Edward Elgar and His World (55 page)

24. This was how the
Illustrated London News
described Victoria, Empress of India's rule of India during the 1886 India and Colonial Exhibition, 8 May 1886; quoted in Kusoom Vadgama,
India in Britain: The Indian Contribution to the British Way of Life
(London: R. Royce, 1984), 61. In the masque, these sentiments are echoed by “India” as she pays homage to the King-Emperor and Queen-Empress at their feet; Hamilton,
Crown of India:
libretto, 22.

25. Edward Said,
Culture and Imperialism
(London: Vintage, 1994), 180.

26. Robert Anderson, “Elgar's Passage to India,”
Elgar Society Journal
9, no.1 (March 1995): 15–16.

27. Anderson,
Elgar
(New York: Schirmer Books, 1993), 16–17.

28. Anderson, “Elgar's Passage to India,” 16, 19. See also Anderson, “Immemorial Ind,” in his
Elgar and Chivalry
(Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 2002), 312–13. In addition, Elgar would have come to know of the opulence of Indian arts and crafts from his mother, Ann; Anderson notes that she kept a scrapbook of cuttings that included some on Indian art.

29. Elgar clipped and kept the following announcement in
The Bystander:
“Sir Edward Elgar, strongest and most individual of all English composers, has, by assuming the Order [of Merit], redeemed knighthood from being the charter of mediocrity in music”; 15 November 1911. EBM Cuttings, 1.

30. The presence of Indians living in Britain around the turn of the century, as distinct from the idea of “India” constructed at the exhibitions, was not large. Although no official statistics are available before 1947, the Indian National Congress conducted a survey of “all Indians outside India” in 1932, which estimated 7,128 Indians in the United Kingdom. Some idea of the numbers of Indians in England's cities can be gleaned from these figures: in 1939 the Indian population in Birmingham was about 100, which included some twenty doctors and students; by 1945 it was 1,000. Of professional-class Indians, the largest group was in the medical profession: it is estimated that before 1947 about 1,000 Indian doctors practiced throughout Britain, 200 of them in London. Three Indians/Pakistanis were elected to the House of Commons between 1893 and 1929. Rozina Visram,
Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947
(London and Dover, N.H.: Pluto Press, 1986), 190–94.

31. The Indian Rebellion (also known as the Indian Mutiny) of 1857, began in Meerut on May 10 and spread quickly to the capture of Delhi by the mutineers. The British slaughtered the mutineers, and this act was celebrated as a victory over native resistance. For many in India, the Mutiny was a nationalist uprising against foreign rule and came to be considered the First War of Independence. An enormous amount of writing, British and Indian, covers this important event; it has been acknowledged as having provided a clear demarcation for both Indian and British history; see, for example, Christopher Hibbert,
The Great Mutiny
(London: Viking 1978).

32. H. Trueman Wood, ed.,
Colonial and Indian Exhibition Reports
(London: William Clowes & Sons Ltd., 1887).

33. The 1901 Exhibition, for example, opened May 2 and closed November 9; it covered some 73 acres in Glasgow's Kelvingrove Park. Admission was one shilling, season tickets were one guinea. The attendance figures were 11,497,220; profits were £39,000 (pub. figure of 1905). Free music was a big selling point for the exhibition; Perilla and Juliet Kinchin,
Glasgow's Great Exhibitions
(Bicester: White Cockade, 1988), 15, 87–88.

34. For instance, a complete “Indian City” was erected for the Empire of India Exhibition in 1895. Raymond Head notes that “the apotheosis of the use of an Indian style at an exhibition was at the Franco-British Exhibition in 1908,” which featured Mughal or IndoSaracenic rather than Hindu forms, in
The Indian Style
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1986), 128–29, 141–42. See also
Franco-British Exhibition Official Guide
(London: Bemrose & Sons Ltd.,1908); F. G. Dumas,
Franco-British Exhibition Illustrated Review
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1908), esp. 295;
Illustrated London News
, 15 June 1901; Imre Kiralfy's notes for his India and Ceylon Exhibition (1896), BL India Office, V 26652, 37–40.

35. John M. MacKenzie discusses these productions in his
Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts
(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 194–96; quotation, 196.

36. Imre Kiralfy,
India
(1895), BL1 1779, Kb, folio 5.

37. Ibid., 41. For a more detailed discussion of Kiralfy's
India
, see “The English Musical Renaissance, An(other) Imperial Myth,” in A. Nalini Ghuman Gwynne, “India and the English Musical Imagination,” Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2003, 25–28; see also MacKenzie,
Orientalism
, 196–97.

38. The reference is to Rudyard Kipling's poem “The White Man's Burden: The United States & The Philippine Islands, 1899” which begins “Take up the White Man's burden/send forth the best ye breed …” in
Rudyard Kipling's Verse: Definitive Edition
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1929).

39. Anderson,
Elgar
, 35.

40.
Crystal Palace Programme
and
Guide to the Entertainments
, 1901, BL Miscellaneous Programmes 1898–1923, Shelfmark 341, no. 4. See also Anderson,
Elgar
, 36.

41. Sir Henry Wood recalled the historic Promenade Concert held at the Queen's Hall at which the D major march was premiered and “accorded a double encore”: “The people simply rose and yelled. I had to play it again—with the same result; in fact, they refused to let me go on with the programme… . Merely to restore order, I played the march a third time.” Wood,
My Life of Music
(London: Gollancz, 1946), 154.

42. Quoted in Anderson,
Elgar
, 49–50.

43. Robert Anderson surmises that it was probably Clara Butt (rather than King Edward VII) who suggested the use of the trio tune from
Pomp and Circumstance
March no. 1, in
Elgar
, 53. For further details on such national and imperial occasions as the 1902 coronation, including the Second British Empire Festival of 1911, see Michael Musgrave,
The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. “National and Imperial Festivals,” 211–12. See also David Cannadine, “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition,' c. 1820–1977,” in
The Invention of Tradition
, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; repr. 1989), 101–64.

44. Tarak Nath Biswas,
Emperor George and Empress Mary: The Early Lives of Their Gracious Majesties the King-Emperor and Queen-Empress of India
, rev. Panchanon Neogi, 4th ed. (London: New Britannia Press, 1921).

45. See Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, “Survivors of Our Hell,”
The Guardian Weekend
, 23 June 2001, 30–36.

46. Quoted in Anderson, “Elgar's Passage to India,” 16.

47.
Daily Telegraph
, 3 February 1912, EBM Cuttings, 11.

48. Letter (January 1912), reproduced in Jerrold Northrop Moore,
Letters of a Lifetime
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 242.

49.
The Crown of India: An Imperial Masque
, arranged for the piano by Hugh Blair (London: Enoch & Sons, 1912), 52–64, BL g.1161.e; hereafter, Elgar,
Crown of India:
vocal score.

50. From a report in
The Standard
, 1 March 1912; quoted in Moore,
Edward Elgar: A Creative Life
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 629. See also EBM Cuttings, 7.

51. Moore,
Edward Elgar: A Creative Life
, 630.

52. Cited in ibid.

53.
Daily Telegraph
, 9 April 1912, EBM Cuttings, 23.

54.
Daily Express
, 12 March 1912, EBM Cuttings, 18.

55.
Times
(London), 7 March 1912, EBM Cuttings, 15.

56. Franco-British Exhibition held at Shepherd's Bush, London, 1908,
Official Guide
, 47–48.

57.
The Standard
, 1 March 1912; quoted in Moore,
Edward Elgar: A Creative Life
, 629.

58.
The Referee
, 17 March 1912.

59. Excerpts from 1912 reviews in the
Morning Post
(12 March) and the
Daily Telegraph
, 24 February and 12 March, respectively; EBM Cuttings, 17.

60. “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus” is another such hymn popular at the time.
Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised
(London: William Clowes and Sons Ltd., 1950), 872–73.

61. Raymond Monk, ed.,
Elgar Studies
(Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990), app. 1 and 4, 16–33.

62. The quotation from “Land of Hope and Glory” appears in St. George's final verse to accompany the words “Dear Land that hath no like!” Elgar,
Crown of India:
vocal score, 61.

63. Gerry Farrell discusses European reactions to kathak in his
Indian Music and the West
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 29–30, 54.

64. The O. E. D. definition of
nautch:
“An east Indian exhibition of dancing, performed by courtesans or professional dancing girls.” Due to the impact of the anti-nautch movement in 1892, the courtesans who danced traditional kathak were stigmatized as the infamous nautch.

65. Walter Henry Lonsdale,
Nautch Dance
(London: Alphonse Cary, 1896); Frederic H. Cowen, “The Nautch Girl's Song.” (London: Joseph Williams & Co., 1901).

66. Edward Solomon,
The Nautch Girl
, comic opera in two acts (London: Chappell & Co., 1891).

67. Richard Burton,
Sindh Revisted: In Two Volumes
(Karachi: Department of Culture and Tourism, Gov. of Sindh, 1993), 2:53.

68. Unidentified review of
The Crown of India
Suite performed at the Proms on September 7, 1912, EBM Cuttings, 41.

69. Rudyard Kipling's “The Ballad of East and West” begins: “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”
Gunga Din and Other Favorite Poems
(New York: Dover Publications Thrift Editions, 1990), 6–9.

70. “Hail, Immemorial Ind!” Elgar,
Crown of India:
vocal score, 21–31.

71. Scene description for
Tableau I
, Hamilton,
Crown of India:
libretto, 3.

72. Hamilton,
Crown of India:
libretto, 5.

73. For a detailed analysis of Agra's song, see “Elephants and Moghuls, Contraltos and G-Strings: How Elgar Got His Englishness,” in A. Nalini Ghuman Gwynne, “India and the English Musical Imagination,” 134–63.

74. Agra's song and the “Crown of India March” can be heard on
Classico CD 334
(Olufsen Records, 2000); a 1912 recording of the “Crown of India March” by the Black Diamonds Band was released by the Elgar Society, CDAX 8019, 1997. A new edition of the masque has recently been published that includes Henry Hamilton's libretto, the orchestral suite of five numbers from the masque arranged by the composer, the vocal score of the masque, and two numbers reconstructed from the extant orchestral parts: Agra's song, “Hail, Immemorial Ind!,” and “Crown of India March.”
The Crown of India
, 3rd ed., ed. Robert Anderson (London: Elgar Society, 2005), 18.

75.
The Crown of India
Suite, op. 66, score (Hawkes and Son, H. & S. 4936), BL h.3930.w.(1.); and orchestral parts, BL h.3930 (42). The suite is published in full score by Edwin F. Kalmus & Co.

76. Elgar conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the suite's premiere at the Three Choirs Festival, Hereford, on September 11, 1912; program held at the Elgar Birthplace Museum, ref. 1037. Elgar used the Anglicized spelling
Mogul
, rather than the correct
Mughal.

77. See Elgar's letter, 13 August 1930, quoted in Moore,
Elgar on Record: The Composer and the Gramophone
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 113. The recordings were made between September15 and 18 with the London Symphony Orchestra in the Kingsway Hall. The “March of the Mogul Emperors” was recorded, as was the “Menuetto,” and the “Warriors' Dance.” These were transferred from shellac by A. C. Griffith to LP (RLS 713). The “Introduction” and “Dance of the Nautch Girls” was also recorded. For further details, see Moore,
Elgar on Record
, 114–15. See also the letter from Gaisberg to Elgar, 16 October 1930, in Moore,
Elgar on Record
, 117.

78. Letter from Elgar to Fred Gaisberg, 15 October 1930, in Moore,
Elgar on Record
, 116.

79. Quoted in ibid., 128.

80.
Times
(London), 26 April 1915. This concert is described by Jeremy Crump in “The Identity of English Music: The Reception of Elgar 1898–1935,” in
Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920
, ed. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London and Dover, N.H.: Croom Helm, 1986), 164–90, 173. The event was, perhaps, an attempt to bolster public morale during the war years, at a time of increasing pressure for conscription; Crump suggests that the concert was “an apotheosis of self-confident militarism.”

81. British Empire Exhibition pamphlet no. 7:
Pageant of Empire
Programme—
Part II
July 21–Aug 30 1924 (Fleetway Press Ltd., London), Elgar Birthplace Museum Concert Programmes 1912, Ref. 1126: 5. The oft-quoted letter that Elgar wrote to Alice Stuart-Wortley deploring the vulgarity of the event might suggest the composer's renunciation of overt celebrations of the British Empire. See Jerrold Northrop Moore, ed.,
Edward Elgar: The Windflower Letters. Correspondence with Alice Caroline Stuart Wortley and Her Family
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 289–90.

82. I have not been able to locate a score of
Indian Dawn
, nor find any further references to it.