Edward Elgar and His World (62 page)

49. Elgar,
A Future for English Music
, 33, 41, 47–49.

50. Ibid., 37, 89.

51. Ibid., 41–43.

52. Ibid., 213.

Elgar's War Requiem

RACHEL COWGILL

This is already the vastest war in history. It is war not of nations, but of mankind. It is a war to exorcise a world madness and end an age.

—H. G. Wells,
The War That Will End War

While Elgar's patriotism and sense of Empire have been treated with considerable insight in recent years, Elgar scholarship seems to have found it relatively difficult to explore objectively the religious and denominational contexts in which he lived, and their significance or otherwise for his music.
¹
Indeed, in some cases emphasis on the former has obscured the latter, as with Jeffrey Richards's suggestion that
The Dream of Gerontius
can be considered an imperialist work on the grounds of Elgar's identification with “the idea of Christian heroism,” exemplified by General Gordon of Khartoum.
²
Where Elgar's Catholicism has been broached in the literature, as Charles Edward McGuire discusses elsewhere in this volume, there has been a tendency to accept without much question two tropes that emerged shortly after Elgar's death, which can be seen at least in part to have originated from remarks made by Elgar himself: the first of these, that a crisis of faith had rendered religion no longer of significance in his life (an identity McGuire refers to as the “Weak Faith” avatar); and the second, that as an English Catholic he had learned to appreciate and operate within the codes of Protestantism (the “Pan-Christian” avatar). Just as these avatars arguably offered Elgar himself a means of appeasing his Protestant countrymen and for dulling his often sharply felt sense of otherness within British society, they have also offered convenient strategies for his past biographers who perhaps either did not recognize the centrality of religious identity as a social dynamic in British society of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, reflecting the increasing secularization of subsequent generations, or whose view of their subject was filtered by a particular denominational position or personal belief.
³

Scholars who have tackled the topic of Elgar's Roman Catholicism directly have done so, understandably, in relation to his sacred and organ music.
⁴
But Elgar's Catholic identity can be seen to have a broader significance both for his art and for its place within English culture, as will be explored here in relation to one of his ostensibly secular vocal works,
The Spirit of England
, op. 80 (1915–17). This is a setting for tenor or soprano soloist, orchestra, and chorus of three poems from
The Winnowing-Fan
, a collection of verse published in the early months of the Great War by the poet, dramatist, and art scholar Laurence Binyon (1869–1943).

In his 1984 study of Elgar's life and works, Jerrold Northrop Moore points to an interrelationship between the themes the composer worked with in his music and his religious beliefs:

The fortunes of Elgar's faith can be traced in the subjects he chose for his major religious choral works, his treatment of those subjects, and how they intertwined with the more purely literary heroes for compositions, also of his own choosing.
⁵

Yet Moore places
The Spirit of England
among Elgar's imperialist works, reserving discussion of it for the chapter titled “Land of Hope and Glory” and denoting it “the other face of the
Coronation Ode
of 1902.”
⁶
In this regard he echoes Donald Mitchell, who had remarked earlier on “Elgar's convinced committal to what we may generally term ‘imperial' topics (the
Coronation Ode, Crown of India, Spirit of England
and the rest).”
⁷
Both writers are surely correct to highlight the overt nationalism of this score, which Moore emphasizes further by adopting its title for his book
(Spirit of England: Edward Elgar in His World
). At first glance Binyon's poetry does not seem far removed from A. C. Benson and indeed many British poets writing in the autumn and winter of 1914. The opening stanzas revel in a version of Kipling's “White Man's Burden”—England's mission to free those enslaved by ignorance and tyranny, to vanquish the forces of evil, and to spread the beacons of civilization—all couched in heady imperial imagery designed to stiffen the backbone in the face of mounting death tolls on the western front. Musically Elgar seems to respond in a like manner, with expansive, aspirational melodies built around upward leaps and rising sequences in full choir and orchestra, marked
grandioso, nobilmente
, and
sonoramente.
⁸
However, to accept unquestioningly this bracketing of
The Spirit of England
with Elgar's imperialist works without further investigation would be to perpetuate the whiff of jingoism and propaganda that has lingered around the work, and which probably accounts for its neglect both in the concert hall and in the literature, despite the quality of the music and its significance within Elgar's creative output.
⁹
As will be seen,
The Spirit of England
can be interpreted as a specifically Catholic response to the outbreak of war in Europe, and understanding it as such can yield insights into Elgar's changing attitudes to his faith—the faith in which he was immersed as a young child—and its relationship to his sense of heroic nationalism in the turbulent second decade of the new century.
¹⁰
When taken out of context, Elgar's words to Frank Schuster on hearing of the commencement of hostilities against Germany on August 4, 1914, can seem startlingly inhumane:

Concerning the war I say nothing—the only thing that wrings my heart & soul is the thought of the horses—oh! my beloved animals—the men—and women can go to hell—but my horses;—I walk round & round this room cursing God for allowing dumb brutes to be tortured—let Him kill his human beings but—how CAN HE? Oh, my horses.
¹¹

Volunteers were flooding to join the British Expeditionary Force across the Channel, but the British army was still perceived as a body of professionals; conscription would not be instituted for two years and the full horrors of trench warfare had yet to become a reality. Like many of the aristocracy with whom he aligned himself, especially as an enthusiastic racegoer, Elgar's concerns were thus for the noble beasts that as cavalry mounts and draught animals had been crucial to Britain's pursuit of the Boer War, and which epitomized the ideal of unwavering service and loyalty until death, most poignantly when slaughtered in their hundreds to sustain the besieged citizens of Mafeking (1899–1900).
¹²
Frustrated that he was “too old to be a soldier,” Elgar signed up as a Special Constable within two weeks of the outbreak of war, and a few months later switched to the Hampstead Volunteer Reserve, involving himself in regular drills and rifle practice.
¹³
He mobilized A. C. Benson into revising the words for “Land of Hope and Glory” and was soon devoting his creative energies to a range of small-scale compositions, including recitations with orchestral accompaniment of poetry by the Belgian patriot Émile Cammaerts (1878–1953):
Carillon
(op. 75, 1914),
Une voix dans le désert
(op. 77, 1915), and
Le drapeau belge
(op. 79, 1916).
¹⁴

British poetic responses to the conflict began to flood the pages of newspapers and periodicals, and among the first were those published in the London
Times
by Elgar's friend Laurence Binyon. By Christmas Binyon had gathered twelve of his poems into a single volume,
The Winnowing-Fan: Poems on the Great War;
from this collection, probably working from a copy given to him by the poet himself, Elgar took the following as the basis for a new cantata: I. “The Fourth of August” (referring to the day war was declared); X. “To Women”; and XI. “For the Fallen”; all of which are presented below.
¹⁵
The elegy “For the Fallen” would become the most famous and lasting of Binyon's poems, containing the prescient fourth stanza:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Over the decades to come this quatrain would be recited during countless Armistice and Remembrance Day services and carved on many of the cenotaphs and war memorials erected across the British Empire. After the war, at the behest of the League of Arts, Elgar would rearrange his setting of “For the Fallen” for “Military or Brass Band, or Organ or Pianoforte” (later replaced by full orchestra), omitting the solo part, cutting three stanzas, more than halving the movement in length, and reworking his treatment of the central quatrain into a more consoling, luminous, and sparsely accompanied passage in E major. Renamed
With Proud Thanksgiving
, this version was intended for performance at the dedication of Edwin Lutyens's Whitehall Cenotaph and the entombment of the unknown warrior in Westminster Abbey in 1920, though in the end hymn singing would be preferred by the organizers.
¹⁶
As the third movement of Elgar's
The Spirit of England
, “For the Fallen” would become a stock item in the BBC's Armistice Day broadcasts, sometimes conducted by the composer himself.
¹⁷
Elgar considered it equal in merit to
The Dream of Gerontius
and
The Kingdom
, and by 1933, Basil Maine could confirm that “for many [The
Spirit of England]
has become a national memorial to which they instinctively turn each year on Remembrance Day.”
¹⁸

The idea of setting poems from Binyon's
The Winnowing-Fan
appears to have been triggered by Elgar's friend Sir Sidney Colvin (1845–1927), who, until his retirement as Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings, had been a colleague of Binyon's at the British Museum. It was widely believed by the Allies that the war would be over by Christmas, and so by the first weeks of New Year 1915 the need was keenly felt for something that could help to make sense of the escalating carnage and offer consolation to the growing mass of the bereaved.
¹⁹
Colvin probably discussed this with Elgar, for after spending the day with him he jotted the following postscript to a letter dated 10 January 1915:

Why don't you do a wonderful Requiem for the slain—something in the spirit of Binyon's “For the Fallen,” or of that splendid homage of Ruskin's which I quoted in the Times Supplement of Decr 31—or of both together? —SC.
²⁰

That Elgar found Colvin's citation of “For the Fallen” sufficiently appealing to set the text itself, along with others from the same collection, is perhaps not surprising. The verses are replete with musical references, which Binyon enhanced in an extra stanza he wrote for Elgar's “Marziale” section (quoted below). As the son of an Anglican clergyman, Binyon also drew on a long familiarity with the language and imagery of the Bible in his poetry: for the famous quatrain in “For the Fallen” he later described how he had “wanted to get a rhythm something like ‘By the Waters of Babylon we sat down and wept' or ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me' … and having found the kind of rhythm I wanted, varied it in other stanzas according to the mood required.”
²¹
His disillusionment with institutionalized religion, however, and fascination with Eastern art and cultures (the main focus of his scholarship in adult life) brought to his poetry both an emphasis on humanism and a broad frame of reference, giving it an appeal that crossed denominational boundaries. His studies of William Blake's apocalyptic visions might also have helped him to find a voice with which he could speak of the harrowing events of the war; and in “Louvain,” the sixth poem from
The Winnowing-Fan
, he expressed both a deep love for Flanders and his personal pain at the sacking of this ancient university town. (He did not at this stage know of the murder of his close friend Olivier Georges Destree, who had entered a Benedictine monastery there.)
²²
The extent to which in early 1915 “For the Fallen” seemed to capture the mood particularly of the nation's noncombatants, and would do so increasingly over the course of the war, is underlined by Binyon's biographer, John Hatcher:

“For the Fallen” is one of the few great war poems to include in its tragedy those “that are left.” It takes Henry's St. Crispin's Day speech from [Shakespeare's]
Henry V
IV. iii, the key text of English chivalric patriotism, and turns it inside out, seeing the war and its aftermath from the point of view of those at home, the older generation too old to fight, including those who found their jingoistic platitudes stilled in their throat by the surreal nightmare the war had become.
²³

Colvin, Binyon, and Elgar all belonged to this “older generation”—“Do you realize that nearly half my life belongs to Victoria's days?” Binyon quizzed T. S. Eliot in 1940—and of the three, only Binyon had direct experience of the fighting.
²⁴

The second text to which Colvin referred Elgar came from the final chapter in volume 3 of John Ruskin's
Modern Painters
—this was an important, indeed crucial, book for Colvin, who had idolized Ruskin all his life.
²⁵
Writing during the Crimean War (1853–56), Ruskin takes as his theme “righteous” warfare, which he argues is essentially a better, more ennobling state for England than peace, referencing ancient codes of Christian chivalry:

I ask
their
witness, to whom the war has changed the aspect of earth, and imagery of heaven, whose hopes it has cut off like a spider's web, whose treasure it has placed, in a moment, under the seals of clay. Those who can never more see sunrise, nor watch the climbing light gild the Eastern clouds without thinking what graves it has gilded, first, far down beneath the dark earth-line—who never more shall see the crocus bloom in spring without thinking what dust it is that feeds the wild flowers of Balaclava. Ask
their
witness, and see if they will not reply that it is well with them and with theirs; that they would have it no otherwise; would not, if they might, receive back their gifts of love and life, nor take again the purple of their blood out of the cross on the breastplate of England… . They know now the strength of sacrifice, and that its flames can illumine as well as consume; they are bound by new fidelities to all that they have saved—by new love to all for whom they have suffered; every affection which seemed to sink with those dim life-storms into the dust, has been delegated, by those who need it no more, to the cause for which they expired; and every mouldering arm, which will never more embrace the beloved ones, has bequeathed to them its strength and its faithfulness.
²⁶