Edward Elgar and His World (53 page)

The “Mogul Emperors” was not Elgar's first exotic march. It followed by eleven years
Pomp and Circumstance
March no. 2, dedicated to the master of Indo-Persian exotica, Granville Bantock. In that earlier (nonprogrammatic) A minor march, Elgar created an exotic sound chiefly by omitting the leading tone in the main theme. For these marching Mughals, Elgar expanded his orientalist musical armor considerably. At first glance the stately moderato maestoso with its marziale and pomposo sections played by a vast orchestra of full brass and percussion (cymbals, timpani, bass drum, side drum, tambourine, tom-tom, and large “Indian” gong) does seem to be an unequivocal instance of Elgarian imperialism. Listening to the music with insight, however, suggests a rather different interpretation. The first sounds we hear hint at the march's unconventional character; the piece begins not, as we have come to expect from such a genre, with consonant affirming triads but with an accented diminished seventh (E
^J
-D) followed by a dissonant tritone (D-G
^J
/G
^J
-D) as if to conjure up the oriental despotism of the Mughal emperors depicted within (
Example 4
).
⁹¹

In
The Crown of India
masque, this was the music that accompanied the emperors Akbar, Jehangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb onto the Coliseum stage: “Four names,” Delhi announces, “whose splendours nothing shall annul … Come, oh ye mighty ones from out the Past”
⁹²
Unusually for Elgar's marches, the music is cast in 3/2 with a distinctly triple-meter feel, lest we forget Kipling's rejoinder that it was, after all, “well for the world” only if the “White Men tread their highway side by side,” marching in 2/4 or 4/4 naturally!
⁹³
Indeed, Elgar's Mughals do not march at all, but rather “process” to a (thinly disguised) polonaise, with all its ceremonial associations, just as Rimsky-Korsakov's Nobles did in
Mlada
(1892).
⁹⁴
Elgar's three swaggering beats divided by two; second-beat accents (see
Example 4
); striking eighth-note fanfare figures; and the appearance of the rhythm popularized in examples of this genre by Chopin, Glinka, Tchaikovsky, and others, reveal this “march” to be a polonaise. (
Example 5
, a rare passage of thematic development, shows the polonaise rhythm that permeates the final section.) For these courtly Mughals of bygone times, Elgar drew on the polonaise's history in nineteenth-Century Russian art music as a stately, processional dance associated with the court; in this guise the polonaise often replaced the march where official “pomp and circumstance” was desired.
⁹⁵
While the “Mogul March” emulates the particular style of Rimsky-Korsakov's grand maestoso polonaise with its brassy fanfares and prominent timpani, Elgar may also have known the “parade-ceremonial” polonaises with patriotic overtones in Tchaikovsky's
Vakula the Smith
and
Yevgeny Onegin
, and in the opening choral pageant of Borodin's
Prince Igor.
⁹⁶

Example 4. Opening, “March of the Mogul Emperors,”
Crown of India.

Example 5. Polonaise, “March of the Mogul Emperors,”
Crown of India.

The generic resonance of the polonaise with which Elgar tacitly casts his Mughal music effectively invokes not only noble or martial associations but also, more significantly, the borderline between dance and processional. Elgar thereby suggests, with the help of several orchestral effects designed specifically for his Mughal depiction, the image of a colorful, festive oriental parade. As the motif introduced in bars 5–8 (see
Example 4
) is extended upward in a series of trills and pseudo-glissandi, it seems to mimic the trumpeting of elephants as they carry their Mughal masters. This is particularly striking when trumpets, muted (for effect rather than volume), repeat the phrase portamento (with slides) and fortississimo; they are punctuated by bass tuba, trombones, bass clarinet, contra-bassoon, double-bass, timpani, bass drum, and “Indian” gong (tam-tam) in second-beat accents
(a la polonaise)
suggestive of ponderous elephant steps (
Example 6
). These trumpet trills, used earlier in the masque's minuet to portray European gentry in the entrance of the East India Company, now gaudily cloaked by tambourine, cymbals, and gong, become audible manifestations of Indian ornamentalism (opulent Mughal costumes and jewelry, lavishly decorated elephants, bejeweled Mughal swords, and so on). A series of illustrations of “Greater Britain” published in
The Sketch
, a popular London weekly, demonstrates how the Mughal emperors and elephants Elgar depicted in the march served, at the time, as symbols of India itself (
figure 3
).
⁹⁷
India, for the British, in Elgar's march as in
The Sketch's
illustration, is represented as a bejeweled, hedonistic, and trumpeting elephant-Emperor, an allegory of wealth and self-indulgence.
⁹⁸

Example 6. “Trumpeting” motif, “March of the Mogul Emperors,”
Crown of India.

Figure 3. “India.” Part of “Greater Britain.”
The Sketch
, 21 April 1897. Courtesy the Bancroft Library collections, University of California at Berkeley.

Elgar's marches, like most examples of the genre (and famously on account of
Pomp and Circumstance
March no. 1), contain a central trio section of a less martial, more lyrical or
nobilmente
character. Yet the Mughal emperors' polonaise has no such trio to interrupt the fanciful orientalist procession. Instead, the “trumpeting” motif dominates, taken up by all the instruments in turn and juxtaposed with the dissonant opening theme. This trumpeting, together with the militaristic polonaise rhythm reiterated by timpani and side drum, and the heavy second-beat polonaise-style elephant steps punctuated by cymbals and bass drum conjure what the
Musical Times
referred to as “the magnificent barbaric turmoil” of this inspired, and somewhat eccentric, polonaise.
⁹⁹

Elgar the Barbarian

The cymbal-crashing, gong-ringing fortississimo that brought to a close the “Mogul March,” and hence
The Crown of India
Suite, came to embody the acme of Elgarian imperialism for the musical intelligentsia after the First World War. In
A Survey of Contemporary Music
in 1924, Cecil Gray, Scottish critic and composer, established what was to become a trope (with minor alterations) in Elgar criticism: the distinction between “the composer of the symphonies and the self-appointed Musician Laureate of the British Empire.”
¹⁰⁰
Concluding that “the one is a musician of merit; the other is only a barbarian,” Gray denounced all of Elgar's marches, odes, and other occasional pieces, particularly
The Crown of India
—which he found “undoubtedly the worst of the lot”—as “perfect specimens” of jingoisim. By 1931,
The Crown of India
was, for F. H. Shera, professor of music at the University of Sheffield, an almost unmentionable piece of Elgar's imperialism that had been “allowed to fade into deserved oblivion.”
¹⁰¹

While Gray's and Shera's criticisms reveal the contemporary attitudes of many critics and modernists of their generation, they tell us little about the continuing popularity of Elgar's music with the British public. In his study, “Elgar and the BBC,” Ronald Taylor states that by 1922, Elgar's music could be heard on at least one of the BBC stations most days of the year.
¹⁰²
Significantly, not only were his imperial works among the most regularly broadcast but, of them (apart from the literally countless broadcasts of “Land of Hope and Glory” and
Pomp and Circumstance
March no. 1),
The Crown of India
suite (the “worst” product of Elgar's “barbarian” mind) was heard most frequently—102 times between 1922 and 1934.
¹⁰³

Radio Times
, a magazine reflective of popular tastes, featured an article in December 1932 that appears to have been crafted in response to the criticisms of Gray, Shera, and others. The author, Alex Cohen, in a spirit of fervent support for the Raj, suggested that “superior folk” had “sniffed” at Elgar's imperialism and that these detractors thought the composer “should have adequately equipped himself … first by a study of oriental mysticism … followed by a few years apprenticeship as a Hindu ascetic.”
¹⁰⁴
Cohen's contempt for such criticism of Elgar's lack of engagement with India in his music is evident in his retort, in which he derided not only the Indian practice of meditation but also Mohandas K. Gandhi's satyagraha in particular as years of Hindu asceticism Elgar “might have spent standing on one leg and contemplating the very essence of things until he grew talons a yard long and could subsist on air alone.” (Gandhi's staunch adherence to satyagraha was widely considered by many British at best eccentric and at worst an extremely effective form of resistance.) Cohen concluded that “west is not east and the miracle has never been achieved … he was the child of his environment” who, accordingly, had mixed in his music “the faith of St Francis the Visionary and an admiration for Cecil Rhodes, the Empire-builder.”
¹⁰⁵