Edward Elgar and His World (52 page)

Following the London premiere of the
Crown of India
Suite, one critic described the effect of hearing the “Menuetto” after the “Dance of the Nautch Girls”:

This movement follows as if to illustrate the statement that “East is East and West is West” in the dance as in other matters. Nothing could be in more effective contrast to the tempestuous conclusion of the Nautch Dance than this quiet and majestic old-world Minuet.
⁶⁸

Beyond the irony that the minuet could be considered “old world” in comparison with the centuries-old tradition of kathak, the critic's reference to Kipling's “Ballad of East and West” (“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”) lends perspective to our understanding of
The Crown of India
's music.
⁶⁹
In the masque, the stately E-flat minuet, titled “Entrance of John Company,” heralded the highest officials of “the Honourable East India Company” including Clive of India, Lord Wellesley and Warren Hastings, as well as several “heroes” of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 such as Sirs Henry Lawrence, Colin Campbell, and Henry Havelock. Marked
dolce e maestoso, stilo antico
, its trills and rhythmic gestures conjure up the social hierarchy of courtly eighteenth-Century European aristocracy in which the minuet promoted a particular kind of grace, agility, and control (
Example 2
). The minuet exemplified the European idea of dancing as a social activity in which both sexes participated. It would be difficult, then, to find two more contrasting dance forms and musical accompaniments than the European and Indian styles that Elgar depicted in his masque.

Example 1. Allegro molto, “Dance of the Nautch Girls,”
Crown of India

Perhaps Elgar's most exotic composition in the masque, and indeed in his entire output, is Agra's “Hail, Immemorial Ind!” Yet, far from displaying the kind of studied musical orientalism of the “Dance of the Nautch Girls,” Agra's song has a refined musical setting in which Elgar drew on elements of his personal idiom and, inspired by the Indian subject, expanded their expressive capacities.
⁷⁰
The name Agra was evocative both for Elgar and his audience: it was the former capital of the Mughal Empire and the location of several wonders of the Muslim world, including Emperor Akbar's city Fatehpur Sikri and Shah Jehan's Taj Mahal, which served as Agra's backdrop at the Coliseum.
⁷¹
The song unfolds in the form of a historical “mythography” of India's glories from ancient times to British conquest and rule and is, as Benares explains, essentially an homage to India:

O Mother! Maharanee! Mighty One! …

Thy daughters bless thee and their voices blend

With that unceasing song.
⁷²

Written for alto solo and an orchestra scored to depict the mysterious delights of the distant land of its text, Agra's song recalls Elgar's earlier song cycle for alto and orchestra, the well-known
Sea Pictures
(1897–99). The sea—Shakespeare's realm of “strange sounds and sweet aires”—inspired a highly evocative, often exotic musical language for Elgar (as it did for other composers, including Debussy, Ravel, and later, Britten). While Elgar seems to have used these earlier songs as a touchstone for Agra's aria, the Indian imagery of Hamilton's verse evidently suggested to Elgar an extended and more nuanced vocabulary of musical expression with which he evokes every detail of this historical paean to India.
⁷³
Agra's rich contralto, timbrally redolent (for an audience brought up on nineteenth-Century exotica) of the feminized East, begins with a refrain colored by an insistent and exotic augmented triad (A–C#–F), and closes with a suspended ninth resolving downward in the lowest regions of the orchestra (bass tuba, basses, bass drum). This gesture is derived from Agra's singing of “Ind” and it musically suggests the ancient, mystical, and, in Agra's own description, “dark” depths of “immemorial” India (see the first return of this refrain as it is taken up by the chorus of Indian cities in
Example 3
). Agra's “quasi recitative” is peppered with tritones that call to mind “the Orient,” as Elgar's setting of those words to a rising G#–D attests. Her vivid descriptions are brought to life by an attendant orchestra of shimmering ponticello tremolo strings, harp, flute, oboe, bassoon, clarinet, piccolo, cymbals, triangle, and glockenspiel that lead Agra's narrative through a harmonic sequence of chromatic lines punctuated by diminished-seventh harp glissandi and ornaments (see fourth bar of
Example 3
).

Example 2. Moderato, “Menuetto,”
Crown of India.

Example 3. Agra's aria, “Hail, Immemorial Ind!”
Crown of India

Agra's aria, along with the rest of the masque, has largely been condemned to the obscurity its colonialist premise might seem to deserve.
⁷⁴
The complete music from the masque was published in vocal score by Enoch & Sons in 1912, but only the well-known orchestral suite, originally published separately by Hawkes & Son (owing to the demise of the Enoch firm in the 1920s), is extant in full score and parts.
⁷⁵
When, in 1975, Leslie Head wished to conduct the complete masque, only two movements could be found (Agra's song and the “Crown of India March”), and any performance of the work today would involve orchestrating the vocal score. How far, though, do memories of the masque inform our hearing of the
Crown of India
we know today, the orchestral suite, op. 66?

Can the Mughals March?

Martial music, in a decidedly Indian vein.
       
—The Daily Sketch
, 12 March 1912

In September 1912, six months after the successful run of his imperial masque, Elgar conducted the premiere of his
Crown of India
Suite, comprising five movements: Introduction, Dance of the Nautch Girls, Menuetto, Warriors' Dance, Intermezzo, and March of the Mogul Emperors.
⁷⁶
Praised as one of Elgar's exemplary marches, this last was favored by its composer, who chose to record it several times, the last being with the Gramophone Company in 1930.
⁷⁷
These recordings were made, along with “Dance of the Nautch Girls,” to the delight and approval of Elgar who declared “Mogul Emperors” to be “a terrific! record.”
⁷⁸
The following year, Alan Webb recalled his first meeting with Elgar: “It at once became evident that most of the evening would be taken up with listening to records… . I was fascinated by his choice … of his own music, we had ‘March of the Mogul Emperors' from
The Crown of India
, the new
Pomp and Circumstance
March no. 5, and the opening and close of the
First Symphony.”
⁷⁹

Soon after the
Crown of India's
run at the Coliseum, the “March of the Mogul Emperors” was singled out as a popular choice for patriotic and imperial occasions. A fine example of the former is the “great patriotic concert” held at the Royal Albert Hall in April 1915 which involved more than four hundred performers drawn from army recruiting bands, and from which all proceeds went to the Professional Classes War Relief Council and the Lord Mayor's Recruiting Bands.
⁸⁰
At the concert, “Mogul Emperors” was featured alongside “Land of Hope and Glory” and such favorites as “Tipperary” and “Your King and Country Need You.” Nearly a decade later, Elgar contributed music for the British Empire Exhibition held at Wembley in the summer of 1924.
⁸¹
His name appeared some twenty times on the program of the grand Pageant of Empire, most prominently in “The Early Days of India” that featured his
Indian Dawn
(setting of Alfred Noyes) written for the occasion, along with three numbers from
The Crown of India:
the Introduction, the “Crown of India March,” and the “March of the Mogul Emperors.”
⁸²
These, interspersed with the other exemplary “Indian” works such as
Old Indian Dances
by an unidentified Shankar (undoubtedly Uday), represent what best depicted India for the British public and how India was perceived.
⁸³
For an England intoxicated by imperial power, India could be no more vividly evoked than by Elgar's “Indian” March.

In a preview of the masque, a critic for the
Daily Telegraph
had noted that “the score fairly bristles with marches, in the composition of which we all know Elgar to be an expert.”
⁸⁴
Some seventy years later Michael Kennedy exclaimed that the “clue” to Elgar's marches is “how
nostalgic
they are,” and that “they also represent aspiration and hope”; he described the “March of the Mogul Emperors” in particular as “a fine piece of Elgarian imperialism which requires no apology.”
⁸⁵
More recently, in her article on the composer for the
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
, Diana McVeagh suggests:

[Elgar's] unaffected love of English ceremonial, and of the grand moments in Meyerbeer and Verdi, prompted him to compose marches all his life: independent pieces like [the
Pomp and Circumstance
marches], or for particular occasions
(Imperial March
, 1897;
Coronation March
, 1911;
Empire March
, 1924) or as parts of larger works
(Caractacus, The Crown of India
). Mostly they are magnificent display pieces, apt for their time, and still of worth, if they can be listened to without nostalgia or guilt for an imperial past … Elgar's march style causes embarrassment only where it sits uneasily, as in the finales of some early choral works, or as an occasional bluster in symphonic contexts.
⁸⁶

We might, however, also understand Elgar's celebrated marches, especially “Mogul Emperors,” as belonging, musically and ideologically, to the late-nineteenth-Century tradition of the march as the favorite signifier of the Raj. By midcentury, the prevailing militarism was generating marches with titles such as “Empire,” “Oriental,” “Battle,” “Hindu,” “Cavalry,” “Delhi,” and even an “Indian Wedding March.”
⁸⁷
In Adolphe Schubart's fantasia
The Battle of Sobraon
, published in London in 1846, Sikhs can be heard marching to their entrenchments to the strains of “There Is a Happy Land.”
⁸⁸
Queen Victoria's crowning as Empress of India in 1876 inspired a further plethora of the genre, including John Pridham's
The Prince of Wales' Indian March
(1876) and
General Roberts' Indian March
(1879), whose title refers to Elgar's father-in-law.
⁸⁹
Kiralfy's
India
featured two “grand” marches, those of “the Rajahs at Delhi” and of “the Mogul Court.” By the 1897 Diamond Jubilee, the march had come to signify both imperial expansion and national celebration; in the process, it had become linked specifically with British India, as exemplified by Thomas Boatwright's 1898
Indian March: The Diamond Jubilee.
⁹⁰