic history in Great Britain throughout his life, from 1857 until 1934. This era witnessed profound changes for Catholicism in England, including an increased civil role for English Catholics within society as a whole, the growth to greater numbers through both conversion and Irish immigration, fundamental shifts in English-Catholic doctrine, and the struggles of Catholicism—like all religions of the time—against Liberalism and the application of scientific evidence and reasoning to questions of faith and perceived wisdom. Continual prejudice against Catholics and Catholicism was a simple fact within Elgar's world, and the composer's perception of this prejudice, along with such prejudice itself, colored his moods, reactions, and judgments.
¹⁴
All of these elements were in flux throughout Elgar's lifetime, and their impact on his beliefs and his approach to Catholic culture and English culture were profound. His beliefs were fluid throughout his life, and thus he created a set of multiple avatars to facilitate self-representation. Criticism and biography, in turn, have accepted the later, more cynical Weak Faith avatar at face value without questioning the truth of it or its earlier manifestations. Consequently, throughout this investigation, I will catechize Elgar's Catholic avatars, those he created for himself and the varied embodiments he projected to his friends, family, and the public at three stages in his life.

The catechism is the Catholic profession of faith: a set of ritualistic questions posed to children during religion classes and sometimes within certain masses. When you “catechize” an individual, you probe his or her beliefs. Although the avatars to be examined include the posthumous one (Pan-Christian), already briefly examined, the bulk of this study will test the avatar present during Elgar's youth, the “Faithful Child.” This will include a detailed examination of Catholic education during the era to locate the sources of Elgar's childhood systems of belief. Shorter discussions of avatars present during his marriage and the early years of his success (the “Publicly Faithful” avatar), as well as from 1905 until his death (the “Weak Faith” avatar) will be examined to ascertain his relationship to the religion of his birth and how cultural Catholic elements affected his life and compositions. Catechizing these avatars will show that despite making light of Catholicism and all religions throughout the last decades of his life, and even moving toward elements of a nature-loving secularism, Catholic tenets retained a strong hold upon Elgar.
¹⁵

English Catholicism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, or “How Do You Prove That the Pope or Bishop of Rome Is the Successor of St. Peter?”

Elgar, who was born in 1857, was alive during one of the most tumultuous times in English Catholic history. Until 1791, Catholicism was outlawed as a religion in England, with exceptions made for embassy chapels of foreign governments; prior to this Catholics often had to worship in secret, and a permanent Catholic infrastructure in England was impossible. The right to worship freely was given in 1791 and basic rights of franchise and political office were granted to Catholics under the Emancipation Act of 1829.
¹⁶
After centuries of prohibition, the reestablishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England in 1850 turned what had been a “mission church” in England into a permanent one, with dioceses, parishes, and typical church organizational structures, including the presence of permanent bishops and cardinals. This event, along with the 1869–1870 doctrines of papal infallibility (the belief that when the Pope spoke
ex cathedra
he could not err on matters of Church doctrine) and the immaculate conception (the belief that the Virgin Mary was born free of the taint of original sin) caused a great deal of Protestant protest and even riots against Catholics, and remained a constant problem within England until the mid–1870s.
¹⁷
But such factors, though engaging and damaging, paled in comparison to the attention given to internal questions that arose within nineteenth-century English Catholicism. During Elgar's life, the three major groups of English Catholics—the Old Catholics, including the family of his boyhood friend Hubert Leicester; the converts to Catholicism, including his first teacher, Caroline Walsh, and his own mother, Ann Elgar; and Irishimmigrant Catholics—held a constant, often rancorous conversation about the direction the English Catholic Church should take. Elgar experienced directly the first two of these three groups.

Each of these Catholic constituencies had different intellectual, political, and class bearings, and each has been studied in independent ways, often at odds with the other. Questions of doctrine and subsequent change have been examined but often focus solely on a perceived shift from the culture of Old English Catholicism to Ultramontanism.
¹⁸
The Old English Catholics were mapped as reserved, intellectually naive, inclined to yield diplomatically to the Protestant majority in most things, and class-stratified. Most of the Old English Catholics were landed gentry, farmers, and agricultural laborers.
¹⁹
Rather than agitating directly for political equality, as the immigrant Irish Catholics and converts did, the Old English Catholics were generally moderate if not conservative in their demands regarding political power and their place within English society. For much of the nineteenth century, the Old English Catholics had great difficulty responding to the needs of either the immigrant Irish or the converts because they had spent much of their lives isolated from other classes.
²⁰
Even aspects of aesthetics differed. The Old English Catholics favored Gothic designs. Immigrant Irish Catholics in general thought such neo-Gothic buildings were too expensive, particularly in new urban Catholic enclaves. Catholic converts, who tended to be Ultramontanists, feared that a Catholic Gothic revival would lead English Catholics to emphasize a national character of Catholicism instead of an international one.
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