Edward Elgar and His World (65 page)

Example 4.
The Spirit of England
, second movement, “To Women,” rehearsal no. 10.

The chromaticism and the repeated rhythm (short-long) forge this link, which again transports us to Calvary and an invocation to the crucified Christ; for as Gerontius is told just before the appearance of this heavenly being, the Angel of the Agony is “the same who strengthened Him, what time He knelt / Lone in the garden shade, bedewed with blood. / That Angel best can plead with Him for all / Tormented souls, the dying and the dead.”

A further motivic link with
Gerontius
is established in the first movement for the sixth stanza (rehearsal nos. 9–13), which culminates in the line “Vampire of Europe's wasted will.” At this point Elgar quotes the Demons' Chorus from the second part of the oratorio, thus connecting implicitly the architects of the Prussian war machine with the depraved beings who howl and snatch at the soul of Gerontius as it passes on its way to Judgment. On June 17, 1917, after completing
The Spirit of England
, Elgar sent an explanation of this decision to Ernest Newman, who was to write an account of this movement for the
Musical Times:

Do not dwell upon the Demons part:—two years ago I held over that section hoping that some trace of manly spirit would shew itself in the direction of German affairs: that hope is gone forever & the Hun is branded as less than a beast for very many generations: so I wd. not invent anything low & bestial enough to illustrate the one stanza; the Cardinal invented
(invented
as far as I know) the particular hell in Gerontius where the great intellects gibber & snarl
knowing they have fallen:

This is exactly the case with the Germans now;—the music was to hand & I have sparingly used it. A lunatic asylum is, after the first shock, not entirely sad; so few of the patients are aware of the strangeness of their situation; most of them are placid and foolishly calm; but the horror of the fallen intellect
—knowing
what it once was &
knowing
what it has become—is beyond words frightful.
⁵⁷

The words “held over” in this letter have often been interpreted to mean that Elgar had difficulty composing this passage—that with his style so firmly rooted in the Austro-German tradition, he struggled to position the Hun musically as the “Other,” in a way he had not in his depiction of the “otherness” of the Mogul emperors for the
Crown of India
three years earlier—and that it had taken him well over a year to arrive at this solution.
⁵⁸
If this was indeed a troublesome passage that held up the completion of the work for so long, however, it seems odd that among the sketches so few are devoted to this particular section.
⁵⁹
A more plausible explanation is that Elgar arrived at his solution early on, and held this particular movement back—the first performances (from May 3, 1916, until the premiere of the completed trilogy on October 4, 1917) were of the second and third movements. His reasons for this decision were probably twofold. First, he would have wanted to avoid offending certain friends, most notably Edgar Speyer, the wealthy patron of London's transport system, hospitals, and concert life. Despite having English nationality, the Speyer family had rapidly become the target of anti-German harassment in the early months of the war: Edgar Speyer was ostracized by former associates, accused of collusion with the enemy, and pressured to relinquish his baronetcy and membership in the Privy Council. Ultimately, on May 26, 1915, Speyer and his family left England for the United States. Elgar had been supportive under these difficult circumstances and might well have remained reluctant to place “The Fourth of August” before the public until the Speyers had settled abroad.
⁶⁰
Elgar's great German musical ally, the conductor Hans Richter, was dead by the end of December 1916.

From Alice Elgar's diaries we know that German forces were frequently described as demonic and brutal in the Elgar household during the early stages of the Binyon project. On December 31, 1914, she wrote, “Year ends in great anxieties but with invaluable consciousness that England has a great, holy Cause—May God keep her,” and from Severn House the following month she recorded outright condemnation of the latest Zeppelin activity:

[19 January 1915:] Seemingly tranquil but at night a German air raid on Yarmouth & that part of East Coast. They damaged houses & caused some loss of life, engulfing themselves more deeply in crime than ever. Brutes—

[20 January 1915:] Long accounts of air raid. Hope it has shown the U.S.A. what lengths uncivilised fiends will go

[27 January 1915:] Splendid accounts of naval action. Must have immense moral
effect
—No truth in the elaborate German
lies
. Almost impossible to conceive that their airships dropped bombs on the sailors while they were trying to save German drowning men—Demons might have acted better.
⁶¹

This intemperate language resurfaced twelve months into the war, when Alice, who had ambitions as a versifier, tried her hand at a war sonnet after Binyon for publication in
The Bookman
. The Handel scholar R. A. Streatfeild, acting as go-between for the editor, advised her that he would “(probably) suggest another adjective in the place of ‘devilish,'” but the original word was retained when the poem went into print.

England. August 4, 1914. A retrospect.

Holding her reign in kindly state and might,
Still deeming honour trod in knightly ways,
Half armed, lay England, through the summer days;
Her rule, outspeeding dawn, outchecking night,
Welded the sphere in wide, majestic flight.
When lo! a foe appears who neither stays
Nor warns, but sweeps the Belgian plains and sways
Grim hosts and arrogates a devilish right. ‘
England still sleeps,' he said ‘and dreams of gain,
She will not stir, who once was battle's lord,
Or risk the clash of squadrons on the main;
Her treaties may be torn, while ‘gainst the horde
These lesser folk may plea[d]e for help in vain …'

Then, throned amidst the seas, She bared her sword.
⁶²

Such rhetoric is a reflection of the propaganda that was disseminated widely in the early months of 1915, particularly concerning alleged German atrocities in Belgium, which were detailed in the Bryce report, published in May 1915.
⁶³
Characterization of the German army as a demonic horde was encouraged in response to the use of poison gas and flame throwers against Allied combatants, air raids that resulted in civilian casualties, and incidents such as the torpedoing of the British passenger liner
Lusitania
and the “martyrdom” of nurse Edith Cavell, all of which were dwelt on at length by the British press in horror and outrage (see
figure 2
).
⁶⁴

For Elgar, however, setting the sixth stanza of “The Fourth of August” to the music he had hitherto used for Newman's demons was not an exercise in cheap propaganda, but part of his conception of the war as a metaphysical struggle between hell and heaven, of darkness and light, for the soul of humanity. Concern that he should not be seen to be peddling anti-German propaganda, fueling popular hatred, and endorsing simplistic views of the war as a conflict between English knights and German devils, might well have been a second factor in his decision to suppress the first movement for so long. And on this point Elgar's dialogue with the critics is revealing.

Figure 2. “The Murder of Nurse Cavell,”
The War Illustrated: A Picture-Record of Events by Land, Sea and Air
(30 October 1915). Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

In April 1916, Ernest Newman wrote an article on
The Spirit of England
for
The Musical Times
in anticipation of the premiere of the second and third movements, which was scheduled for the following month (described in greater detail below). In his essay, Newman extemporized on material Elgar had supplied for that purpose in a personal letter, but the critic also indulged in explicit anti-German sentiments couched in “holy war” rhetoric:
⁶⁵

We gladly leave the writing of Hymns of Hate to the race that has shown us in too many other respects also how near its instincts are to those of the barbarian. An older and better civilisation looks to its leading artists for something different from the German froth and foam, bellowing and swagger. We are not “too proud to fight,” but we are too proud to abase our emotions about the war to the level of those of our bestial foe; to do that would be disloyalty to the memory of our holy dead.
⁶⁶

These references to “Hymns of Hate,” which incensed Newman so deeply, allude to settings of a poem penned in 1914 by a German-Jewish writer, Ernst Lissauer, which had been used to whip up a fury of Anglophobia throughout Germany in the early months of the war. It was from this that the German army derived the slogan “Gott strafe England” (God punish England), for, as Stefan Zweig recalled, Lissauer's poem had “exploded like a bomb in a munitions factory”:

The Kaiser was enraptured and bestowed the Order of the Red Eagle upon Lissauer, the poem was reprinted in all the newspapers, teachers read it out loud to the children in school, officers at the front read it to their soldiers, until everyone knew the litany of hate by heart. As if that were not enough, the little poem was set to music and, arranged for chorus, was sung in the theatres.
⁶⁷

Copies reaching England were seized upon by the press, the text appearing in the
Times
on October 29, 1914 (in a translation prepared by Barbara Henderson for the
New York Times)
, and a musical setting (attributed to Franz Mayerhoff) in the
Weekly Dispatch
of March 7, 1915. This stoked anti-German hatred in turn, triggering a series of musical retorts, particularly from the music halls: Whit Cunliffe, for example, popularized Robert IP Weston and Bert Lee's
Strafe'emf;
Thomas Case Sterndale Bennett produced
My Hymn of Hate;
and a lesser-known composer, Harold Whitehall, composed a
Tyneside Hymn of Hate.
⁶⁸
A satirical rendition of Lissauer's “Hymn” in its musical raiment was given on March 15, 1915, at the Royal College of Music by Hubert Parry, Walter Parratt, and an impromptu choir: “Sir Walter asked them to sing the hymn with plenty of snarl, to express honestly the intentions of the composer … but they laughed too much to snarl.” Later burlesque performances included those by Major Mackenzie Rogan and the band of the Coldstream Guards in morale-building concerts behind the lines in France and Flanders, on ships, and in munitions factories, with “a second verse punctuated by snatches of British melodies, patriotic and profane, expressing Tommy's reply from the trenches to the comminatory bitterness of Prussianism.”
⁶⁹

It was probably reluctance to be seen participating in this venomous exchange that prompted Elgar's exhortation to Newman not to “dwell upon the Demons part” when writing his introductory article about the first movement for the
Musical Times
a year later.
⁷⁰
Although Newman took care to distinguish Elgar's
Spirit of England
from “the strut and swagger of the commoner ‘patriotic' verse and music” in this essay, “the foul thing” that Germany had become was still to be roundly denounced: “For the first time in the lives of many of us we find ourselves indulging in a national hatred and not seeing any reason to be ashamed of it,” he declared, for “even Fafner, Wagner's last word in brutishness, would not have decorated himself with a
Lusitania
medal.”
⁷¹
Despite Elgar's instruction, Newman emphasized the “Demons part,” predicting: