Edward Elgar and His World (57 page)

The only recorded occasion on which this unique piece of transport had a chance to prove itself came on a visit by Edward VII. This was shortly after the opening of the theatre, and was the first visit ever paid by a member of the Royal Family to a variety theatre. The royal party climbed in, the manager gave the signal. But instead of moving softly along its tracks, the car stayed quite still. The King passed it off as a joke, but the car never recovered from the disgrace.

Covered in ignominy, the King's Car was banished to the Stoll Theater where it gathered dust until it was eventually converted into a supplemental box office during the 1920s.
¹

Figure 1. An early photograph of the King's Car at the London Coliseum.

Elgar, too, might have wished for a hermetically sealed (or hermeneutically sealed) “Composer's Car” to whisk him through the portals of his fraught interactions with the popular culture of his day. For the composer's engagements with mass culture—and the attendant accusations of “vulgarity” leveled at him by elitist critics—have raised some of the most problematic questions in the study of Elgar reception by both his contemporaries and later commentators.
²
Since the topic of Elgar's relationship to popular culture is extraordinarily complex, this essay seeks to explore ways in which envisioning Elgar crossing the Coliseum's threshold might open the doors for an investigation of the popular, vulgar spaces available to artists during the fin de siècle. Barry J. Faulk and others have argued that new forms of entertainment arising in the late nineteenth century allowed for the transcending of class barriers. In marked contrast to the dubious working-class entertainments of the mid-Victorian period, widely considered by the authorities to be socially disruptive and unsuitable, a new version of popular culture developed as part of a bourgeois field of activity.
³
By turning a critical eye on Elgar's participation in the popular culture of his era, we may well arrive at a clearer understanding of his engagement with modernity.

For Elgar, who reached the height of his fame in the early years of the twentieth century, an aspect of being a “modern” composer was to step boldly into the arena of mass popular culture, especially as the “popular” had gained new respectability due to its associations with the genteel middle classes. Given Elgar's family background, his alliance with the middle class was a comfortable and natural step up in social status. Elgar's father was a provincial piano tuner and freelance musician who raised himself from working class to the lower-middle class by going into trade as part owner of a music shop in Worcester. Despite Elgar's marriage to a woman who enjoyed a markedly higher social status and his subsequent conflicted attempts to play the county gentleman, the composer was forever branded by some denizens of upper-class society as a social climber from the lower-middle class.
⁴
The extent to which Elgar's biographers dwell on the class conflicts inherent in his career and character attests to the centrality of this issue. Positioning Elgar against the backdrop of a newly respectable and increasingly uniform middle-class version of mass culture now helps us gain insight into a whole range of Elgar's compositions that were regarded, in his lifetime and after, as problematic because of their supposed vulgarity. A partial list of such “vulgar” scores might include the
Pomp and Circumstance
marches and the many works designed to celebrate coronations and other civic occasions; “salon” music, such as
Salut d'amour;
and much of the incidental music written for theatrical productions. All of this music may be viewed, as it is by Charles Edward McGuire, as “functional music.”
⁵
By composing functional music that appealed to an expanding bourgeois audience, Elgar demonstrated that he was a savvy professional who accurately assessed the possibilities, fiscal and otherwise, that popular culture offered to a British composer during the first decade of the twentieth century.
⁶

A prerequisite to gaining greater insight into this phenomenon is an exploration of the times and places in which Elgar purveyed music to the masses. Such an investigation must take place on multiple planes, encompassing both the metaphorical and the concrete. An apt place to begin is in the music halls (also known as “variety palaces” or “variety theaters”), which functioned, as noted above, as prominent
loci
of popular entertainment in the years preceding the First World War. The culture of the music halls has recently attracted a lively amount of attention from historians who study the rise of popular culture, but Elgar's place in this milieu has rarely been examined in depth.
⁷

In 1912, Elgar composed a spectacular masque,
The Crown of India
, op. 66. By creating this piece of functional music, the composer passed the threshold of more than the Coliseum, for he also entered into a metaphorical space understood at the time as “modern.” Furthermore, in that same step, he traversed a series of class boundaries: the slumming royals, the boisterous working classes, and the respectable bourgeoisie. Recent scholarly work on
Crown of India
rightly investigates its overt imperialistic and orientalist aspects: the score can be viewed as a nexus for issues of national identity and colonial “otherness” that permeated British cultural productions during the late-Victorian, Edwardian, and, indeed, Georgian, eras. Nalini Ghuman, for example, offers an insightful exploration of the imperialist underpinnings of
Crown of India
in her essay “Elgar and the British Raj: Can the Mughals March?” in this volume. These accounts present a fascinating picture of how the details of the music and production commingled to uphold a set of musical and dramatic conventions that served to encourage (and maintain) the then popular ideologies of empire. Instead of viewing the score through the lens of colonial studies, however, this essay concentrates on the particularly modern artistic and public stance that Elgar adopted in exploiting imperialist tropes within the larger contexts of audience and mass culture.

The Crown of India
as Popular Entertainment

The commission for the
Crown of India
masque came from impresario Oswald Stoll, who sought Elgar's prestige and popularity for the London Coliseum in order to celebrate the state visit of King George V to India in December 1911.
⁸
Stoll planned a sumptuous production for the Coliseum, with a budget of over £3,000 for fabulous costumes and elaborate sets. He hired popular actors and actresses, including the celebrated Nancy Price in the role of “India” (
figures 2a
and
2b
).

The elaborate libretto was concocted by the playwright and littérateur Henry Hamilton. His text for
Crown of India
exalted British colonial power as if it were still at its historical peak rather than already in the process of an inexorable decline. (Nalini Ghuman has provided a synopsis of Hamilton's libretto in her discussion of
Crown of India.)
Not content to fill the stage with the several groups of dancers, personifications of cities, and the putative national characteristics of both Britain and India, Stoll crowded in courtiers, soldiers, attendants, pages, natives, and a multitude of “etceteras,” providing an opulent visual display that played directly to his public's colonialist fantasies. In Stoll's vision, India was characterized as an exotic dreamland firmly controlled by a benign British military, abetted by commercial interests. India was therefore controlled within the space of the theater by the modern gaze of an audience of British consumers.

Figures 2a and 2b. Publicity stills of Nancy Price as India from the Coliseum production of
The Crown of India.

For this spectacle, designed to cater to the longings of the newly emerging lower-middle and middle classes, Elgar created a richly varied score: introductions, melodramas to support speeches, songs, interludes, and marches that reflect the stereotyped characteristics of an orientalist mode. These sections mined musical representations of non-Western locales that were used throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth.
⁹
Such characteristics—including discreet chromaticism, “exotic” percussion, and piquant harmonies—had long been exploited by British composers who specialized in short, light orchestral works often featured prominently in concert halls such as the Crystal Palace. Such exotic tropes are also found in music for the theater, both serious and comic, and above all in the extensive corpus of parlor songs with orientalist lyrics, such as Amy Woodforde-Finden's famous “Kashmiri Song.”
¹⁰
In
Crown of India
, these standard elements of exoticism emerge in music designed to characterize the “East,” whereas British characters are portrayed through hearty diatonic tunes.

Once the score was complete, Elgar threw himself enthusiastically into preparations for the premiere.
¹¹
He conducted cast rehearsals, both for the chorus and the soloists, often as accompanist at the piano. He rehearsed the pit orchestra as well. During the first two weeks of the run, Elgar conducted two performances of the masque daily, and often called additional rehearsals as needed. This tremendous effort exhausted the aging composer and, by its end, exacerbated an inner ear problem that ultimately required a stay in a nursing home.
¹²

Crown of India
was first performed on March 11, 1912; Elgar's participation in its run ended on March 23 (
figures 3a
and
3b
). The production was unquestionably a commercial success. Nevertheless, some critics at the time—and several commentators since—considered it beneath a composer of Elgar's stature: the creation of such a frankly commercial score could not be received with universal approbation.
¹³
Concerns about the composer's involvement in a populist spectacle were voiced by a reporter who interviewed him for the
Standard
just before the premiere of
The Crown of India
. In response, Elgar mounted a public defense:

Sir Edward Elgar would commit himself to no special opinion regarding his first definite contribution to the programme of a big music-hall. “It is hard work, but it is absorbing, interesting,” he said, during pause in the proceedings. “The subject of the Masque is appropriate to this special period in English history, and I have endeavoured to make the music illustrate and illuminate the subject.”
¹⁴

Elgar's statement reads as a thinly veiled attempt to give the commission greater dignity through an appeal to patriotism. However, the composer's motives for accepting such commercial projects were more personal in nature.

In his account of the period from 1910 to 1912 when the masque was composed, Jerrold Northrop Moore reveals Elgar's anxiety over his persistent financial difficulties, especially the debts accrued through the composer's ill-considered move into Severn House, a large and expensive edifice in Hampstead. Stoll's lavish budget for the masque included a sizable fee for the composer, with additional funds for Elgar if he agreed to conduct it during the first two weeks.
¹⁵
Elgar wrote a somewhat defensive letter to Frances Colvin outlining the fiscal benefits of the masque: