Edward Elgar and His World (61 page)

2. One notorious example of a musicologist characterizing Elgar's music as “vulgar” was E. J. Dent's tart opinion of the composer written in 1924 for Adler's
Handbuch der Musikgeschichte
. Dent's assertions were only seriously challenged when the second edition of the
Handbuch
appeared in 1930. An anguished cry of indignation was then sounded by Elgar's defenders. Somewhat unexpectedly, it was the sardonic modernist composer Peter Warlock who gathered signatures from leading musicians of the day, as well as eminent supporters such as George Bernard Shaw and Augustus John, for an “open letter” of protest praising Elgar. See Robert Anderson,
Elgar
(New York: Schirmer Books, 1993), 167. Dent's opinions are frequently cited in discussions of Elgar's character, popular appeal, and literary pretensions. Brian Trowell neatly summarizes the reception of Dent's comments over the years in his “Elgar's Use of Literature,” in
Edward Elgar: Music and Literature
, ed. Raymond Monk (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 182–287.

3. Barry J. Faulk,
Music Hall and Modernity: The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004).The classic discussion of emerging forms of Victorian leisure activity and the attendant class ideologies remains Peter Bailey,
Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1995
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).

4. Most of the current biographies of Elgar discuss this aspect to a greater or lesser extent. An essay by Meirion Hughes offers perhaps the most focused discussion of Elgar's problematic relationship to his family background and subsequent efforts to project a more genteel identity. Meirion Hughes, “The Duc d'Elgar: Making a Composer Gentleman,” in
Music and the Politics of Culture
, ed. Christopher Norris (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), 41–68.

5. Pertinent chapters on Elgar's functional music found in
The Cambridge Companion to Elgar
, ed. Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) include J. P. E. Harper-Scott, “Elgar's Unwumbling: The Theatre Music,” 171–84; Charles Edward McGuire, “Functional Music: Imperialism, the Great War, and Elgar as Popular Composer,” 214–24; and Diana McVeagh, “Elgar's Musical Language: The Shorter Instrumental Works,” 50–62. See also Daniel M. Grimley's essay in this volume.

6. Not that Elgar was alone in this ambition by any means; for instance, his archrival Charles Villiers Stanford also sought to compose popular, lucrative works and succeeded with oft-performed (and patriotic) choral works such as
The Revenge
. See Jeremy Dibble,
Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 178–79. Stanford never ventured into the music halls, however.

7. There is a large, fascinating bibliography on the music hall, truly interdisciplinary in the range of fields from which it has emerged. Besides Barry J. Faulk's magisterial book, a list might include the collection of essays
Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure
, ed. Peter Bailey (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986); Dagmar Kift,
The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class, and Conflict
, trans. Roy Kift (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and the wonderful section on the music hall in Dave Russell's
Popular Music in England, 1840–1914
, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).

8. King George V's Delhi Durbar was a huge event, exciting intense interest in the British media. Part of the royal tour of India, the Durbar was a modern court occasion, when Indian princes assembled to pay homage to the ruler. As an “invented tradition,” in Eric Hobsbawm's terms, this sort of ceremony was perfectly geared for the imposition of a new British ruler on Indian soil. For more on the fascinating impact of the event on the imaginations of the British people, and how this was fueled by emerging media technologies, see Corissa Gould, “Edward Elgar,
The Crown of India
, and the Image of Empire,”
Elgar Society Journal
13, no. 1 (March 2003): 25–35.

9. Robert Anderson has recently prepared an edition of the score for the masque for the
Elgar Complete Edition
, vol. 18, (London: Elgar Society with Novello, 2004). Despite the pervasiveness of the exotic idiom in music during the nineteenth century, particularly in Britain, musicological investigations of the ways in which the orientalist impulse mapped onto British musical composition and its reception are relatively limited. Recently there has been a rise of interest. See especially Nalini Ghuman Gwynne, “India in the English Musical Imagination, 1890–1940,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2003. Jeffrey Richards offers an overview of the subject in
Imperialism and Music: Britain 1876–1953
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Finally, for a pan-European look at critical approaches to the subject of orientalism, see the collection of essays edited by Jonathan Bellman,
The Exotic in Western Music
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998).

10. For a discussion of such songs, see Derek B. Scott,
The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour
, 2nd ed. (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2001), 177.

11. Barker,
House That Stoll Built
, 179.

12. Jerrold Northrop Moore,
Edward Elgar: A Creative Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 629–30.

13. Diana McVeagh, for example, has characterized the music of
Crown of India
as “trumpery in a colourful and dashing manner.” See Diana McVeagh, “Elgar” in
The New Grove Twentieth-Century English Masters
, ed. Stanley Sadie (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1986), 44.

14. 1 March 1912, as quoted in Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 629.

15. Gould, “Edward Elgar,
The Crown of India
and the Image of Empire,” 25.

16. Letter to Frances Colvin, 14 March 1912, as quoted in Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 630.

17. Barker,
House That Stoll Built
, 179. In the first three chapters, Barker paints a vivid picture of Stoll's peculiar but successful style of management.

18. Stoll was right: Elgar convinced the actress Mary Anderson to appear at the Coliseum in 1917, citing his own happy experience there; see Barker,
House That Stoll Built
, 135.

19. Gould, “Edward Elgar,
The Crown of India
and the Image of Empire,” 29.

20. Both Edward and Alice Elgar may have been further reassured by Stoll's own high standards of respectability, for he neither drank nor smoked and swore only on the rarest of occasions; see Barker,
House That Stoll Built
, 53.

21. Ibid., 27.

22. Anton Dolin, a major star, had been
premier danseur
with the Ballets Russes; see Richard Buckle,
Diaghilev
(New York: Atheneum, 1984), 413ff. For Elgar's interest in having Dolin choreograph his
Nursery Suite
, see Barker,
House That Stoll Built
, 158–59.

23. See Russell,
Popular Music in England, 1840–1914;
and Bailey,
Leisure and Class in Victorian England;
as well as an essay by Penny Summerfield, “Patriotism and Empire: Music Hall Entertainment, 1879–1914,” in
Imperialism and Popular Culture
, ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 17–48.

24. For more on the anxiety over musical halls and their role in working-class life, see Kift,
The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Confict
, in particular chaps. 5 (“1860–1877: The Demon Drink”) and 6 (“1875–1889: Programs and Purifiers”).

25. Walter Sickert was one of the most important British artists in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. A student of the self-consciously modern Whistler, he came under the influence of Degas and thus was firmly rooted in French Impressionism and committed to the “painting of modern life.” Sickert remained a successful artist throughout his life, his style changing with the times, and also was extremely important as a teacher and mentor to younger British artists. For more information about Sickert and his music hall paintings in particular, see David Peters Corbett, “Seeing into Modernity: Walter Sickert's Music-Hall Scenes, c. 1887–1907,” in
English Art 1860–1914: Modern Artists and Identity
, ed. David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 150–67, and
Walter Sickert
(London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2000). Anne Greutzer-Robins discusses Sickert's knowledge of the music hall scene in “Sickert ‘Painter in Ordinary' to the Music Hall,” in
Sickert Paintings
, ed. Wendy Baron and Richard Stone (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

26. Walter Sickert,
Writings on Art
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 14.

27. Barker,
House That Stoll Built
, 29–30.

28. For the politics and social conditions involved in this contest over relicensing, see Tracy C. Davis, “The Moral Sense of the Majorities: Indecency and Vigilance in Late-Victorian Music Halls,”
Popular Music
10, no. 1 (1991): 39–52. For the Oxford Music Hall controversy, see Faulk,
Music Hall and Modernity
, 75–110. Oswald Stoll's own churchgoing in-laws considered such theaters as “sinful homes of the devil”; see Barker,
House That Stoll Built
, 50.

29. Such “variety palaces” were found in most of the larger towns and cities across England as well as in London.

30. The Chairman played an important role in the music halls until the 1890s, introducing the turns and keeping order; see Barker,
House That Stoll Built
, 30.

31. Anon.,
To the Coliseum
(London: Raphael Tuck and Son, 1906).

32. Ibid., 8.

33. Ibid., 6.

34. Ibid., 6

35. Ibid., 3, 7.

36. Ibid., 6

37. Ibid., 18.

38. The timing of these excerpts from
Parsifal
was largely the result of a copyright issue. See Barker,
House That Stoll Built
, 177.

39. For instance, the program on February 9, 1913, was sponsored by the National Sunday League. “A Grand Orchestral Concert with the Meistersingers Orchestra, conducted by Mr. Norfolk Megone. Mix of songs, orchestral favorites, Viennese waltzes, the
William Tell
overture, Elgar's ‘Salut d'Amour' and Three Dances from German's
Henry VIII.”
The Coliseum program is in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum Theatre Archives.

40. I have not been able to trace the identity of the composer “Arends” mentioned in this program. But given the frequent misspellings of the foreign composers' names in ephemeral documents of the time such as this one, it is entirely possible that this composer was actually Anton Arensky, a Russian who had written ballet works in an orientalist vein.

41. The program even included musical examples explicating Wagner's musical dramas. The scenes from
Parsifal
presented:

1. Killing of the Swan

1b. Towards the Castle of the Grail

2. Amfortas Administering the Grail

3. Ejection of Parsifal from the Castle of the Grail 4a. The Magic Garden

4b. The Temptation of Parsifal by Kundry 4c. Kundry Repulsed by Parsifal 4d. Parsifal and the Spear

5. The Overthrow of Klingsor's Splendour

6. The Flowery Mead

7. The Healing of Amfortas

8. Redeeming Love

Coliseum program, March 1913, Victoria & Albert Museum Theatre Archives.

42. On the program: A family of gymnastic equilibrists / Tom Stuart in dramatic and burlesque impressions / Thora, a ventriloquial novelty / Billy Merson, the new London eccentric comedian / Dmitri Andreef, the famous Russian solo harpist / Miss Irene Vanbrugh in J. M. Barrie's “The Twelve-Pound Lock” / Rudolfo Giglio, chanteur napolitain /
Crown of India
/ A company of famous Continental mimes in “Pierrot's Last Adventure,” with music by Fridrich Bermann and produced by the Viennese ballet master Charles Godlewsky. Coliseum program, March 1913, Victoria & Albert Museum Theatre Archives.

43. John M. MacKenzie, “Introduction,”
Imperialism and Popular Culture
, 1–16.

44. J. H. Grainger,
Patriotisms: Britain 1900–1939
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).

45. It is important to emphasize that the voice of the “public poet” was only one of many personae adopted by Elgar, both in his life and works. It is enough to say here that the negation of personal subjectivity, which is in some way demanded by the utterances of the “public poet,” was a source of personal conflict for a composer whose work seems in many ways replete with autobiography and self-representation. Few Elgar scholars today, influenced by the seminal work of Jerrold Northrop Moore and Byron Adams, would argue that Elgar could ever project a unitary identity.

46. See Deborah Heckert, “Composing History: National Identity and the Uses of the Past in the English Masque, 1860–1918,” Ph.D. diss., Stony Brook University, 2003.

47. Ibid., passim.

48. In 1905, Elgar was offered the new Peyton Chair in Music at the University of Birmingham. Richard Peyton had endowed this position with the stipulation that it would be offered to Elgar. Elgar was not enthusiastic about the offer, worried that his lack of academic credentials made him unqualified for the job, and justly fretted that his busy schedule would be further complicated by the addition of new responsibilities. However, with the creation of the professorship at stake, and with persuasive arguments from friends and colleagues in Birmingham, Elgar accepted the post. Part of his responsibilities included delivering a set of public lectures. Elgar gave seven lectures between 1905 and 1906, many of which proved quite controversial, before his resignation in 1907. See Percy Young's introduction and commentary to Edward Elgar,
A Future for English Music and Other Lectures
, ed. Percy M. Young (London: Dennis Dobson, 1968). See also Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life
, 446–48, 456.