Edward Elgar and His World (58 page)

Figure 3a. A playbill publicity insert for the Coliseum production of
The Crown of India.

Figure 3b. A program for an evening at the Coliseum in March 1913, including
The Crown of India

When I write a big serious work e.g. Gerontius we have had to starve & go without fires for twelve months as a reward: this small effort allows me to buy scientific works I have yearned for & I spend my time between the Coliseum & the old bookshops … Also I can more easily help my poor people [his brother and sisters' families]—so I don't care what people say about me—the real man is only a very shy student & now I can buy books… . I go to the N. Portrait Gallery & can afford lunch—now I cannot eat it… .

My labour will soon be over & then for the country lanes & the wind sighing in the reeds by Severn side again & God bless the Music Halls!
¹⁶

Whether the money was spent on such purchases, or whether Lady Elgar used it to pay the servants' salaries at Severn House, is unknown.

Although the pecuniary rewards of such popular commissions obviously held their appeal for Elgar, he also respected his colleagues at the Coliseum. The timing of the
Crown of India
commission was suspiciously apposite, as Stoll's extensive connections in society may have let him hear rumors of the composer's unstable finances. Stoll was well-known for his successful approaches to “serious” music and theatrical personalities, overtures that were timed to coincide with periods when these artists were short of ready money.
¹⁷
Stoll's shrewd premise was that once the great and good, baited by cash, encountered the Coliseum's high artistic standards and respectability, they would become advocates.
¹⁸
Clearly, Stoll's strategy worked with Elgar: in the letter to Colvin quoted above, Elgar also wrote, “It's all very curious & interesting & the
people
behind the scenes so good & so desperately respectable & so honest & straight-forward—quite a refreshing world after Society—only don't say I said so.”

The obvious financial rewards of this commission were clearly not the only inducement for Elgar. As Corissa Gould has observed, he had no qualms about turning down commissions he did not feel suited his temperament, either musical or ideological.
¹⁹
Rather, Elgar and his wife enjoyed the Coliseum. During the production's run, Alice Elgar, whose standards of propriety were high indeed, repeatedly took friends and family to the Coliseum to view the entertainment.
²⁰
She wrote proudly in letters and diaries of the glories of the production and her husband's music in a way that strongly conflicts with the notion that either Edward or Alice was embarrassed by the composer's involvement with the Coliseum.
²¹
Indeed, Elgar relished attending the Coliseum over the years: seeing a performance there of the ballet
Little Boy Blue
danced by Anton Dolin and Ninette de Valois inspired the composer to send Dolin his
Nursery Suite
to choreograph as a ballet.
²²
In 1918 Elgar wrote another work for Stoll and the Coliseum,
Fringes of the Fleet
, a setting of verse by Rudyard Kipling. In producing works for the Coliseum and its mass audiences, then, Elgar sought to fulfill at least part of what he conceived to be his responsibility as a modern British composer.

The Nineteenth-Century Music Hall

If neither Elgar nor his wife were embarrassed by the composer's sally into Stoll's Coliseum, then we should not be surprised at the imperialist ideology embedded in his music hall pieces. Recent investigations by Dave Russell, Penny Summerfield, and Peter Bailey have shown that jingoistic sentiment—a chauvinistic celebration of the British Empire—was an essential feature of a successful music hall revue.
²³
New data on the content of music hall acts reveal that the sorts of imperialist ideologies represented by
Crown of India
were present even in the performances by comic singers in workingclass variety palaces. Imperialism was therefore joined inextricably with popular culture in late-Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian music halls. The songs of the music hall stars were at times ambivalent about particular aspects of Britain's imperialist ambition and the impact of empire building on the lives of workingmen and women, especially during the Second Boer War. Overall, however, support for Britain and its empire, found in overt displays of patriotic sentiment, was a signal way in which the music halls managed to create a unified audience from a disparate group of spectators across a spectrum of class backgrounds.

But even as positive sentiments toward imperialism seemed to transgress the class boundaries of fin-de-siècle Britain and imply some sort of unity between these classes, the reality was that class distinctions were sharply drawn even within the walls of the music halls—as the very existence of the King's Car suggests. Any reading of the popular culture found in the middle-class Edwardian and Georgian music halls must take into account the populist (and at times rowdy) characteristics of the earlier incarnations: the variety palaces that flourished during the second half of the nineteenth century that were also known as the “late-Victorian” or “working-class” music halls.

During the transition between the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the “new” and “modern” music halls (as well as other emerging forms of mass entertainment) provoked both fascination and anxiety on the part of contemporary commentators. Such commentators lacked an adequate frame in which to position inherited attitudes against the onrush of modern influences. Since the general populace enjoyed a previously unknown amount of leisure time, access to early twentieth-Century sites promoting popular entertainments increased. These venues were surrounded by anxieties emanating from late-Victorian attitudes toward social control. Music and music making were particularly implicated in Victorian strategies for controlling the actions and attitudes of society, especially those of the working class.

Music was securely bound to the Victorian ideal of “moral uplift.” Victorians of the ruling class sought to use didactic imperatives to support the continuance of a class-based system; in this context they tried to control the putatively undisciplined and volatile working classes through the medium of an artistic culture imposed from above. The result was an attempt to denigrate—or at times erase—popular music making that originated from within the working classes themselves. But for all the Victorian rhetoric of disapproval, which was often a nostalgic attempt to deny contemporary reality, popular music that arose from the working classes forced its way into visibility within institutions that were valued as modern. To the Victorians, the music halls represented a dangerous but enticing brand of modernity.
²⁴

One British artist who celebrated the music halls was the painter Walter Sickert (1860–1942), who created several canvases dating from the 1890s that portray the variety palaces in ways that suggest their modernity.
²⁵
Sickert's writings frequently valorized the music hall as an appropriate topic for the modern artist, and he practiced what he preached.
²⁶
Sickert was particularly drawn to the lively music halls in Islington and Camden; his nocturnal jaunts were habitual and became legendary, since he walked miles to attend these variety palaces, returning late at night on foot to his residence in the much more exclusive suburb of Hampstead.

Sickert's keen, unsentimental eye is evident in such paintings as
The P.S. Wings in the O.P. Mirror
. (Sickert's title alludes to the “prompt side” and “off prompt” side of the stage.) In this canvas, a reflecting mirror separates the space of the painting into two contrasting perspective planes, heightened by differences in scale (
figure 4
). Sickert's other music hall paintings present even more of a visual puzzle evoking his multivalent and essentially modern attitude to his subject. Indeed, Sickert's paintings can be viewed as a mirror that reflected, through the use of new techniques such as skewed perspective, the tensions—class, gender, and aesthetic—that arose as the new lower-middle and middle classes began to define themselves within the 1890s variety palaces. An example of Sickert's ingenuity in this regard is his canvas of a lone audience member propped up against a mirror, which creates a vertiginous array of backdrops, wings, mirrors, and raking perspectives (
figure 5
). The intricacies of Sickert's paintings constitute an eloquent portrayal of the music hall during the 1890s, as well as how perspectives, both literal and figurative, were changing during this period of transition.

Figure 4. Walter Sickert,
The P.S. Wings in the O.P. Mirror
. Rouen, Musee des Beaux-Arts.

The predecessors to the music halls that Sickert painted in the 1890s were various kinds of public meeting places that combined drinking and music, such as the supper club and music-licensed taverns. Music halls as such did not appear until the 1850s.
²⁷
During the 1860s, they multiplied until there were over three hundred such establishments in greater London alone. By the early 1870s, music halls had assumed a regular design: a proscenium arch marking a definitive stage area, bars serving alcohol at the back of the hall, and frequently a promenade area where men and prostitutes might open negotiations.

The Oxford Music Hall was the most notorious of these establishments. When it came time to renew its license, this particular hall served as a target for attacks by several organizations dedicated to the preservation of public morality; these attacks represented just a few of the many overt attempts to close or constrain these variety theaters.
²⁸
Perceived as contested sites of modernity as well as immorality, the music halls and the debates that swirled around them reflected larger ideological concerns that flared up during the 1880s and '90s. These centered on the dangers of popular culture and the frightening instability of the urban working classes.

By the 1890s, music halls had sprung up in London's suburbs such as Camden Town and Islington—the halls frequented by Sickert—as well as in the new theater and entertainment district around Leicester Square in London's West End.
²⁹
Neighborhoods determined the style of hall; suburban halls catered to the new “clerk” class of the petit bourgeois, a direct result of a dramatic increase in white-collar workers on the lower end of the pay scale. The older, poorer neighborhoods of the East End were home to halls frequented by members of the working class. Larger, more opulent establishments were clustered around Leicester Square and Charing Cross, where proximity to rail stations allowed travelers of all sorts to stop in at the Oxford, the Empire, and the Alhambra—which meant that these halls had to maintain at least a veneer of respectability.

In the early 1890s, these larger venues began to diversify their programs in order to appeal to new middle-class audiences by including variety acts; the Alhambra even made ballets a particular feature of their nightly offerings. However, this high-toned fare was more the exception than the rule; most music halls still appealed predominantly to working-class and lower-middle-class audiences. The success of the halls relied heavily on stars, especially comic singers such as Albert Chevalier, Harry Lauder, Marie Lloyd, and Katie Lawrence. Their songs were popularized not only by performances in the halls, but through sheet music which sold widely across Britain. A song's success was based solely on the reputation of the star with which it was associated rather than the composer or lyricist. The songs dealt mostly with quotidian topics, some sentimental, most comical, and many pervaded by sly sexual innuendo. These popular songs were designed to mirror the audiences they targeted, treating with humor the trials and tribulations of love, courting, marriage, work, and other subjects. Recent discussions of music hall songs stress their conservative nature: these songs were hardly a call to revolution. Despite this conservatism, the songs nevertheless expressed a particularly working-class perspective that would have been considered modern at the time.