Elgar: An Anniversary Portrait

210 Pages·2008·1.78 MB·English

by  Nicholas Kenyon

Elgar
An Anniversary Portrait

Elgar
An Anniversary Portrait
Introduced by Nicholas Kenyon
Continuum
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First published 2007
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9780826496966
Typeset by Interactive Sciences Limited, Gloucestershire
Printed and bound by MPG Books Limited, Cornwall
Contents
Introduction vii
Part 1: Elgar the Man
1. Orchestrating his own life: Sir Edward Elgar as a
historical personality 1
David Cannadine
2. Elgar’s biography, Elgar’s repute: themes and
variations 36
Julian Rushton
3. A View from 1955 48
Diana McVeagh
4. Elgar the Catholic 54
Stephen Hough
Part 2: Elgar the Composer
5. Elgar in Manuscript 70
Robert Anderson
6. Elgar the Composer 80
Christopher Kent
7. Elgar the Progressive 104
Hans Keller
vi Elgar: An Anniversary Portrait
8. Elgar’s Church Music 112
Adrian Partington
9. A Sixth Pomp and Circumstance March 128
Anthony Payne
Part 3: Performing Elgar
10. Conducting Elgar
Mark Elder in conversation with Richard Morrison 132
11. The Role of the Angel in The Dream of Gerontius 143
Janet Baker
12. Sir Edward Elgar: My Musical Grandfather 148
Yehudi Menuhin
13. The Violin Concerto 159
Tasmin Little
14. The Cello Concerto—Jacqueline du Pre´’s
Recordings 167
Andrew Keener
Part 4: The Legacy
15. An Honoured Trust: The Elgar Foundation
and the Birthplace Museum 181
Michael Messenger
Index 193
Introduction
NICHOLAS KENYON
Richard Strauss’s famous toast to Edward Elgar in 1902—‘to the
welfare and success of the first English progressivist’—looks star-
tling today. Is not Elgar the last embodiment of a fading Empire, a
composer of late romantic music that even for its period was behind
the times? That cliche´d view has become ever more inadequate over
a period when Elgar’s music has increasingly been performed and
recognized internationally. Yet we all acknowledge that there is
something essentially English in Elgar—but what is it? In Elgar we
sense a peculiarly British, a (deliberately?) enigmatic combination
of conservatism and progressivism, intense introversion and bold
extroversion, despair and exuberance. It is easy to see that in the
first years of the 20th century, the Wagnerian echoes of The Dream
of Gerontius and the originality of the Enigma Variations must
have created a powerful impression on Richard Strauss and others.
Was Elgar on the verge of a breakthrough that would have
transformed his national music? That did not quite happen. But
because it did not happen, something else did.
Elgar was not the only English composer born in the nineteenth
century to have travelled abroad and imbibed the effect of the best
of continental music, but he was the most successful at internalising
the influences. Arthur Sullivan had returned from Leipzig to be
hailed as the English Mendelssohn, though his talent found its most
distinctive outlet in gentle parody, rather than adventurous devel-
opment, of the models he studied. Elgar first discovered Wagner,
Brahms, Liszt and Berlioz for himself at Covent Garden and Crystal
Palace. In 1892–3 he heard all of the Ring cycle, Parsifal and
viii Elgar: An Anniversary Portrait
Tristanon visits to Europe, and began to experiment with some of
their techniques of harmony and thematic transformation in his not
wholly successful choral works of the 1890s. By the time he reached
Gerontius(a text Dvorak once contemplated setting), he was ready
to challenge the heart of the English tradition.
By choosing Cardinal Newman’s poem, a Catholic work far
outside the tradition of the English establishment oratorio, Elgar
immediately broadened the scope of that genre. And by assimilating
doubt and uncertainty into his musical picture, Elgar also captured
the temper of the times. ‘I can no more, for now it comes again/
That sense of ruin which is worse than pain/That masterful
negation and collapse/Of all that makes me man’—Elgar’s music,
rootless and drifting, evokes an feeling of desperation that mirrors
Tennyson’s In memoriam (‘I stretch lame hands of faith and
grope... ’) and even Malcolm Arnold’s‘Dover Beach’ (‘The Sea of
Faith was once too at the full... But now I only hear/Its melan-
choly, long withdrawing roar... ’).
Musical England was not ready for Gerontius. The performance
was famously inadequate and the young Vaughan Williams
reported that the tenor sang the part ‘like a Stainer anthem, in the
correct tenor attitude with one foot slightly withdrawn’. But Elgar’s
creative life, as documented in this fascinating book of essays, was
a continual struggle between the desire for wide, uncritical accep-
tance and a profound, depressive self-loathing which seems to
emerge at the time of his greatest triumphs. And it is surely this
emotional tension which both prevented Elgar from becoming a
true twentieth-century composer in language and technique, in the
way Strauss implied, and yet enabled him to become the composer
who more than any other figure expresses truthfully the dichoto-
mies of our country in the early years of the last century.
Justfifty years ago, in a penetrating anniversary essay (Music and
Letters April 1957), Donald Mitchell started dismissively: ‘It is a
commonplace that Elgar’s reputation has suffered a certain decline.
His music, to put it crudely, is a little out of fashion’. You could not
write that today: as the essays in this volume charting Elgar’s
revival and reception make clear, his stock stands higher than
ever—revelatory performances and recordings by international
interpreters, Solti, Previn, Slatkin, Barenboim, have transformed
Introduction ix
our understanding of his music (listen to Norrington’s recent
vibrato-less First Symphony, wonderfully recorded with the SWR
Stuttgart Orchestra, reinterpreting the sound of Elgar for the
twenty-first century!). And one of the most thrilling musical
episodes of recent years (which I had the privilege to be involved in
while at BBC Radio 3) has been Anthony Payne’s realization of the
sketches for Elgar’s Third Symphony, first mooted during Radio 3’s
Fairest Isleyear in 1995 with an illustrated broadcast talk, and then
brought to completion in a studio performance we mounted by
Andrew Davis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra on 18 October
1997, in the presence of some of those who had been most sceptical
about the possibility of completion, and a Royal Festival Hall
account the following spring by the same artists in the BBC’s
Sounding the Centuryseries, hailed as ‘a landmark in the history of
British music’. That ‘new’ work has already received well over 100
performances worldwide and has established itself in the repertory,
releasing the buried creativity of Elgar’s final years.
Mitchell’s essay is well worth pursuing, for the central contrast it
makes is still absolutely valid, between Elgar as the self-creator of
a quintessentially English image (an idea developed in fascinating
detail in this volume by David Cannadine), while at the time being
more international than all his contemporaries in his musical idiom.
And then: ‘Elgar’s conservative personality—self-imposed as I
believe it was—did not mean that he felt less deeply, but rather that
the range of his feeling was inhibited: he did not plunge into those
new regions of feeling that might have forced his style to widen its
scope... my guess is that had Elgar liberated himself from a host
of protective emotional prohibitions and permitted his tensions to
rise to the surface, he might well have responded with some out-
of-character music that would have crossed the threshold of the
new century in style, not chronology alone.’ Absolutely true, and
supported by Rosa Burley’s observation that Elgar was ‘one of the
most repressed people it is possible to imagine’. It is perhaps
understandable of Mitchell to regret that Elgar did not become
more like Mahler, but there is surely one more logical development
of his train of thought—that it was precisely becauseElgar did not
cross that threshold that he remains such a perfect example of our
own (as a nation) emotional inhibition and repressed passion, a