Edward Elgar and His World (41 page)

Ironically, this London success occurred within a year of another source of resentment toward Elgar among London critics: the composer's pronouncement, in a public letter to Rev. Canon Charles Gorton prior to the 1903 Morecambe Festival, that “unknown to the sleepy London press … the living centre of music in Great Britain is not London, but somewhere farther North.”
⁵¹
The letter was reprinted in the festival brochure, from where it was copied by the
Musical Times
. The heated response it generated from critics was considerable: as one
Musical Standard
editorial put it, London's critics were “annually driven near crazy during the months of May, June and part of July in the process of deciding which of the forty (or more) concerts per week need their personal attention … [Elgar] should remember, at all events, that there is other music besides part-songs and oratorios.”
⁵²
Whether Fuller-Maitland, Maclean et al. took personally Elgar's description of a “sleepy” London press, uninterested in provincial music making, is a moot point. But it is hard to imagine that it did not color their views of the composer. It is surely no accident that this period coincided with a hardening of Fuller-Maitland's stance toward Elgar. It is likely, too, to have contributed to the often negative reaction to Elgar's professorial lectures two years later, when the composer appeared at times to take a consciously anti-metropolitan stance, notably when he hinted that Leipzig (rather than London) might prove the most appropriate model for music making in Birmingham.
⁵³

A more profound reason for this resentment of Elgar's popularity was his unsuitability as an exemplar. The future of British music was a major concern for many critics, who saw one of their functions as promoting the best British composers and their works to as wide an audience as possible in the hope that a younger generation, an elusive “School of British Composition,” might be inspired to follow in their wake. (Maclean's articles in the
Zeitschrift
are one manifestation of this; Fuller-Maitland's favorable comparison of his five renaissance “leaders” with the Russian
Kuchka
is another.)
⁵⁴
But the “School of British Composition” had to consist of the right kind of composer; not everyone was welcome to join this exclusive club. In the critical critics' eyes, the aristocratic Parry qualified for membership, but Elgar, the tradesman's son, did not. A comparison of the language used to describe the two composers is most revealing. Parry's “loftiness” and “aloofness” hint at a social and artistic elitism from which Elgar's “extra-ordinarily common” writing (and ordinary background) automatically excluded him. Parry's music was described by Maclean as a “direct product of academic olive-groves.” Elgar, however, was not only uneducated but implicitly undisciplined, trusting “little if at all to intellect” and “rush[ing] wholly on impulse.”
⁵⁵
Parry's diatonicism and his emphasis on musical ideas rather than color provided evidence for the “purity of his artistic ideals”; Elgar was overreliant on virtuosic orchestration and “ultra-modern” chromaticism that might mask a deficiency in technique elsewhere.
⁵⁶
Above all, Parry possessed a “power” and emotional control that had its roots in the manly self-restraint of “muscular Christianity,” the very embodiment of Victorian public school values. It is not without significance that Fuller-Maitland refers to the “purity” of Parry's artistic ideals. That same self-restraint and, implicitly, purity was lacking in the more volatile, stylistically protean Elgar.

In short, the critical language used to describe the two composers forms part of a system of binary oppositions: Parry consistently embodies the positive, hegemonic values of the normative Self, Elgar the negative values of the Other. Given this construction of the two, there was no way that Elgar might have been held up as a model for younger composers to emulate because he was defined expressly in opposition to the one composer, Parry, who was regarded as a salutary—and characteristically British—influence for the young. Ironically, the discourse used by Fuller-Maitland and Maclean to describe Parry's music is used by pro-Elgar critics to describe
his
work, as is illustrated by three comments about
The Apostles:
Alfred Kalisch wrote of the score's “power and beauty and spiritual elevation”; Herbert Thompson referred to Elgar's “masterful” weaving together of the score; and Robert Buckley, comparing the work to
Gerontius
, commented that it is “of more masculine fibre, and with all its passion, has greater reserve. And greater reserve means greater dignity.”
⁵⁷
The ideological values shared by these three writers were the same as those of the critical critics; even the vocabulary is virtually identical. The only difference is in the object of approbation.

The binary oppositions outlined above can perhaps be summed up by reference to an article by Henry Hadow, titled “Some Tendencies in Modern Music,” which appeared in the
Edinburgh Review
in October 1906. Once again, Parry is praised for his depth of purpose (“his prevalent mood is one of serious earnest[ness]”), his emotional restraint (Parry “minimis[ed] the appeal to the senses, concentrating his whole force on the intimate expression of religious or philosophic truth”), and his ability to depict “the awe and mystery which surround the confines of human life” in musically simple ways. Above all, Parry embodied the national character, and in a way that drew sustenance from his artistic forebears:

Throughout his work he employs an idiom of pure English as distinctly national as that of Purcell himself. He is the spokesman of all that is best in our age and country, its dignity, its manhood, its reverence; in his music the spirit of Milton and Wordsworth may find its counterpart.
⁵⁸

Conversely, Hadow's criticisms of Elgar echo those of Fuller-Maitland and Maclean.
Gerontius
offered proof that Elgar's music “invariably falters” before the “highest and noblest conceptions” and that his “extraordinary skill of orchestration covers … an occasional weakness of idea,” while in
The Apostles
, there is a “want of largeness and serenity” in Elgar's handling of the music. This, Hadow claimed, was caused by Elgar's leitmotif technique: the motifs were “all broken up into little anxious ‘motives,' which are not blended together but laid like tesseræ in a mosaic, each with its own colour and its own shape. No work of equal ability has ever displayed so little mellowness of tone.” In general, Elgar's style is “somewhat tentative and transitional; it often moves with uncertain step, it often seems to be striving with a thought which it cannot attain.” For these reasons Hadow likened Elgar to Berlioz, as the Frenchman possessed something of the same “wayward brilliance.”
⁵⁹

“Wayward brilliance,” however, was scarcely a sure foundation for an English school of composition. Elgar's tentativeness, uncertainty, and mosaiclike orchestration seemed to offer a fragmented, even emasculated, future for English music, compared with the philosophical certainties and wholeness of Victorian manliness embodied in Parry's music. Not surprisingly, it is Parry, the spiritual heir of English poets, rather than Elgar, the artistic heir of Berlioz, who emerges as the true musical voice of the nation: the Balakirev at the head of Britain's
Kuchka
to Elgar's Tchaikovsky.
⁶⁰

Elgar, Wagner, and Lyricism

Hadow's concerns about Elgar's use of leitmotifs were as much a matter of personal aesthetics as of technique. As noted above, opinion on Wagner in Britain was divided, with many leading figures within the renaissance set skeptical of the composer, at least as a compositional model and certainly as an ideologue. Hadow was less explicitly anti-Wagner than some, but his pronouncement in 1893 that it was “neither likely nor advisable that [Wagner] should exercise any permanent influence” on composers working in musical genres other than opera or music drama was somewhat ingenuous, to put it mildly.
⁶¹
Yet this rejection of Wagner outside the theater was consistent with the idealism, derived largely from the critical writings of Hanslick, that pervaded contemporary British musical thinking. Such idealism found its perfect exemplar in the music of Hanslick's hero, Johannes Brahms, who provided British composers with a “safe” compositional model that eschewed the extremes associated with Bayreuth.
⁶²
The Brahmsian model was realized most fully in Britain by Parry, whose emotional control and moderation in orchestration seems almost the antithesis to Wagner. For Elgar to make use of a Wagnerian orchestra, Wagnerian chromatic harmony, and an extensive network of leitmotifs in
Gerontius
and
The Apostles
was, to some extent, to state his allegiance to a composer against whom the leading faction in modern English music had defined itself. Moreover, despite Elgar's plausible claim that his earliest acquaintanceship with reminiscence motifs had not been in Wagner but in Mendelssohn's
Elijah
, the “thematic analyses” to
Gerontius, The Apostles
, and
The Kingdom
, which were written by Jaeger under the composer's supervision, and which listed the works' different motifs, were clearly based on Hans von Wolzogen's
Handbücher
for audiences at Bayreuth.
⁶³
Comparisons with Wagner were thus inevitable.

These comparisons were often negative, notably with regard to
The Apostles
, where the composer's leitmotif technique attracted unfavorable comments. For instance, J. H. G. Baughan of the
Musical News
felt that the piece lacked spontaneity and that Elgar's use of leitmotifs elicited only boredom; the opening of
Part II
, indeed, was castigated as “bald, means absolutely nothing; and must surely have been written in a hurry.”
⁶⁴
This much we might expect from a critic who had previously claimed of
Gerontius
that it “lacked novelty and real inspiration,” that “the feminine whine and excessive love of minor harmonies” made “many of the score's pages more painful than artistically impressive,” and that its “frequent faded feeling and morbidity” compared unfavorably with the “virility” and “robustness” of Elgar's earlier (and more conservative)
King Olaf.
⁶⁵
But criticism of this same passage in
The Apostles
also came from one of the most ardent advocates of
Gerontius
, Ernest Newman, for whom it had “no musical
raison d'être
. You could play the themes in any order you liked without any sense of discontinuity.” The problem with the oratorio, Newman argued, was that Elgar's primary concern was to depict a literary narrative, which he achieved through juxtaposing motifs irrespective of musical sense. According to Newman, the music was incapable of developing “an organic life of its own… . In no modern work have leading motives been employed so woodenly and with such lack of variety.”
⁶⁶
This charge was echoed by a critic whose views of the composer generally fell between J. H. G. Baughan and Newman, namely Common Time:

His complex use of the
leit motif
system [in
The Apostles]
is too often only clever on paper. In performance the themes pass in the general hurly-burly without any particular significance; partly because many of them are not very distinctive in themselves and partly because the composer's use of them is so fragmentary. He seems disinclined to develop his themes to any great extent; and their recurrence, in slightly changed form, does appear mechanical,—a charge often brought against Wagner, who could develop his themes.
⁶⁷

The observation that Elgar's leitmotifs tended to fragment rather than coalesce—a point that echoes Hadow's comments about unblended tesserae—is highly significant, for the notion of fragmentation lies at the root of much of the anti-Wagnerist criticism of Elgar. Musically, the concerns with fragmentation were twofold: first, the suspicion that Elgar's use of leitmotifs compensated for a lack of skill in writing periodic, lyrical melodies; and second, that Elgar's highly colored scoring masked an underlying formlessness. Both these suspicions were articulated, indeed fostered, by Maclean, for whom Elgar's career seemed to be a long, mostly downward slide from the somewhat unlikely high point of
Caractacus
. According to Maclean,
Caractacus
was “a pleasure to listen to from start to finish” on account of its “good rhythm, … fair hold of tonality, judicious prevalence of the major key, broad long phrases, and … melody-line often beautiful.”
⁶⁸
With the
Enigma
Variations, however, the long phrases and beautiful melodies disappeared. Maclean opined that the melodies in that score were “downright ugly at their core,” largely because the melody was “scarcely lyric” and the minor-major alternation in the theme of “doubtful beauty.”
⁶⁹
Matters worsened for Maclean in the large-scale choral works, in which Elgar abandoned traditional melodic writing for a word painting, driven by leitmotifs, whose sensational immediacy was antithetical both to lyricism and to form. In a review of
The Apostles
, Maclean was moved to write: “To those who believe in the doctrine ‘follow the words,' [there is] no example finer. To those who ask for backbone, [there is] little or none, though perhaps more than in
Gerontius.”
Similarly, in
The Music Makers
, the “extensive wordpainting” acted “to the detriment of the general jubilancy which is the tenor and purport of the poem.” Indeed, of Elgar's mature works, only the First Symphony and the
Crown of India
Suite escaped Maclean's vituperations.
⁷⁰