Edward Elgar and His World

volume

Of Worcester and London:

An Introduction

BYRON ADAMS

We begin now to see clearly the Elgar dichotomy: the Worcestershire Elgar and the London Elgar, the private Elgar and the public Elgar. The division is apparent in the music. The great works of 1899 and 1900 belong to Worcestershire and to the private Elgar, accordingly they have an authentic ring of truth.

—Percy M. Young, Elgar O.M.: A Study of a Musician, 1955

By all rights, 1912 should have been the crowning year of Edward Elgar’s career, his long progress from provincial obscurity to fame and riches consummated at last. In this year Elgar and his wife, Alice, whose faith in her husband’s genius had been vindicated so spectacularly, moved into Severn House, an elegantly appointed home in London designed by the fashionable architect Norman Shaw. As they took possession on New Year’s Day, Sir Edward and Lady Alice Elgar may have reflected on how far they had come since 1890, when an earlier attempt to gain a foothold in the metropolis met with discouragement. During this uncertain and disappointing period in Kensington, Alice Elgar, who was forty-one and pregnant with her first and only child, had been forced to sell her pearls to make ends meet.¹ In the autumn of that unhappy year, Elgar and his family abandoned London, retiring once again into the dull routines of provincial Worcestershire. Some twenty-two years later, their situation took the sting from memories of earlier struggles: the Elgars had arrived, and in a style befitting Britain’s leading composer. As their daughter, Carice, later reminisced, Severn House, grand as it might be, was by no means everybody’s house as it would only accommodate a small family such as ours, as everything was sacrificed to the long stately corridor and the large music room and annexe, a large dining room and large basement, two large bedrooms and three quite small ones, and two even smaller for the staff.²

Here a proud Lady Elgar held at homes on Saturday afternoons, attracting eminent guests such as Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, and Arthur Nikisch.³ Sir Edward was less sanguine than his wife about the move to London, however. When flighty Dora Penny, portrayed as Dorabella in the tenth of the Enigma Variations, first entered Severn House, she enthused to the composer, "You are in clover here. Elgar replied darkly, I don’t know about clover—I’ve left that behind at Hereford—but Hereford is too far from London; that’s the trouble."⁴

Elgar’s forebodings proved, alas, all too prescient. Severn House, furnished in part through the generosity of wealthy friends such as Edward Speyer and Frank Schuster, was expensive—ruinously so. Projects such as The Crown of India, op. 66 (1912), a sumptuous masque composed by Elgar for Oswald Stoll’s lavish music hall, the Coliseum Theatre, were undertaken in part to provide much needed cash.⁵ Elgar, who had become accustomed to ecstatic receptions for his compositions, such as occurred with both the First Symphony in 1908 and the Violin Concerto in 1910, was dismayed that his Second Symphony had garnered a much more restrained response from audiences and critics. At the 1911 premiere, he exclaimed in dismay to his friend W. H. Reed, What is the matter with them, Billy? They sit there like a lot of stuffed pigs.⁶

Under the strain, Elgar’s health, never very robust, began to fray. On May 28, Alice Elgar wrote in her diary, E. very uneasy about noise in the ear.⁷ Elgar was diagnosed with Ménière’s disease, a mysterious illness of the inner ear that often particularly affects middle-aged men. The composer’s case of this chronic illness seems to have been confined to episodes of vertigo and tinnitus without significant loss of hearing, although hearing loss can, and often does, manifest itself in some sufferers. As Ménière’s disease is made worse by adrenalin release, it is not surprising that Elgar suffered with particular intensity during this worrisome time, and the trauma of the diagnosis itself may have exacerbated matters.⁸

But all of these problems—finances, illness, changes of musical fashion—paled into insignificance in August of 1914, when the familiar world came crashing down around his and everyone else’s ears. From the windows of the frigid Severn House (virtually impossible to heat due to wartime fuel shortages), the Elgars watched the war intrude into the night skies over London: in her diary entry for September 8, 1915, Alice Elgar noted that she ran to the window and then fled out to look through other windows … The sky was lit by flying searchlights—part of Zeppelin visible like a gilt box, and star-like shells bursting more or less near it, and the boom of guns sounding!⁹ Worn out from composing music to support the war effort, and battered by fluctuating war news as well as by the disruptions to concert life that inevitably brought financial disruptions in their wake, the composer continued to suffer from ill health. Elgar may have experienced a severe episode of vertigo related to Ménière’s disease during a train journey in April 1916, and in March 1918 he had a tonsillectomy, at that time an acutely painful operation for a man of sixty-one.¹⁰ In uncertain health and upset by the war, Elgar sought refuge in the countryside, in 1918 renting a very modest cottage in Sussex, Brinkwells, literally in the middle of nowhere. Here his creative faculties were renewed, and he completed the Cello Concerto as well as what William W. Austin called the astonishing trilogy of chamber music.¹¹

Elgar’s retreat from London to rural Sussex in the face of wartime anguish might at first seem evidence for Percy Young’s construction, expressed in the headnote, which divides the composer into the public poet who lived in metropolitan splendor at Severn House and the private artist alone with his deepest, most authentic thoughts amidst the Malvern Hills. Young’s vision of a bifurcated Elgar remains popular, and similar rhetoric shows up in analyses by commentators such as Frank Howes, who divides the composer into the Elgar who writes for strings and the Elgar who writes for brass.¹² The work of this protean composer cannot be parsed neatly, however. Elgar was deeply torn about his roots in Worcestershire: between his first unsuccessful 1890 sojourn in London and the success in 1899 of the Variations on an Original Theme, op. 36—the Enigma Variations—he spent a great deal of time in the West Midlands bemoaning his fate as an obscure provincial musician hampered by his status as a tradesman’s son and a Roman Catholic.¹³ Elgar’s friend and employer Rosa Burley recalled that he had at this time, and indeed never lost, a marked Worcestershire accent and was not then a young man of any particular distinction, yet he had the habit of speaking of Malvern in the condescending manner of a country gentleman condemned to live in a suburb.¹⁴ In fact, the young Elgar ached to get to London. As an aspiring youth he scrimped and saved enough money to take violin lessons in London from Adolphe Pollitzer, and once in the capital would attend concerts avidly. Until the mid–1920s, he continued to do so whenever he was in London. Without the varied musical venues of the metropolis, from concert halls to the soirees held in the London salons of influential patrons such as Frank Schuster, Elgar could hardly have attained either fame or honors so rapidly after 1899.

More to the point, Elgar’s music simply cannot be divided up neatly into the extroverted urban and the introspective—and thereby somehow more authentically English—rural. Simple geography belies a convenient division into the pastoral or vulgarly imperial, for Elgar wrote his lively, brassy musical love letter to the capital, the Cockaigne Overture, op. 40 (1901, and suggestively subtitled In London Town) while residing in Malvern. Indeed, nearly all of Elgar’s public and populist compositions, including all five of the Pomp and Circumstance marches, were composed in the West Midlands, and his anguished and, in spite of the large orchestral and choral forces employed, intimate reaction to the war, The Spirit of England, op. 80 (1915–17), was mainly composed in London. Interestingly, the most nakedly autobiographical and most private of his scores, The Music Makers, op. 69 (1912), was finished in the city. The day that Elgar completed this score, the self-dramatizing composer wrote to his friend Alice Stuart-Wortley: I sent the last page to the printer … I wandered alone onto the [Hampstead] heath—it was bitterly cold—I wrapped myself in a thick overcoat & sat for two minutes, tears streaming out of my cold eyes and loathed the world.¹⁵

After Elgar’s death in 1934, Vaughan Williams, Howes, and others sought to remold his history closer to their own ideological desires, co-opting Elgar’s posthumous reputation for their own brand of English musical nationalism. In an obituary tribute penned in 1935 for a special memorial issue of Music and Letters, Vaughan Williams eulogized Elgar to suit his own agenda: He has that peculiar kind of beauty which gives us, his fellow countrymen, a sense of something familiar—the intimate and personal beauty of our own fields and lanes. Later in the same tribute, Vaughan Williams asserted that Elgar achieved a bond of unity with English listeners "not when he is being deliberately ‘popular,’ as in Land of Hope and Glory or Cockaigne, but at those moments when he seems to have retired into the solitude of his own sanctuary."¹⁶ In the same issue of Music and Letters, Howes divided the composer’s oeuvre into private strings and public brass. Such critics as Howes, faintly embarrassed by Elgarian exuberance, tended to prefer the introspective, pastoral music for strings, especially the Introduction and Allegro, op. 47 (1904–5), a work in which the composer comes tantalizingly close to quoting a Welsh folk tune.¹⁷ Such efforts to recruit Elgar posthumously into their ranks of the English Musical Renaissance were doomed to fail, especially in the face of Elgar’s quite public lack of interest in all of the signifiers that marked (to a greater or lesser degree) renaissance composers such as Vaughan Williams. As Elgar’s friend W. H. Reed has testified, the composer had no great affection for the Elizabethan composers … He liked Purcell, but would not join in the furore about Tudor music that arose amongst a certain set of young composers … He would not rave about folk-tunes … he held that the business of a composer is to compose, not to copy.¹⁸ Indeed, Elgar once exclaimed forthrightly, I write the folk songs of this country.¹⁹

Rather than espousing an overt ideology, many biographers have preferred to concentrate on the composer’s fascinating, contradictory, and infuriating personality. For some authors, Elgar has served as a pretext for indulging in an ill-advised nostalgia about the Edwardian era—actually a time of rapid scientific change and political upheaval—as if the entire period was a luxuriant perpetual summer before the carnage of the First World War. Of the reign of the grossly self-indulgent Edward VII, one distinguished Elgarian scholar once wrote that "life was more leisurely then, the countryside less spoilt, birds and butterflies more numerous, gardens more scented, most human beings less sophisticated and cynical… . There was style [author’s emphasis] in that era and most of all a degree of innocence and charm which was to blasted away for ever [sic] by the First World War."²⁰ All of this expensive loveliness was enjoyed by a tiny percentage of the British population, however; the scented gardens and unspoiled countryside would have been an alien environment to industrial laborers working six days a week in dark satanic mills that spewed out pollution on an unprecedented scale.²¹ Upward mobility was much less common than in today’s Britain, and the process was extremely painful, as the diaries and letters of those working-class men and women who did better their lot (including Elgar himself) eloquently attest.

Recently, however, musicologists studying Elgar have begun to plot a course to avoid the seductions of nostalgia. Building on a foundation laid by Robert Anderson, Diana McVeagh, Jerrold Northrop Moore, James Hepokoski, Julian Rushton, and others, these scholars have started to examine Elgar using tools provided by critical theory, colonialist studies, and revisionist history, as well as intriguing multivalent approaches in music theory. A number of monographs and essay collections on Elgar have been published in recent years, encouraged in part by such distinguished journals as Music and Letters, The Musical Times, and, above all, 19th-Century Music, in whose pages a series of searching articles on this British composer, some quite provocative, have appeared over the past few years. The essays that constitute Edward Elgar and His World advance this re-evaluation of the composer and his music by studying him in a series of different contexts—his worlds, so to speak. While the essays in this book are grouped by their relation to either Worcester or London, the essays themselves often suggest how porous such boundaries were for him (and are for us), as Elgar frequently seems to have a foot planted in each, unsure exactly to which world, if any, he really belonged.

Elgar’s ambivalent vacillations between town and country, faith and doubt, high and low, set off resonances that chime from essay to essay in ways both revealing and unexpected. Charles Edward McGuire, in the first chapter of the Worcester section of this book, investigates Elgar’s cultural Catholicism; Rachel Cowgill, in the final chapter of the London section, illuminates the ways in which Elgar’s Catholicism pervaded his reactions to the First World War and affected the creation of his war requiem, The Spirit of England. Matthew Riley also touches upon Elgar’s early Catholicism in the context of the composer’s boyhood in Worcester and explores ways that this and other factors may have contributed to the view of Elgar as an escapist composer; both Riley and Cowgill use books by Elgar’s contemporary H. G. Wells to explicate aspects of the composer’s personality and work. In a counterpoint to McGuire’s research on Elgar’s Catholic education, I explore how the composer’s self-tutelage, manifested in childhood and encouraged by his mother, acted both to tie him to and to liberate him from the modest class position into which he was born. Nalini Ghuman and Deborah Heckert organize their essays around Elgar’s masque, The Crown of India, but while Ghuman uses the score to elucidate the fraught question of Elgar’s possible collusions with imperialism, Heckert provides a portrait of the composer as a public poet who embraced modernity by entering into the vital popular culture of the Edwardian music halls. Daniel M. Grimley’s essay on Elgar’s musical populism, and the attendant charges of vulgarity leveled against the composer, might be read profitably alongside Aidan J. Thomson’s lively investigation of those contemporary critics who were less than enamored of Elgar’s music. While Thomson, Heckert, and Ghuman place Elgar in the context of his public life, especially in urban settings, Sophie Fuller demonstrates how a web of private social and musical connections served Elgar’s career and molded his music. The world revealed by Fuller stands in contrast to the private spaces that the composer inhabited as a boy in Worcester, especially the uneasy intimacy of his family circle. It is to be hoped that readers will make many such connections throughout this volume, enriching their understanding of Elgar’s music and character. By design, the two documents chapters are placed in the center of Edward Elgar and His World, functioning as a bridge between the two worlds: Aidan J. Thomson’s reception history of Elgar’s oratorio, The Apostles, looks back toward Worcester, the Three Choirs Festival, and the choral tradition of the West Midlands; Alison I. Shiel’s documentation of the Violin Concerto looks ahead toward one of the composer’s greatest triumphs in the concert halls of London.

As is customary with this series, Leon Botstein provides a summation that brings together many of the issues discussed throughout the volume. Botstein connects Elgar’s aesthetics and ambitions to the work of Arnold, Longfellow, and Ruskin, as well as to the canvases of the Pre-Raphaelite painters Millais and Burne-Jones. Furthermore, Botstein aptly views Elgar’s life and work though the lens provided by the writings of Cardinal Newman, whose poem The Dream of Gerontius provided the libretto for the composer’s great oratorio. By providing a broad context that engages specifically with Elgar’s cultural Catholicism, Botstein’s thoughtful peroration suggests paths for future research.

Did Elgar ever decide between the life represented by London and that of Worcester? By 1919, he realized that he could not maintain Severn House, and tried to sell it; he did succeed in finding a buyer—who paid a disappointingly low sum—a year after his wife’s death in 1920.²² Thus Elgar’s second experiment at living in London came to an end more melancholy than the first. For the last fourteen years of his life, Elgar lived mostly in comfortable country houses, enduring fluctuations in musical fashion that often relegated his music to an earlier, pre-war age. Although his output as a composer slowed drastically after his wife’s death, it is an exaggeration to say that he did not continue to compose: who among admirers of Elgar’s music would choose to renounce such exquisite occasional works as The Nursery Suite (1931)? The aging composer showed a certain enterprise by embracing new technologies such as radio broadcasting and the phonograph recording. In the years after Lady Elgar’s death, he set about creating a performing tradition for his music based on his own recordings, surely one of the first composers to do so.

Near the end of his life, riddled with the cancer that would kill him, Elgar asked to be cremated and have his ashes scattered at the confluence of the Severn and Teme rivers.²³ Unfortunately, this touching and wholly appropriate wish, along with his urgent request that his desultory sketches for a Third Symphony be burned, was shown no respect by his daughter and by his supposedly loyal friends. In the end, he was buried with his wife in the dreary churchyard of St. Wulstan’s Catholic Church in Little Malvern, and the Third Symphony was completed later by other hands, dishonoring his memory.²⁴

To what world did Elgar finally give his allegiance? He was happy neither in the West Country, where he yearned for the plaudits of London, nor in the great city, where he cast a nostalgic halo of prelapsarian innocence around his childhood in Worcester. Instead he internalized both places, importing aspects of London and Worcester into his true homeland, that of his imagination. While Elgar was composing his major works in the first decades of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust—with whom the English composer shared at least one acquaintance, Gabriel Fauré—was gradually discovering within himself the vast landscape of his roman fleuve, á la recherche du temps perdu. Describing a septet created by his fictional composer Vinteuil, Proust writes eloquently of the mysterious imaginary world inhabited by composers. His words may offer a key to understanding Elgar’s tormented life and appreciating his enduring work: Each artist seems thus to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten, and which is different from that whence another great artist, setting sail for the earth, will eventually emerge… . Composers do not actually remember this lost fatherland, but each of them remains all his life unconsciously attuned to it; he is delirious with joy when he sings in harmony with his native land, betrays it at times in his thirst for fame, but then, in seeking fame, turns his back on it, and it is only by scorning fame that he finds it when he breaks out into that distinctive strain the sameness of which—for whatever its subject it remains identical with itself—proves the permanence of the elements that compose his soul.²⁵

NOTES

1. Michael De-La-Noy, Elgar the Man (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 55.

2. Percy M. Young, Alice Elgar: Enigma of a Victorian Lady (London: Dennis Dobson, 1978), 167.

3. Jerrold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 631, 646.

4. Mrs. Richard Powell (Dora Penny), Edward Elgar; Memories of a Variation, 4th ed., rev. and ed. Claud Powell (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 119.

5. Felix Barker, The House that Stoll Built: The Story of the Coliseum Theatre (London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1957), 179.

6. Quoted in Robert Anderson, Elgar (New York: Schirmer Books, 1993), 102.

7. Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 630.

8. Both Jerrold Northrop Moore and Michael Kennedy have cast doubt whether or not Elgar really was suffering from Ménière’s disease. Moore opines that the composer’s giddiness might have been only the symptom of a deep desire to escape, while Kennedy declares that a tonsillectomy that Elgar had in 1917 effected a cure, as the composer was not afflicted by deafness during the remaining sixteen years of his life. See Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 630 and Michael Kennedy, The Life of Elgar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 153. Both writers ignore the complaints Elgar voiced throughout his later life, of distracting noises in his ear and debilitating episodes of giddiness, which are just as much symptoms of Ménière’s as progressive deafness. One such instance is recorded in a letter from Carice Elgar to Alice Stuart-Wortley posted on 2 June 1920: "It was arranged that [Elgar] should go to his sister yesterday, but he had another giddy attack in the morning … The Dr. says he is better today, but wants to keep him quiet a little longer … It is so distressing this giddiness again—& depresses him so." Jerrold Northrop Moore, ed., Edward Elgar: The Windflower Letters. Correspondence with Alice Caroline Stuart Wortley and Her Family (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 241.

9. Andrew Neill, Elgar’s War: From the Diaries of Lady Elgar, 1914–1918, in Oh, My Horses! Elgar and the Great War, ed. Lewis Foreman (Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 2001), 29.

10. According to Alice Elgar’s diary of 8 April 1916, before catching the train, her husband had said he felt giddy & was not sure he would go. Elgar was befriended in his distress by a concerned army officer, Captain Dillon, and spent time in a nursing home. See Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 695.

11. William W. Austin, Music in the 20th Century: From Debussy through Stravinsky (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 87.

12. Frank Howes, The Two Elgars, Music and Letters 16, no. 1 (January 1935): 26–29, reprinted in An Elgar Companion, ed. Christopher Redwood (Ashbourne: Sequoia Publishing, 1982), 259.