Edward Elgar and His World (63 page)

Elgar's own affection for Ruskin is apparent in his quotation of a passage from
Sesame and Lilies
on the last page of his score of
The Dream of Gerontius
. That he considered working directly with the text Colvin highlighted for him seems unlikely—it is, after all, prose rather than poetry—but in its message and atmosphere of heroic idealism it comes close to the poem he would choose for the opening movement of
The Spirit of England
, Binyon's “The Fourth of August” (text quoted below). By 1915 most Englishmen believed their country was engaged in a just war, necessary to honor treaties and avenge the “rape of Belgium” by going to the aid of the smaller, weaker country overwhelmed by a foreign aggressor. In this manner, the war engaged highly developed notions of chivalric honor, manliness, patriotic duty, and, as David Cannadine has observed, an increased confidence that death, when it came, would come naturally and in old age, encouraged by the lengthening of life expectancy and decline in infant mortality in Britain since the 1880s. Combined with growing international tensions (including a concern that colonial youths were outstripping their home-grown counterparts in prowess and vigor) and the increasing appeal of social Darwinism in the 1900s, these factors had created the “strident athletic ethos of the late-Victorian and Edwardian public school … in which soldiering and games were equated, in which death was seen as unlikely, but where, if it happened, it could not fail to be glorious.”
²⁷
Such conditioning determined the conduct not only of the officers drawn from the public-school elite, but also those from the lower social ranks who emulated them, and can be seen to have been effected through music as much as through the literature and imagery of the 1900s (see, for example,
figure 1
).

Figure 1. Ezra Read,
The Victoria Cross: A Descriptive Fantasia for the Pianoforte
(London: London Music Publishing Stores, c. 1899). Note the detailed program.

The most striking aspect of Colvin's proposal is that he should have prompted his Catholic friend Elgar to compose a “requiem for the slain,” a phrase that may owe something to Binyon's habit of referring in private to “For the Fallen” as his “requiem-verses.”
²⁸
To someone with a Protestant background, like Colvin, the word
requiem
could be bandied quite lightly. Over the 1890s and 1900s English audiences had shown a greater willingness to accept choral works based on Roman Catholic liturgy; and in his discussion of Stanford's decision to compose a requiem for the 1897 Birmingham Festival, Paul Rodmell cites freedom from librettists and potential copyright entanglements among the attractions of setting such a text.
²⁹
Yet to Elgar, raised as a Roman Catholic,
requiem
was inseparable from a particular view of the afterlife, especially the doctrine of purgatory—a process that allowed for the purification of the souls of repentant sinners in a slow agony and which could be hastened and even curtailed by the prayers of the living. By contrast, Protestant theology on the afterlife during the Victorian era was far more rigid: God's judgment determined whether a soul ascended to heaven or was cast into the fires of hell for eternity, and the doctrine of purgatory was excoriated in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church.
³⁰

Byron Adams has described Elgar's faith as never more than “a flickering light” and in a compelling narrative tracks the faltering of that faith through a downward spiral of physical and psychological corrosion as the composer struggled to complete his massive trilogy of oratorios, especially the final work
The Last Judgement.
³¹
Such was the extent of this apparent spiritual decline that the doctor who diagnosed Elgar's terminal cancer remembered the composer telling him that “he had no faith whatever in an afterlife: ‘I believe there is nothing but complete oblivion.'”
³²
This must have seemed an astonishing remark to hear from the man who had composed
The Dream of Gerontius
over thirty years earlier. Similarly, in his last weeks Elgar's friends and daughter were unsettled by his request to have his body cremated and his ashes scattered at the confluence of the rivers Severn and Teme; and although he reportedly received the “last rites,” it was only after he had slipped into morphine-induced unconsciousness. Elgar's daughter Carice finally persuaded him to be buried alongside his wife, Alice, at St. Wulstan's Roman Catholic Church, Little Malvern, and though a requiem mass was celebrated in his memory, it was a low mass without music.
³³

Whether one can fully accept Adams's narrative of a crushing loss of faith, or set Elgar's apparent ambivalence toward his Catholicism down to the obfuscation necessary for acceptance in Protestant British society, two considerations are fundamental to any discussion of Elgar's spirituality. First, whatever his experience in late adulthood, and whatever the strength or otherwise of his faith, Elgar's outlook and personal history were steeped in Catholicism: culturally, he always remained a Catholic. Until his departure from Worcester to London in his early thirties, he lived life in a Catholic context dominated by his mother, a fervent convert to the faith; he had attended Catholic schools and a Catholic church, had socialized with Catholics, and was organist at St. George's Catholic Church in Worcester, which provided him with many of his earliest musical experiences including exposure to repertoire from the continental Catholic traditions. Catholicism would remain a strong influence on the women in his life—his wife would convert to Catholicism, and his sister became a senior nun at a Dominican convent near Stroud. Memories of boyhood would forever be inseparable from this “Catholic ethos,” to borrow John Butt's phrase, as when Elgar reminisced about priests he had known as a child, for example, in conversation with the Leicester family on June 2, 1914.
³⁴

Second, in the sphere of religious music Elgar had to become adept at negotiating Protestant sensibilities. In his early career, before 1898, he composed a great deal of Latin sacred music, including a short hymn tune for the Marian devotion “Stabat Mater Dolorosa” and a number of individual mass movements, though he never attempted a complete setting of the Ordinary.
³⁵
In the years before the Great War, Elgar turned his attention to the composition of Anglican liturgical music, to the extent that John Butt describes him as “an Anglican
manqué,”
but his interest in Catholic music continued unabated.
³⁶
While on a trip to Italy in 1907–8, Elgar planned to obtain a copy of Giovanni Sgambati's
Messa di Requiem
, which had been sung at Italian royal funerals and had been heard twice to great acclaim in Germany; perhaps he hoped this might reignite his inspiration as he struggled to complete his oratorio
The Last Judgement.
³⁷
He suggested to Ivor Atkins, organist of Worcester Cathedral, that Sgambati's Requiem might be suitable for a Worcester Festival Choral Society concert, or even the Worcester Festival of 1908, and laid plans to meet the composer personally while in Rome to discuss the loan of orchestral parts. In the end, however, the festival committee chose Stanford's
Stabat Mater
(1906), a setting of a Catholic text by a safely Anglican composer.
³⁸

The most eloquent evidence of Elgar's willingness to appease his Protestant countrymen remains his approach to the setting of Cardinal Newman's “The Dream of Gerontius.” Newman's poem required considerable truncation and simplification in order to render it suitable as a libretto. Elgar also seems to have wanted to shift the focus of attention away from Newman's conception of the afterlife, toward Gerontius as a universalized suffering human figure, which, as McGuire observes, was characteristic of his approach in his later oratorios.
³⁹
Among the cuts Elgar was prepared to make were several passages of Catholic doctrine. The Guardian Angel's words on leaving Gerontius in the care of the Angels of Purgatory were left out, for example, although the remaining text still clearly described a purging of the soul hastened by masses said by the living.
⁴⁰
Passages from Newman such as these caused Dean Spence-Jones of Gloucester to ban the work from performance in the cathedral there in 1901 and the Anglican authorities to stipulate textual alterations before
Gerontius
could be heard in Worcester Cathedral the following year.
⁴¹
As Elgar outlined in a letter to Jaeger, on May 9, 1902, the problematic sections were the Litany of Saints recited at the dying man's bedside, Gerontius's beseeching of the Virgin Mary to intercede for him, and the references to the doctrine of purgatory in the final scene:

What is proposed is to omit the litany of the saints—to substitute other words for Mary & Joseph—& to put “Souls” only over the chorus at the end instead of “Souls in Purgatory” & to put “prayers” instead of Masses in the Angel's Farewell… . So far I have only said I have no objection to the alterations or that I concur—permission
I
cannot give.
⁴²

For that permission the approval of Newman's executor, Father Neville, had to be sought. In the end Neville concurred with Elgar on a bowdlerized version of the work designed for performance in an Anglican church; Elgar was sufficiently content to conduct this version himself at Worcester in 1902 and finally at Gloucester in 1910.
⁴³
Clearly, Elgar learned from these experiences: he took the precaution of having the text of
The Apostles
vetted by two Anglican clergymen before committing himself to the final version.
⁴⁴

In view of Elgar's cultural roots in Catholicism, the faltering of his inspiration for
The Last Judgement
, his preparedness to make compromises for his Protestant audiences and patrons, and the fervency of his nationalism, we can speculate that Colvin's invitation to write a requiem for the slain in the early months of the Great War would have been a powerful stimulus to the composer's creative imagination. Having suffered Anglican censure of
The Dream of Gerontius
, however, Elgar would surely have been reluctant to court controversy again by composing a setting of the Latin Mass for the Dead. A requiem from his pen, as opposed to those of his Protestant countrymen, would need to take a less overtly Roman Catholic (and therefore less provocative) form; Binyon's poetry would prove ideal for the composer's purpose.

The verses Elgar selected from Binyon's
The Winnowing-Fan
had been published in the
Times
at the outset of the conflict on August 11, August 20, and September 21, 1914. Elgar emphasized their local significance in an inscription on the completed score: “My portion of the work I humbly dedicate to the memory of our glorious men, with a special thought for the Worcesters,” and at the end, “For
the Fallen
& especially my own
Worcestershires.”
The text is as follows:

Movement I
(Moderato e maestoso)
I.
The Fourth of August
⁴⁵
Now in thy splendour go before us,
Spirit of England, ardent-eyed,
Enkindle this dear earth that bore us,
In the hour of peril purified.
⁴⁶

The cares we hugged drop out of vision.
Our hearts with deeper thoughts dilate.
We step from days of sour division
Into the grandeur of our fate.

For us the glorious dead have striven,
They battled that we might be free.
We to their living cause are given;
We arm for men that are to be.

Among the nations nobliest chartered,
England recalls her heritage.
In her is that which is not bartered,
Which force can neither quell nor cage.

For her immortal stars are burning
With her the hope that's never done,
The seed that's in the Spring's returning,
The very flower that seeks the sun.

She fights the fraud that feeds desire on
Lies, in a lust to enslave or kill,
The barren creed of blood and iron,
Vampire of Europe's wasted will …

Endure, O Earth! and thou, awaken,
Purged by this dreadful winnowing-fan,
O wronged, untameable, unshaken
Soul of divinely suffering man.

Movement II
(Moderato)
X.
To Women
Your hearts are lifted up, your hearts
That have foreknown the utter price.
Your hearts burn upward like a flame
Of splendour and of sacrifice.

For you, you too, to battle go,
Not with the marching drums and cheers
But in the watch of solitude
And through the boundless night of fears.

Swift, swifter than those hawks of war,
Those threatening wings that pulse the air,
⁴⁷
Far as the vanward ranks are set,
You are gone before them, you are there!

And not a shot comes blind with death
And not a stab of steel is pressed
Home, but invisibly it tore
And entered first a woman's breast.