Edward Elgar and His World (76 page)

Amid all this lay the central theme of
Gerontius:
divine presence resides in the living human being and is expressed in the conduct of one's life. Though death offers liberation, the hope for grace rests in the extent to which the divine presence is revealed in one's life and character. This was not a Lutheran doctrine of good works but was distinct in requiring adherence to objective norms and doctrines validated by a community, not attained through the subjective experience of a personalized encounter with Christ. The making of art was one means for an individual to realize the ideal. Aesthetic norms suggested the possibility of divine sanction and required a resonant response from a universal community. In this regard, Elgar's musical achievement qualified. The implicit religious foundation of his compositional practice, rooted in history, authority, tradition, and measurable by the assent of the community, also explains Elgar's affinity for the Pre-Raphaelite painters.

Painting: The Realization of the Imagined Ideal

The movement known as Pre-Raphaelite burst on the English scene in 1849. The painters of the group, much like the members of the Oxford Movement and the Cambridge Apostles, constituted themselves as a brotherhood. As was the case with similar associations of intellectuals and artists of that generation, the group was held together by a spiritual and intellectual idealism critical of inherited eighteenth-Century pieties. A cold rationalism, a disregard of the organic character of history, a resistance to acknowledging the limitations of human action, an arrogance toward tradition, and an all-too-radical individualism all came under scrutiny. Pre-Raphaelite ideology and the aesthetic consequences and reception of their art in Edward Elgar's lifetime make their work a key to understanding the composer.

It was not so much the brotherhood, the idealization of friendship, the use of religious imagery and symbolism from the pre-Reformation past, or the homoerotic underpinnings of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood that formed the basis of affinity for the adult Elgar. Rather, it was a close personal link. Alice Stuart-Wortley, Elgar's “Windflower,” was John Everett Millais's daughter. In 1903, she gave Elgar an engraving of her father's portrait of Cardinal Newman (see
figure 1
).
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Like the Pre-Raphaelites, and consistent with Longfellow's didactic ambitions, Elgar was drawn to premodern subject matter ranging from Caractacus and King Olaf to Jean Froissart. In these contexts, the underpinnings of the music were idealized versions of history. Elgar's intent was not so much to regenerate myth (in the Wagnerian sense) as to create a symbiosis of realism and normative aesthetics. The compositional strategy, as Jaeger's pamphlets on
The Apostles
and
The Kingdom
suggest, was to use the Wagnerian leitmotif.
¹⁰⁵
In this way Elgar could establish musical signifiers whose repetition and audible transformation within a complex fabric helped the listener achieve a sense of representation and narration. Clearly the musician, unlike the novelist or the painter, possessed no easy instrument of correspondence with reality. But Elgar's ambivalence about the effort to create parallels notwithstanding, he did adapt the model set by Wagner, who successfully reached a wide public—precisely Arnold's Philistines—with a musical drama that combined so-called normative aesthetic values with narrative accessibility.
¹⁰⁶

Figure 1. John Everett Millais,
Portrait of Cardinal Newman
, 1881.

Painting more than music has a readily available capacity to manipulate the illusion of realism. But in the hands of the Pre-Raphaelites, as Ruskin argued on their behalf, aesthetic norms (of the sort argued in Germany by Johann Joachim Winckelmann) were applied to a reconstructed past and tradition, whether of antiquity or the Middle Ages. The choice of symbolic, mythic, and religious subject matter cast in a distinctly premodern manner stood in stark contrast to the genre painting and portraiture typical of eighteenth-Century painting. Furthermore, the Pre-Raphaelites construed realism in a way that was strikingly historical, cultivating techniques that suggested the refined craftsmanship of the medieval masters, eschewing even the use of perspective and depth.

Elgar's pride in his command of form and his attention to detail, particularly in orchestration, mirrors the extreme attention to illustrative detail in the painting of the Pre-Raphaelites. A poignant example of this was Elgar's admiring comments and advice he sent to Parry concerning the latter's
The Vision of Life
. Parry responded that the struggle to achieve aesthetic perfection in the realization of a work of art reminded him of Millais's own struggles.
¹⁰⁷

At the core of the Pre-Raphaelite project was the idealization of reality. In Elgar's favorite, Millais's
Isabella
, from 1849 (
figure 2
), a representation of Keats's poem (later set to music in a brilliant tone poem by Frank Bridge in which musical gestures suggest and narrate the emotional intensity of the poem's story), the quite modern, almost hyperrealistic gestures, faces, and attitudes are striking.
¹⁰⁸
So, too, is the idealized meticulousness with which the wallpaper and fabrics are realized. The idealization is communicated in a manner sharply divergent from eighteenth-Century genre and landscape painting by the use of vivid color and the refinement of the delineation. Realism is not only transcended, but idealized: something in
Isabella
even approaches later painterly movements such as Magical Realism and Surrealism. This effort to transfigure realism through idealization and meticulous exaggeration is paralleled by Elgar's musical strategy, which employs complex norms of absolute musical form and technique to elevate both program and choral music, thereby edifying the broad public he wished to reach.

Figure 2. John Everett Millais,
Isabella
, 1849.

Millais and his fellow Pre-Raphaelites chose subject matter that was imaginary, symbolic, or religious rather than quotidian or patently historical. But the core of believability was required, as were the illusion of a direct contact between picture and viewer and the effacement of the painter's individuality. These goals are analogous to the immediate identification with and comprehensibility of musical communication, evident in the transparency and formal clarity of the leitmotifs so dear to Elgar. As William Michael Rossetti observed in 1903:

A leading doctrine with the Pre-Raphaelites … was that it is highly inexpedient for a painter, occupied with an ideal or poetical subject, to portray his personages from the ordinary hired models; and that on the contrary he ought to look out for living people who, by refinement of character and aspect, may be supposed to have some affinity with those personages—and, when he has found such people to paint from, he ought, with substantial though not slavish fidelity, to represent them as they are.
¹⁰⁹

This helps explain Elgar's use of programs that implied an ideal or poetical subject for music—from Caractacus to Falstaff—and his transformation of them into music, by adapting, following Strauss's example, musically strategic evocations of realism, without slavish imitation but with contemporary, almost modern, authenticity. This connection between normative idealism and realism reconciles Elgar's avowed allegiance to absolute music and his consistent reliance on idealized nonmusical subject matter (whether that subject matter was religious or intimately personal) as a framework.

Religion was a key subject matter for the Pre-Raphaelites, as it was for Elgar. With his characterizations of Judas and Mary Magdalene in
The Apostles
, the mix of realism with aesthetic idealism shows his debt not only to Longfellow but also to the Pre-Raphaelites. The painterly equivalent of Elgar's
Apostles
is Millais's
Christ in the House of His Parents
(
figure 3
). In this painting, all the elements—realism, idealization, and normative aesthetic craftsmanship of a traditional manner taken to the most minute detail—can be seen. The connection to Elgar is also theological.
Christ in the House of His Parents
was linked to Anglo-Catholicism. Millais spent time at Oxford and was associated with the Tractarians, among them Newman. The narrative of
Christ in the House of His Parents
reveals the influence of Edward Bouverie Pusey as well as the Tractarian and Roman Catholic emphasis on the sacrament as reflective of the sacred memory of Christ's physical suffering, his bleeding. The necessity of infant baptism and the receipt of the sacrament from a priesthood separated from everyday life, in a monastic discipline descended from the apostles, is signaled by the wound in the hand of the young Jesus near the center of the canvas, suggestive of the wounds he would later receive on the cross, which is being washed away in the presence of his mother. This emphasis on sacrament and priestly authority, framed with a decisive role for Mary, transmitted through tradition by the historical continuity of Christ's followers, was central not only to the Tractarians but, as Newman observed, also led logically to Catholicism and stood in contrast to the doctrines of justification by faith alone and the subjective response to Scripture characteristic of Protestantism.
¹¹⁰

Figure 3. John Everett Millais,
Christ in the House of His Parents
, 1849–50.

Millais was not the only Pre-Raphaelite painter to interest Elgar and his wife. Alice Elgar, in a classic Longfellow-like response, was inspired by Edward Burne-Jones's
The Golden Stairs
(
figure 4
) to write a poem of her own.
¹¹¹
Once again, the painting represents the real in the ideal: one of the women it depicts is the mother of Alice Stuart-Wortley.
¹¹²
Burne-Jones's
Ascension
, a stained-glass window at St. Philip's Cathedral in Birmingham (
figure 5
), was admired by Elgar, who conducted a performance of
The Apostles
there. Though Burne-Jones also came from Oxford and was influenced by the spirit of the Oxford Movement, what distinguishes him from Millais but suggests an affinity with Elgar's musical strategies is his emphasis on formal design. The focus in Millais is on a searing wealth of minute detail, with a stark realism in the psychological character of the figures, their posture, and faces, while in Burne-Jones the stress is on the compositional structure. His faces are strangely distant and formal, their gaze hypnotic and depersonalized within a commanding architectural design. Elgar's resistance to excessive subjectivity, his inclination to hide the personal beneath a compelling aesthetic framework, and his capacity to generate melody that permitted the listener to interject his or her own subjective meaning parallel Burne-Jones's removed and neutral representation of the human figure and face.

Both Millais and Burne-Jones sought their inspiration in pre-Renaissance painting, but in Burne-Jones's version the overall aesthetic structure was foregrounded as a vehicle for subjective appropriation rather than minute observation. In Millais's canvases, the detail is forcefully realized. In Elgar's music, the melodic material and rhetorical sweep have lent themselves to such disparate readings precisely because of their place in an overwhelming large-scale musical structure. The sections of
The Apostles
and
The Kingdom
that have attracted attention (the Virgin Mary's “The Sun goeth down” in
The Kingdom
, the scenes with Judas in
The Apostles)
are more like Millais, while the Prelude to
The Apostles
and the setting of the Lord's Prayer in
The Kingdom
are suggestive of Burne-Jones. Indeed, the realism of Millais finds its analog in the manner in which the characters in Elgar's later oratorios assume a rich, psychologically powerful specificity and therefore a plausible contemporaneousness, often defined by Elgar's own autobiographical projections.
¹¹³