Edward Elgar and His World (72 page)

I hold that the Symphony without a programme is the highest development of art.
Views to the contrary we shall often find
, held by those to whom the joy of music came late in life or would deny to musicians that peculiar gift, which is their own, a musical ear, or an
ear for music.
I
use
, as you notice, a very old-fashioned expression
but we all know what
it conveys: a love of music for its own sake.
¹¹

Despite this pronouncement, much of Elgar's music, particularly for orchestra (including the symphonies), was either explicitly programmatic and narrative (including musical reflections of intimate feelings) or thinly veiled as such.
¹²
Elgar was required to explain his admiration of Strauss “as the greatest genius of our days” by suggesting, counterfactually, that “I am sure Richard Strauss could give us a symphony to rank among, or above the finest if he chose.”
¹³

This apparent contradiction mirrors an ongoing and unresolved uncertainty, if not conflict, in the attempt to link Elgar's music to his biography and his historical context. On the one hand, he is said to have been a composer motivated by personal intimacies. He was also a resentful outsider (as a Catholic born to a family of limited means, engaged in commercial trade) whose deep attachments were often secret. At the same time he appears to have been an adherent to a nostalgic, if not anti-urban, pastoral ideal of England. Although an autodidact in all arenas, including composition, he was possessed of overt literary and religious beliefs. The employment of both secret and explicit programs for instrumental music therefore fits both the man and the audience for whom he wrote.
¹⁴

On the other hand, Elgar has been characterized as a callow, socialclimbing boor, if not bore (someone who sold his Gagliano violin for a billiard table, disdained talk about music, and sported the image of the golf-playing squire); desperate to be accorded conventional external recognition (therefore eager for an inherited peerage); shrewd in his manipulation of the press; socially and politically conservative; enthusiastic about science (with a laboratory and patents to his name); a man who evinced deep religious feeling; and a booster of English imperial ambitions and conceits. His defensive and aggressive attitude to his privileged and academically trained contemporaries suggests at the same time an arrogant ambition to outshine all in his craft, popularity, international reputation, and aesthetic standards. Elgar's rhetoric on behalf of the formal and aesthetic autonomy of music parallels his self-image as the English heir to traditions exemplified by Mozart's Fortieth and Brahms's Third symphonies.

Elgar's music provides evidence for both the private and public aspects of his image and personality. Unlike Wagner and Schoenberg (and for that matter, Mendelssohn, Bartók, Schumann, and Stravinsky, the last by means of ghostwriters and an amanuensis), and his own contemporaries C. Hubert Parry and Vaughan Williams, Elgar did not write about music (the Peyton Lectures notwithstanding) in a fashion that assists the interpretation of his music; even his letters are unhelpful in this regard. We are therefore left with only the music.
¹⁵
On the one side are the well-known, small-scale intimate works (the music for strings such as the Elegy for Strings and the Introduction and Allegro) and the larger works with explicit, intimate content (the Cello Concerto, the
Wand of Youth
Suites, and
The Dream of Gerontius
). Explicit, symbolic, and indirect evocations of nature persist not only in the programmatic works, but in the symphonies as well.
¹⁶
On the other side are the extroverted
Pomp and Circumstance
marches, the
Coronation Ode, King Olaf, Caractacus
, and aspects of the two symphonies that suggest an ambitious, public, and patriotic personality. At the center of this interpretive divide is Elgar's most famous work, the
Enigma
Variations. If his “Land of Hope and Glory,” extracted from the Trio of
Pomp and Circumstance
March no. 1, has become a second national anthem, the “Nimrod” variation, for all its overt origin as a personal portrait of a dear friend, has become just as powerful a public evocation of something distinctly English. That fact highlights the biographical enigma.

It has been alleged that in recent years devoted Elgarians have sought to downplay the patriotic gore in Elgar's music and character. The rise of an anticolonial and anti-imperialist historiography since the late 1960s has led to readings of Elgar as not a mirror but a leading creator of the cultural ethos of late-Victorian and Edwardian political and cultural conceits, a musical equivalent of Rudyard Kipling. In this context, the dominant critical stance of the present, one of praise and near-deification of Elgar, has encountered serious challenge.
¹⁷
This revisionism has in turn been challenged not merely by efforts to link Elgar with a benign English patriotism based in a pastoral nostalgia for premodernity.
¹⁸
Rather, Elgar's life has been scrutinized as possessed of a secret character, marked not only by successive attachments to two women apart from Lady Elgar (Alice Stuart-Wortley, whom the composer nicknamed “Windflower,” and in later years Vera Hockman), but also to men. A homoerotic interior, particularly within the
Enigma
Variations, has been persuasively argued, much to the dismay of more conventionally admiring scholars, some of whom share some distaste for the public, patriotic Elgar.
¹⁹
That homoerotic dimension is clearly consonant with a powerful thread within late-nineteenthcentury English culture, apparent in literature, cultural criticism, religion, and painting.

The irony in the pursuit of a homoerotic subtext is that its existence can be used to buttress arguments on both sides of the well-known, Janusfaced portrait of Elgar. The pressure to suppress homosexuality reflects massive changes in the attitudes to homosexuality and sexuality that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, accelerated by the redefinition of English manliness required by the military requirements of an empire.
²⁰
The trial of Oscar Wilde is the defining moment of that process. In his Peyton lectures, Elgar himself defined the task of modern music in England to assert a “healthy” robust manliness, set explicitly in opposition to an effeminate aestheticism. For English music, he wrote,

there are many possible futures. But the one I want to see coming into being is something that shall grow out of our own soil, something broad, noble, chivalrous, healthy and above all, an out-of-door sort of spirit. To arrive at this it will be necessary to throw over all imitation. It will be necessary to begin and look at things in a different spirit.
²¹

These respectable public ambitions for musical art coincided with the celebration of sports in elite schools, the ideal of a healthy “out-of-door” sensibility, understood as compatible with manly adventure into the exotic and courage on the battlefield—all central experiences of the British Empire.
²²
The Elgarian mode, even in the legendary passages marked
nobilmente
, allowed the composer to express through eloquence and grandeur a disciplined and aggressive manliness, while at the same time signaling an intimacy of feeling that may have contained contradictory secrets and suppressed feelings. Understood therefore as a man torn by inner conflict, the two sides of Elgar become reconciled as complementary. There are miniatures of intimacy and calm evocations of landscape and solitude, but the primary ambition is neither one of mystical contemplation nor explicitly subjective aestheticism. The ideals of nobility and chivalry suggest a commitment to music as a public, civic art tied to the
vita activa
. The mores of the age force the personal to survive as a coded subtext to a public art, not as a direct confessional. Since the deeply personal demanded secrecy, the scale and public ambition of Elgar's music offered the ideal cloak and protection. The contradiction between the pompous, brash, and nearly militaristic Elgar of the
Crown of India
and the searingly expressive emotionalism of the second movement of the Cello Concerto are themselves evidence of the complex and competing claims of the private and the public spheres on English artists and intellectuals of Elgar's generation, particularly before 1914. The relative decline in Elgar's popularity in England after World War I and particularly in the 1930s (a claim that is itself in some dispute) can then be understood as reflecting the gradual collapse of late-Victorian hypocrisies.
²³
Extreme sacrifices and compromises became increasingly unnecessary, as Britten's rise to fame and fortune as England's representative composer from the 1940s on would suggest.
²⁴

There are, however, sources for understanding and interpreting Elgar and his music that are not contingent on debates concerning Elgar's intimate life and the issues of his sexuality and gender identity, sources that are at once historical and biographical and that recast these seemingly contradictory dimensions. Elgar's relationship to literature, religion, and painting offers important clues.

In literature, it is useful to consider Elgar's favorite author, and his mother's—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The novel
Hyperion
was a treasured inheritance from his mother, and it was
Hyperion
that Elgar gave as a gift late in life to his last close female friend. Longfellow was the source not only for Elgar's first successes, including
The Black Knight
, “Spanish Serenade,” “Rondel,” and most importantly,
King Olaf
, but also for his first large-scale oratorio,
The Apostles.
²⁵

In the realm of religion, the importance to Elgar of John Henry Cardinal Newman's theological views and the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin demands reconsideration. Newman was not only the author of the text of what is perhaps Elgar's masterpiece,
Gerontius
, but also the leading force in late-Victorian Catholic thought. Elgar was attracted by the explicit theology in Newman's poem and also by the cardinal's articulation of the place of Catholicism in modernity and its relationship not to the liberalism and evangelicalism of the 1830s but to the world of science and learning of the century's last decades, when debates over papal infallibility and the cultural consequences of scientific progress were intense.
²⁶
It was the Newman of the
Apologia Pro Vita Sua, The Idea of a University
, and
An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent
who informs the intellectual context for Elgar. Though his traditional faith in God may have waned in later years, theology mattered to Elgar, even if indirectly through its consequences on the politics of culture. Basic constructs of meaning with regard to life and death and the human community influenced his version of the role that art, and therefore the musician, played in the public life to which he aspired.

Finally, Elgar's allegiance to Longfellow and his internalization of assumptions within Victorian English Catholic thought corresponded to a lifelong affection for the work of specific Pre-Raphaelite painters and other examples of imaginary and idealized realism, notably Ivan Kramskoi's 1872 painting,
Christ in the Wilderness
. These three sources—literary, religious, and visual—illuminate the tensions within Elgar the man as well as his powerful but eclectic amalgam of musical debts to the past, from Bach, Mozart, and Mendelssohn to Wagner and Brahms.

Arnold and Longfellow: The Transcendence of the Philistine

The framework most pertinent to Edward Elgar's career was the intense debate in Britain during his formative years regarding the political, social, and moral place of art and culture—the public consequences of the cultivation of education, taste, and judgment in the face of the power of religion in a secular material culture. At the center of this discussion was Matthew Arnold, whose 1869
Culture and Anarchy
did much to frame the discourse and establish its terms. Elgar certainly knew of Arnold as a poet, having studied his verse.
²⁷
The terms Arnold made famous in his prose—the categories of “Barbarian” (the landed aristocracy), “Philistine” (the middle classes), and “Populace” (the working classes), as well as his opposition to Hebraism and Hellenism, were sufficiently well-known to enter the language of a 1915 review of Elgar's
The Starlight Express.
²⁸

Elgar's personal position in Arnold's polemical social geography, the composer's resentments and ambitions notwithstanding, was clearly that of the Philistine. In Elgar's self-assessment, pride of achievement was mixed with defensiveness and shame. He never forgot that, unlike Parry (whom he liked and admired) and even Charles Villiers Stanford (whom he derided), he was without either aristocratic provenance or family means and therefore had made his career the hard way, in the provinces and without benefit of academic training or standing.
²⁹
Arnold's plea was for the betterment of the Philistine, the transformation of the middle classes of Elgar's type through culture. The hope for the future of civilization was not in the all-too-common imitation of regressive Barbarian mores by the economically successful middle classes or, far worse, the descent into chaos, amorality, and violence characteristic of the Populace. Rather, the cultivation of “sweetness and light,” of the Hellenic sensibility that “speaks of thinking clearly, seeing things in their essence and beauty, as a grand and precious feat for man to achieve,” was necessary to transform the Philistines whom Arnold credited with making England economically great.
³⁰
The Hellenic had failed in previous ages of history because it was “premature” in the development of humankind.
³¹
The historical moment was made imperative not only by the danger from the masses below but also by the material achievements of the middle classes.