Edward Elgar and His World (51 page)

The 1897 Diamond Jubilee celebrations had established Elgar as England's imperial bard, a composer whose music glorified colonial policy. Elgar certainly took up “The Composer's Burden.”
³⁸
His contribution to the Jubilee celebrations included the following works: the
Imperial March
(attributed to
Richard
Elgar!) played by vast military bands at the Crystal Palace early in 1897 and later by special command of the queen at the State Jubilee Concert (the only English work on the program); the two cantatas,
The Banner of St. George
, with its grand finale glorifying the Union Jack, and
Caractacus
, its ancient context encompassing the fall of the Roman Empire and prophesying the rise of the British nation.
³⁹
Performances of the
Imperial March
during that year—at the Albert and the Queen's Halls, at a royal garden party and a state concert, and at the Three Choirs Festival—placed Elgar in the position of laureate for imperial Britain. The Crystal Palace hosted another grand occasion that year at which a new Elgar work was premiered. For this event, held in October 1897, “Ethnological Groups,” including “Indians, Bushmen, Zulu Kaffirs, Mexican Indians, Hindoos [
sic
], Tibetans,” were put on display in the south transept. Elgar contributed
Characteristic Dances
to the program.
⁴⁰
Five years later, Henry Wood gave the London premiere of Elgar's
Pomp and Circumstance
Marches in D Major and A Minor, conducting two encores of the former.
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Charles Villiers Stanford remarked that “they both came off like blazes and are uncommon fine stuff” that “translated Master Kipling into Music.”
⁴²
In October 1902, Elgar composed the
Coronation Ode
to commemorate the accession of Edward VII and his crowning as Emperor of India. At the king's suggestion, the
Ode
included the choral setting of the expansive trio melody of
Pomp and Circumstance
March no. 1, a tune that would in Elgar's words “knock ‘em flat” and which became known across the world (with words by A. C. Benson) as “Land of Hope and Glory,” the anthem of British imperialism.
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Yet, as inferred from the policies announced at the Delhi Durbar, these imperial festivals, resounding with marches and hymns, marked a high point for the public face, but not the imperial power, of British rule in India. An apologist for the Raj, Tarak Nath Biswas, prefaced his 1912 study of the Durbar by emphasizing how far relations had deteriorated within the Anglo-Indian colonial encounter:

The present peculiar situation of India demands a popular exposition of the bright side of the British rule, for the shade of discontent that one unfortunately notices in the country, can only be removed by a better understanding of our rulers and their beneficent and wellmeaning administration.
⁴⁴

The “shade of discontent” is an oblique reference to the seven years of horrors unleashed by the Bengal partition, and the “bright side of British rule” masks the fact that radical Bengali nationalists and other “enemies of empire” were sent to a prison of death on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.
⁴⁵
While
The Crown of India
boasted of Britain's “beneficent and well-meaning administration” to a packed Coliseum during March 1912, English officials were hanging Indian dissidents in a desperate attempt to avoid a full-scale mutiny. As with so many of Elgar's imperialist works,
The Crown of India
, in its subject matter, march topoi, brassy scoring, and massive performing forces, was secretly addressing a crisis of imperial—and thus national—self-assurance.

“East Is East and West Is West.”

Remarks by Elgar during the masque's composition indicate the composer's enthusiasm for the project. His earliest thoughts about the masque, outlined to Alfred Littleton of Novello, his publisher, on January 8, 1912, describe it as “very gorgeous and patriotic.”
⁴⁶
By February 3, the
Daily Telegraph
reported that Elgar had “expressed the keenest satisfaction with Mr. Hamilton's work.”
⁴⁷
Later that month the composer declined an invitation from friends, explaining, “I must finish the Masque—which interests and amuses me very much.”
⁴⁸
Elgar divided Hamilton's elaborate reconstruction of the Delhi Durbar into two tableaux comprising some twenty musical numbers together with passages of
mélodrame.
⁴⁹
The cast was headed by “India” (played by Nancy Price), with twelve of her most important cities, Delhi, Agra, Calcutta (now Kolkata), and Benares (now Varanasi), as female singing roles; in addition, the masque featured St. George, Mughal emperors, the King-Emperor and Queen-Empress, and a herald called Lotus.

At rehearsals Elgar told the press he found the work hard but “absorbing, interesting.”
⁵⁰
The composer himself conducted the masque twice a day for the first two weeks of its successful run, often running rehearsals between performances.
⁵¹
His dedication paid off, not least financially: “God Bless the Music Halls!” he exclaimed to a friend, Frances Colvin, at the thought of his emolument.
⁵²
The masque—and particularly its “gorgeous and patriotic” music—proved enormously popular with audiences and critics alike. In the production's fourth week it was still, the
Daily Telegraph
reported, “a case of ‘standing room only' at the Coliseum soon after the doors were opened for both the afternoon and evening performances.”
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England's popular tabloid, the
Daily Express
, trumpeted Elgar's “great triumph at the Coliseum,” declaring that “the call was for Elgar at the fall of the curtain… . Truly,
The Masque of India
is the production of the year.”
⁵⁴

The success of Elgar's music was due at least in part to the manner in which the score drew on representations of India and its music that were then all the rage in popular culture. The London
Times
told readers that “the score contains ideas drawn from Oriental sources,” pointing to inclusion of the most un-Indian of instruments, “a new gong” contrived by Elgar “for his special purpose.”
⁵⁵
A “native musician with tom-tom” and a pair of “snake-charmers with pipes” also figured in the opening scene, the former by way of the tenor drum, and the latter by oboes. These touches suggest that Elgar must have absorbed the manner in which Indian music was routinely represented at exhibitions, to wit by “snake-charmers … dancers, musicians, jugglers, and beautiful Nautch girls.”
⁵⁶
Nothing in
The Crown of India
would have been recognizable as Indian music to an Indian musician, but for audiences caught up in the celebrations of the Delhi Durbar, and with exhibition entertainments ringing in their ears, these allusions were more than sufficient to establish the proper atmosphere.
The Crown of India
's libretto, together with the elaborate costumes and stage design of its Coliseum run, brought it close to the late-nineteenthcentury “Indian” stage spectacle in which
bayadères
and Mughal emperors appeared in London's music halls and theaters. Moreover, similar in theme, representational style, and imperial purpose to Kiralfy's
India, The Crown of India
was intended as an edifying, historically accurate entertainment.

After completing the score, Elgar explained that “the subject of the Masque is appropriate to this special period in English history, and I have endeavored to make the music illustrate and illuminate the subject.”
⁵⁷
A perceptive review in
The Referee
addressed the difficulties of representing the Durbar musically:

When Sir Edward Elgar undertook to write music for a masque dealing with historical events in India for the Coliseum he was faced by several problems not easy to solve harmoniously. It was essential that the patriotic note should be made prominent. It was also distinctly necessary to suggest the mystery of the East… . Sir Edward might have made use of the Indian scales … and, by contrasting the two systems of music, reflected in his score the difference of Indian and British outlook. Mr. Hamilton's libretto, however, mainly regards India from a British standpoint… . The result is that while his music illustrating the Indian portion of the libretto appeals to musicians who will distinguish with pleasure the hand of a master in subtleties of tone-colour and cross rhythms, the chief effect on the ordinary listener is almost entirely confined to the song, “The Rule of England.” This, with its diatonic refrain, sounds the imperial note of popular patriotism.
⁵⁸

Audiences did indeed delight in St. George's song: critics described it as “a patriotic song of honest ring,” “very stirring,” and “destined to be heard for many a day outside the Coliseum walls.”
⁵⁹

The appeal of St. George's rousing solo “Rule of England” can be understood in the context of its popular musical language, for which Elgar drew on several well-known idioms of the day. The chorus's energetic four-square melody and marching bass, along with the text's call to arms and imperialist sentiments, is akin to the “crusader” hymn tradition in general and to the popular exemplar “Lift High the Cross” in particular. The militaristic idiom and lofty imperialism expressed in such hymns and patriotic songs had been caricatured in Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas to great acclaim at the Savoy Theatre since the 1870s.
⁶⁰
Elgar owned several of these libretti and had seen, played in, and conducted many of Sullivan's works in the 1880s and '90s, including
Iolanthe
which, along with
HMS Pinafore
, seems to have inspired “Rule of England.”
⁶¹
Ironically, or perhaps with original irony intact and intended, echoes of Sullivan's imperialist spoof, “He is an Englishman”
(HMS Pinafore)
can be heard in the male chorus section of St. George's song with its marching bass and nationalistic text. And “Rule of England's” risoluto section, with its ostinato, marked
marcato
, and lofty sentiments, appears to have strayed out of Lord Mountararat's song with chorus: “When Britain really ruled the waves … in good King George's glorious days.” Elgar even invoked his own “Land of Hope and Glory” in the song's accompaniment to tug at nationalistic heartstrings.
⁶²

In contrast to this popular patriotism, the “Dance of the Nautch Girls” is one of the pieces “illustrating the Indian portion of the libretto” that “appeals to musicians who will distinguish with pleasure the hand of a master in subtleties of tone-colour and cross rhythms.” In writing a nautch girl's dance, Elgar was tapping in to one of the most pervasive cultural signifiers of India in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century England. From the early days of the Raj, Indian dance had been a popular form of entertainment for the English. Yet, familiar with such dances as the waltz, the colonizers tended to misunderstand the dance they came across most often: kathak, the north Indian performance genre that includes mime, singing, accompanying music (usually
tabla
and
sarangi)
and intricate rhythmic improvisations with the feet in response to virtuosic tabla sequences.
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Kathak has a strong erotic character, as it often depicts the amorous exploits of Krishna with his consort Radha. Although traditional kathak dates back to the progressive Bhakti movement of medieval times and was later danced by skilled courtesans, or
tawaifs
, at the royal courts, it had, by the turn of the twentieth century, become synonymous with what foreigners termed “nautch” dancing (from the Hindi
nach
, meaning dance), a derogatory term associated with prostitution.
⁶⁴

Nautch songs and dances in all kinds of instrumental and vocal guises had become all the rage in England; these included Venanzi's “Dance of the Bayaderes” in Kiralfy's
India
, Walter Henry Lonsdale's “Nautch Dance” for piano (1896), Frederic H. Cowen's “The Nautch Girl's Song” (1898), a setting of words by the well-known authority on Indian literature, Sir Edwin Arnold.
⁶⁵
In June 1891, the London populace first became privy to the secrets of the nautch girl when Edward Solomon's opera
The Nautch Girl
began a successful run at the Savoy in a production designed, like
The Crown of India
, by Percy Anderson. As Hollee Beebee, a character in the opera, explained in tantalizing detail:

First you take a shapely maiden …

Eyes with hidden mischief laden, Limbs that move with lissom grace,

Then you robe this charming creature, so her beauty to enhance:

Thus attired you may teach her all the movements of dance …

Shape the toe, point it so, hang the head, arms out spread

Give the wrist graceful twist, eyes half closed now you're posed …

Slowly twirling, creeping, curling … gently stooping, sweeping, drooping

Slyly counting one, two, three …

Bye and bye this shapely creature will have learned the nautch girl's art,

And her eyes … throwing artful, furtive glances …

Wringing heartstrings as she dances, making conquests all along.
⁶⁶

In his “Dance of the Nautch Girls,” Elgar evoked the (imagined) intricacies of kathak dance in an almost pointillistic sequence of musical gestures suggestive—to his Coliseum audience, at least—of the perceived eroticism of the dancing girl's hand, head, and eye movements (“Limbs that move with lissom grace”/“Slowly twirling, creeping, curling”/“Eyes with hidden mischief laden”): pianissimo muted violin and flute running thirds in triplets and sextuplets with scrupulous attention to articulation; trills; tempo changes; muted string chords; and touches of muted horn, harp, and bass drum. Later, the Allegro molto features a repetitive rhythmic pattern on Elgar's Indian drum (“Tomtoms”), along with fortissimo parallel fifths, flat leading tones, and a swirling sixteenth-note figure in flutes and piccolo to evoke the perceived wild or barbarous nature of the nautch as described by one onlooker in the late 1870s: “She wriggled her sides with all the grace of a Punjaub [sic] bear, and uttering shrill cries which resemble nothing but the death-shriek of a wild cat.” (See
Example 1
).
⁶⁷