Edward Elgar and His World (40 page)

Before returning to
English Music
, two key musical relationships that the critical critics identified in their writings about Elgar must be considered: the musical debt he owed to Wagner and Wagnerites and, crucially, how he was compared to the composer at the heart of the renaissance establishment, Sir Hubert Hastings Parry.

Elgar and Parry

However else the critical critics might have disagreed with Elgar, they surely agreed with his high opinion of Parry. In his inaugural lecture at the University of Birmingham, Elgar drew attention to the fact that at the previous year's “Musical Festivals … the honours have fallen, save with one exception to the
younger men.”
Identifying that exception, Elgar cited

a name which shall always be spoken in this University with the deepest respect, and I will add, the deepest affection—I mean Sir Hubert Parry, the head of our art in this country … : with him no cloud of formality can dim the healthy sympathy and broad influence he exerts and we hope may long continue to exert upon us.
³¹

Elgar's reservations about others associated with the Royal College of Music, notably Stanford, did not extend to Parry, for whom his admiration was genuine—and with good reason. Parry had been supportive in helping to secure Hans Richter's services for the premiere of the
Enigma
Variations in 1899 and had proposed Elgar for membership in the Athenaeum Club in 1904. In the latter year, Elgar publicly acknowledged his indebtedness to Parry's scholarship when he was interviewed by
The Strand Magazine:
“The articles [in
Grove's Dictionary]
which have since helped me the most … are those of Hubert Parry.” Appropriately, Parry made the Latin oration when Elgar received his honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1905. Parry's music impressed Elgar sufficiently for him to comment in a letter to August Jaeger of Novello, sent 8 October 1907 that
A Vision of Life
was
“fine stuff
& the poem [which Parry had written himself] was literature”—a far more positive endorsement than his barbed allusion to Stanford in the inaugural lecture that “to rhapsodise is one thing an Englishman
cannot do.”
³²
With the exception of a (relatively early) complaint to Jaeger that Parry's orchestration was “never more than an
organ part arranged,”
there is no hint that Elgar disagreed with prevailing critical opinion about Parry's preeminence.
³³

Yet it was precisely this preeminence that led Elgar's detractors to compare him unfavorably with Parry, as Fuller-Maitland's assessments of both composers in
English Music in the Nineteenth Century
(1902) and the revised edition of
Grove's Dictionary
(1904–7) exemplify clearly. It might seem unfair to include
English Music
here, given that it would have gone to press before the Düsseldorf performance of
Gerontius
in December 1901 and the burgeoning critical interest in Elgar that followed it; but, as perhaps the first monograph to advance the thesis that 1880 (the year when Parry's
Scenes from Shelley's “Prometheus Unbound”
was premiered) represented a peripeteia for British music, it is an important illustration of how in certain quarters Parry's status was beyond dispute. Fuller-Maitland argued that the post–1880 renaissance was attributable to five “leaders” (Parry, Stanford, Mackenzie, Frederic Cowen, and Arthur Goring Thomas), who, in turn, had bred a generation of “followers” (essentially all other British composers born after 1850 and active in 1900). Not surprisingly, the five leaders are examined in considerable depth; conversely, the followers receive short shrift. Elgar, though the “most prominent among the older generation of the followers,” is summarized in just a single page, in which
Froissart, The Light of Life, Caractacus, Dream of Gerontius [sic]
, and
Cockaigne
are mentioned only in passing, the
Enigma
Variations are described simply as “delightful,” and
Sea Pictures
is characterized tersely as “popular.” In all these works, Fuller-Maitland concludes, there were “evidences of a truly poetic gift, of imagination rightly held in control, and of great technical skill in the management of voices and instruments.”
³⁴
But that was all. Compared to these blandishments, Fuller-Maitland's ten pages on Parry are positively effusive, for instance his comment that it was “Parry's especial gift to ‘bring all heaven before our eyes' by means of the mastery of his cumulative effect.”
³⁵

This disparity did not go unnoticed in early reviews of the book.
Musical News
felt that Fuller-Maitland had drawn “totally inadequate notice” to Elgar's work; in
Musical Opinion
the pseudonymous columnist Common Time meanwhile declared that Fuller-Maitland's “prejudices [were] strong and often unaccountable,” and proposed 1896 (the year of Stanford's opera
Shamus O'Brien)
as an alternate starting date for an English musical renaissance.
³⁶
But Fuller-Maitland soon became more transparent in his prejudices, for his
Grove
entry for Elgar (1904) is laced with invective, particularly with regard to the composer's large-scale choral works: “Praise to the Holiest” in
Gerontius
, for instance, suffered from a “want of the cumulative power which some other masters have attained, and which would have brought into the whole work a unity and a sublimity which it was not felt to possess.”
³⁷
No sense here, then, of Elgar managing to “bring all heaven before our eyes” like Parry; if anything, quite the opposite, for the success of
Pomp and Circumstance
March no. 1 was achieved “in spite of the objections of some musicians”—including Fuller-Maitland himself, presumably—“to it on the score of its immediate appeal to hearers of every class.” Meanwhile,
The Apostles
is portrayed as Elgar's artifice-laden overreaction to these objections:

It is perhaps not to be wondered at that, after the compliments paid the composer by the most advanced of modern German composers, and the adverse opinion passed by some superior persons upon the “Pomp and Circumstance” tune, the composer should have adopted an ultra-modern style in this oratorio, and that it should be found so strange by some hearers as to call for censure.
³⁸

If Fuller-Maitland's entry for Elgar was marked by trenchant criticism, his entry for Parry, published in 1907, was full of praise—and praise that seems almost deliberately to promote Parry at Elgar's expense. Unlike Elgar's highly colored orchestration, Parry's symphonic works “laid more stress on the substance of the ideas and development, rather than on the manner of their presentment,” and as such “must always appeal strongly to the cultivated musician.” Compared with the “want of cumulative power” in “Praise to the Holiest,” Parry's choral music was characterized by his “wonderful power” in “handling large masses with the utmost breadth and simplicity of effect, and of using the voices of the choir in obtaining climax after climax, until an overwhelming impression is created”: this was “felt not only by the educated hearer, but even by the untrained listener.” The implication is clear: without ever compromising his style, Parry wrote music whose authority was discernible to all; Elgar, by contrast, veered inconsistently between oversophistication
(The Apostles)
and vulgarity (the
Pomp and Circumstance
marches). Lest his readers be left in any doubt of Parry's stature, Fuller-Maitland concludes the dictionary entry by stating that Parry's “strong common sense” and the “purity of his artistic ideals” marked him “as the most important figure in English art since the days of Purcell.”
³⁹

Fuller-Maitland was not Parry's sole apologist, however. In a
Zeitschrift
article from 1903, Maclean conflated Parry's social and musical elitism in terms very similar to those that Fuller-Maitland would use in
Grove
. Maclean wrote that Parry's art “stands above that of his fellows, as the Drachenfels above the Rhine; lofty, alone, perhaps even melancholy.” His music is “a direct counterblast to preciosity”:

In contour it is wholly broad. While in harmony it is free from decadent subtleties; indeed almost absolutely diatonic, a trait in common more or less with all British composers who are true to themselves, but carried in this beyond the practice of most of them. The amount of expression which Parry obtains with diatonic means is quite astonishing… . Nor does his art yield to emotional excesses; he is greatly subjective, but his introspection is steadied by reflection.
⁴⁰

Thus, not only did Parry's solidity of form and emotional moderation offer proof of his naturally good musical taste, but his avoidance of chromaticism provided evidence of his echt-Englishness—certainly much more than was the case with Elgar, against whom Maclean ends his article with a damning broadside. Recalling Strauss's toast to Elgar as the “first English progressivist” at the 1902 Lower Rhine Music Festival, Maclean pompously observed that with works of art, unlike with “physical and mathematical truths,” there is “at least as much chance of what is older being superior to what is younger, as vice-versa.” To prove his point, Maclean compared Elgar's
Coronation Ode
with Parry's symphonic ode of 1903,
War and Peace
. The latter work, in Maclean's opinion, was “Parry purified from mannerism or blemish, pushing new discoveries in poly-tonism without relinquishing his own diatonic habit … showing depths of harmonious sensibility in the solo numbers with long resistless forces in the choral numbers.” The
Coronation Ode
, however,

consists musically of little else than this; first a decided mannerism of the composer in descending bass scale-passages and certain treble suspensions, secondly music based on quite the weakest form of the English part-song style, thirdly a march-tune imported from another composition which has no affinity whatever with this one and is in this place at least extra-ordinarily common.

“It seems next to impossible,” Maclean concluded, “that any musician could hear or read these two works side by side, and not realise that the work of the older man is on an immeasurably higher plane than that of the younger.”
⁴¹

At least one periodical was moved to comment that Maclean's choice of works was disingenuous. In a review of the article,
Musical News
dismissed Maclean's claim that “composers must be judged by their latest productions,” observing that as the
Coronation Ode
was “not up to its composer's highest standard” it was hardly the most appropriate piece to use for such a comparison.
⁴²
Quite what the periodical would have made of Maclean's comments on the 1904 Gloucester Festival is debatable; for once again his praise for Parry is tempered by an implicit rebuke to Elgar. The main review of the festival for the
Zeitschrift
was written by the pro-Elgar critic Herbert Thompson, who dwelt chiefly on the performances of
The Apostles
(which was receiving its Three Choirs premiere) and Parry's oratorio
The Love that Casteth out Fear.
⁴³
Maclean added a postscript to Thompson's report, in which he extols Parry in terms similar to his article of the previous year:
The Love
was the “master-work of the festival”; Parry's diatonic language showed “capacities for still further budding and blossoming”; and “the effect … of this newest work of Parry's on all right-minded musicians was prodigious.” In his closing comments comes the pointed gibe: “Such results achieved by a composer who never makes a bid for popularity might give cause to those who are on the crest of a wave to institute heart-searchings as to how much of the mountebank there may not be mixed up in their own art.”
⁴⁴
This reference is so transparent that Maclean hardly needed to invoke the composer's name; the Elgar Festival at Covent Garden had taken place barely six months earlier and, as Thompson had noted,
The Apostles
attracted a larger audience at Gloucester than
Elijah.

As it is Elgar's popular appeal, once again, that damns him, it is worth putting Fuller-Maitland's and Maclean's objections into context, for their remarks are the ancestors of Edward J. Dent's notorious critique of the composer in Guido Adler's
Handbuch der Musikgeschichte
(1924, rev. 1930), in which Elgar's music is described as “too emotional and not quite free from vulgarity.”
⁴⁵
That vulgarity was a concern for early-twentieth-Century British music critics should not be surprising. The development of mass consumer culture in cities, epitomized by the growth of urban popular song and the growing respectability of music hall, provided attractions for potential audiences that were far removed from the internationally respected
Tonkunst
the critics were seeking to establish. Admittedly, these new stimulations might ignite a creative spark; Elgar himself argued that vulgarity “often goes with inventiveness” and that “in the course of time [it] may be refined.”
⁴⁶
But his was a minority view. More typical was that of C. Fred Kenyon, who saw musical vulgarity not as a raw material from which works of art might be fashioned, but as an unwelcome by-product of success: vulgarity was “the most insidious, and most deadly, and yet most popular of all vices.” In Kenyon's eyes, a composer who possessed genius (“the highest gifts that the gods can bestow”) had no business seeking worldly pleasures, which was simply greediness on his part.
⁴⁷

Elgar's detractors do not accuse him of greed; indeed, if anything, the remarks above suggest that the resentment toward the composer from some within renaissance circles owed less to vulgarity per se, and more to Elgar's post-Düsseldorf fame—hardly surprising, perhaps, given that Strauss's toast had been dismissive of those who had spent the previous twenty years trying to advance the prospects of British music. Maclean's defensive comment that “we have more than one composer” reveals just how sensitively the higher echelons of British musical opinion reacted to Strauss's possibly tipsy reflections, but their attempts to promote other composers met with mixed success.
⁴⁸
Proposals to hold a National Festival of British Music in November 1903 at which “too much attention will not be given to the music and musicians who have been unduly prominent of late” came to nothing. Indeed, the prospect that this festival might be run on “Royal College lines” caused
Musical Opinion
's columnist Common Time to remark that the Royal College had a reputation for self-advancement, and that “their idea of the best interests of the art [was] too limited by personal considerations.”
⁴⁹
By contrast, the Elgar Festival at Covent Garden in March 1904 was both artistically and financially successful—more so, indeed, than the Beethoven and Strauss festivals that had taken place in London the previous year.
⁵⁰