Edward Elgar and His World (67 page)

If the mass shedding of blood was a catharsis by which the nation would be united and cleansed, individual redemption and collective redemption were thus intertwined, inviting parallels between the heroism of the most low-born Tommy in the trenches and the atonement vouchsafed to Christians through the Blood of Christ. At the front British Protestants were brought into a relationship with Catholic imagery and culture such as most had probably never known. Fighting in a Catholic country and often alongside Catholic comrades, they came across roadside shrines in every village—crucifixes, calvaries, madonnas, and saints—that would sometimes assume a symbolic value according to the extent to which they had been spared or suffered shell damage.
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Amid the carnage and desolation of the trenches, such symbolism encouraged a powerful identification with the sufferings of Christ, both for the soldier at the front—as a fellow sufferer probably more than as a savior—and for his relatives at home looking for consolation. The poetry of the trenches is full of references to Christ, as in “The Redeemer” from Siegfried Sassoon's
The Old Huntsman and Other Poems
. In the rain-sodden night, the speaker struggles along a ditch with his company; in the burst of a shell he looks back at his comrade and sees a vision of Christ laboring under the cross. The merging of the two images implies a connection of pain, endurance, and unprotesting self-sacrifice suffered by one extraordinary but ordinary man for the redemption of others: “But to the end, unjudging, he'll endure / Horror and pain, not uncontent to die / That Lancaster on Lune may stand secure.”
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After the war, this idea would also find expression in Stanley Spencer's canvas
The Resurrection of the Soldiers
at the Oratory of All Souls, Sandham Memorial Chapel (Burghclere, Hampshire), which drew on the artist's own experiences of action at Salonica. Here the viewer is literally overwhelmed by images of the cross, as soldiers emerge from the ground, dusting themselves down and shaking hands with resurrected comrades, and present their crosses to the figure of Jesus in the middle distance. Lying on the side of a collapsed wagon, a single soldier ponders the figure of Christ on a crucifix.
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Relatives of combatants found comfort in images of Christ on the battlefield, which not only seemed to confirm the nobility and holiness of the cause, but also, if death was to be the fate of their loved ones, the promise of redemption by self-sacrifice. One of the most popular images of consolation, one with strong Catholic overtones, was a colored print taken from an oil painting commissioned for the Christmas 1914 edition of
The Graphic
, titled
Duty
or
The Great Sacrifice
(see
figure 3
). The artist, James Clark, depicts a young soldier lying dead from a head wound on the battlefield (“sacrificed on the altar of duty to country”), his hand touching the feet of a spectral Christ, haloed by the sun, who seems to gaze down in recognition from the cross. This print was circulated across the country, endorsed by at least five of the nation's bishops, and further copies of this, dubbed the “most inspired Picture of the War,” were offered for sale in
The Graphic
of February 6, 1915.
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It could be found hanging in churches, Sunday Schools, soldiers' institutes, public halls, classrooms, and private houses, and after the war it was used in several places as a design for stained-glass memorial windows.
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The print was so ubiquitous it is difficult to imagine that Elgar and his associates were unaware of it, just as the mass rallies and jingoistic speeches of the charismatic Anglican bishop of London, Arthur Foley Winnington-Ingram (1858–1946)—born in Worcestershire, like Elgar—must also have entered their consciousness at some level. Christ was often in the bishop's sights, and he often spoke of the war as a struggle between “Christ and Odin,” “Berlin against Bethlehem,” or of “the Nailed Hand and the Iron Fist.”
¹⁰²
Sometimes delivered in his uniform as chaplain to the London rifle brigade, and from a truck swathed in Union Jacks or an altar of drums, his fervent, imperialist sermons did much to alienate his countrymen, particularly in the months following the Somme; but throughout the war years his message was simple and unswerving, as in this example, speaking of bereaved parents who had visited him for succor in Advent 1916:

Figure 3. James Clark,
Duty
, also known as
The Great Sacrifice
, oil on canvas, 1914. Donated by Clark to the Royal Academy's War Relief Exhibition on January 8, 1915, it was bought by Queen Mary, who gave it to Princess Beatrice in memory of her son Prince Maurice Battenberg who had died at Ypres in 1914. Beatrice presented it to St. Mildred's Church, Whippingham, Isle of Wight, where it now hangs in the Battenberg Chapel. Photo Rachel Cowgill.

The precious blood of their dearest boy mingles with the Precious Blood which flowed in Calvary; again the world is being redeemed by precious blood. “CHRIST did what my boy did; my boy imitated what CHRIST did” they say.
¹⁰³

The presence of the motifs associated with Christ from
The Dream of Gerontius
in
The Spirit of England
does not imply that Elgar shared the bishop's starry-eyed jingoism. Daniel M. Grimley has noted how Elgar repeatedly undercuts even his most powerful and assertive moments of uplifting nobility in
The Spirit of England
, particularly in the final movement, “For the Fallen.” The resulting atmosphere of uncertainty, melancholy reflection, and vulnerability is intensified by several striking features: the return to the opening material of “For the Fallen” in the closing moments; the movement's harmonic circularity, the putatively aspiring semitonal ascent in the overall tonal scheme of the trilogy (G, A-flat major/minor, and A minor); and particularly by the pensive rocking between A major and A minor in the final bars, marked
morendo
. With a passing reference to Catholic doctrine concerning the afterlife, Grimley observes:

Elgar's music therefore suggests a state of musical, as well as spiritual purgatory. In Elgar's setting, Binyon's words “At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them” become an anguished expression of longing for closure or death, and not merely a patriotic act of remembrance. Far from being a moment of consolation, it is the most troubled music in the whole work.
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It was this profound emotional complexity that made
The Spirit of England
such a powerful work expressing a righteous idealism tempered by grief and attrition as the war dragged on. H. G. Wells concludes his 1916 novel with an ambiguity that echoes Elgar's final measures. Adopting the persona of Mr. Britling, whose only son is killed in action, the author works through his emotional and rational responses to the war toward a declaration of faith in “our sons who have shown us God”; but the seemingly serene pastoral sunrise with which the novel concludes is tainted by the inevitability of further bloodshed, especially in the chilling final line (“From away towards the church came the sound of an early worker whetting a scythe”).
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Elgar conducted the completed
Spirit of England
on October 31, 1917, (the eve of All Saints' Day), along with
The Dream of Gerontius
, in a Choral Union concert at Leeds Town Hall, and again on November 24 at a Royal Choral Society Concert at the Royal Albert Hall. For twenty years or so afterward, the composer continued to direct cathedral performances of “For the Fallen” at the Three Choirs Festival and, as previously noted, for Armistice Day services and concerts broadcast by the BBC.
¹⁰⁶
In
The Spirit of England
Elgar reengaged with eschatological themes familiar from
The Dream of Gerontius
and his fraught oratorio project that culminated in the abandonment of
The Last Judgement
—namely, afterlife, purgatory, and redemption. This vein of Roman Catholic doctrine was combined with a reflective and consoling, though ultimately inconclusive message to his fellow countrymen and women tested to extremes in the worst excesses of the war that theirs was a divine cause, and their physical and spiritual suffering necessary for the emergence of a newly purified Europe: “redemption by the shedding of blood.”
¹⁰⁷
The Catholic elements discussed here are discernible but never brought conspicuously into the foreground, Elgar demonstrating again his ability to explore aspects of his own spirituality in music without disturbing Protestant sensibilities. Indeed,
The Spirit of England
seems in many ways to anticipate the more ecumenical and internationalist outlook that emerged among Anglicans in the years after the war—a step on the way to John Foulds's
World Requiem
(1919–21), dedicated to “the memory of the Dead—a message of consolation to the bereaved of all countries.”
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With its eclectic text, combining passages from the Latin Mass for the Dead, John Bunyan, and the fifteenth-Century Hindu mystic Kabir among others, Foulds's score was certainly far removed from the traditions of English oratorio prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in which England, through metaphor, is depicted as a Protestant bastion in a sea of decadent and minatory Catholicism.

The contexts in which
The Spirit of England
were heard over the airwaves in the years after 1918 also seem to point to the future, although it is not always clear how far programming decisions were influenced by Elgar himself. On November 11, 1924, in a BBC concert broadcast from Birmingham, the cantata was heard in the midst of a miscellaneous sequence apparently assembled to create a narrative from mourning to jubilation: the hymn “O God Our Help in Ages Past”; Sullivan's Overture
In Memoriam;
Elgar's
The Spirit of England;
a “dramatic recital” of poetry by Rupert Brooke; “I Know that My Redeemer Liveth” from Handel's
Messiah;
Elgar's “The Immortal Legions” from his recent
Pageant of Empire
music; as well as the first
Pomp and Circumstance
march.
¹⁰⁹
In 1925 Elgar conducted the London Wireless Orchestra in the introspective third movement of his First Symphony and the “Meditation” from his
Lux Christi
(an instrumental interlude from Elgar's first oratorio that is saturated with themes associated with Christ in that work) as a prelude to the commemoration service at Canterbury Cathedral; this was followed immediately by the complete
Spirit of England
, and later in the evening by the first and second
Pomp and Circumstance
marches.
¹¹⁰
And Elgar's
Enigma
Variations, op. 36, and “For the Fallen” concluded the radio program
In Memoriam 1914–1918: A Chronicle
, compiled by E. A. Harding and Val Gielgud, and broadcast from all BBC stations on Armistice Day evening in 1932. Poetry reading formed the main part of this program, which combined the voices of soldier and noncombatant poets alike, in a selection drawn from John Masefield, Rupert Brooke, Herbert Asquith, Laurence Binyon, Julian Grenfell, Alan Seeger, Wilfrid Gibson, William Noel Hodgson, Edward Shanks, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Richard Aldington, Lord Dunsany, and Thomas Hardy.
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One can only wonder what sort of impact these events might have had on the young Benjamin Britten—then a schoolboy—and how much, if anything, he may have later recalled of such broadcasts as he began to interleave texts drawn from the requiem mass with poems by Wilfred Owen, preparing to commemorate the dead of another war in his
War Requiem
of 1961 for Coventry Cathedral.
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NOTES

My thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (United Kingdom) for supporting part of this research, and to the staffs of the Elgar Birthplace Museum; Brotherton Library Special Collections (University of Leeds); British Library; BBC Written Archives; and St. Mildred's Church, Whippingham, Isle of Wight for their assistance. I am grateful to Byron Adams, Charles Edward McGuire, Derek Scott, and Aidan J. Thomson for generous suggestions and comments on an early version of this essay read as a paper at the Second Biennial Conference of the North American British Music Studies Association, August 2006, as well as to Julian Rushton for his thoughts at various stages of the project.

1. Epigraph: H. G. Wells,
The War That Will End War
(London: Frank & Cecil Palmer, 1914), repr. in W. Warren Wagar, ed.,
H. G. Wells: Journalism and Prophecy, 1893–1946
(London: Bodley Head, 1965), 57.

2. Richards argues that
The Dream of Gerontius
“may not be a directly imperial work, but it contains something of the spirit of Elgar's Empire, the idea of Empire as a vehicle for struggle and sacrifice.” Jeffrey Richards,
Imperialism and Music: Britain, 1876–1953
(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), 60–61.