Elgar, Beyond Pomp and Circumstance By DIANA McVEAGH

August 5, 2007
Music
Elgar, Beyond Pomp and Circumstance By DIANA McVEAGH

LONDON

EDWARD ELGAR’S eminence in British music, 150 years after his birth, is assured.

During this anniversary year his music is being played up and down the land, from January to December: rare as well as familiar works, as a glance at the Elgar Society Web site (www.elgar.org) shows. There are many broadcasts, celebrations, major publications. But exactly what Elgar stood for and what is unique about his music are more than ever being questioned.

Recently in Britain there have been several scholarly Elgar conferences, with Americans as well as his countrymen taking part. Old assumptions are being challenged, clichés rejected. And in a welcome development, the major festival is in America, which Elgar visited several times to conduct his music. Over the next two weekends the Bard Music Festival in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., will devote its annual Rediscoveries series to Elgar and his world.

Critical opinion about Elgar is far less settled than it was at his centenary in 1957. Fifty years ago he seemed a grand phenomenon. At a greater distance he is more of a historical figure, less of a living presence.

To the many Americans now writing about him, he may seem no more familiar than Brahms. Young British academics are applying rigorous analytical techniques to his music as if he were Debussy or Schoenberg, unencumbered by images of the Malvern Hills or the British empire. His sayings are being taken less at face value and scrutinized as defensive coverups. Scholars who have studied other composers before Elgar — Julian Rushton, after Mozart and Berlioz; James Hepokoski, after Verdi and Sibelius — come to him freshly.

It was never true that Elgar was universally regarded simply as a Colonel Blimp, epitomizing England, Empire and Establishment, his music confident and grandiloquent. Certainly, “Land of Hope and Glory” (better known to Americans from the “Pomp and Circumstance” March of countless graduations), the once-in-a-lifetime tune that entered the national consciousness and brought him popular fame, also acted partly as a barrier.

Some people, though always a minority, saw little beyond it, beyond the bristling mustache and the cultivated military appearance. Perceptive listeners, right from the start, heard the nervousness beneath the swagger. The pendulum may indeed have swung too far the other way. Emphasizing the melancholy, tormented undertow to Elgar’s music has brought a danger that his life-affirming, exuberant, glowing side is now underestimated. He may have wished to “curse the power that gave me gifts,” as he once said, but he also knew the “Spirit of Delight” invoked in the epigraph to his Second Symphony.

His range is great. At one extreme are his charming light pieces, like “Salut d’Amour.” They are not negligible, for their melodic appeal and the finish of their workmanship are enduring.

During the decade in which Delius composed his agnostic “Mass of Life” to Nietzsche’s text, Elgar turned to Cardinal Newman for his searing oratorio “The Dream of Gerontius” and offered glimpses of eternity. (The critic Michael Steinberg rates “Gerontius” as the greatest religious work between Verdi’s Requiem and Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms.”)

The exhilarating but elusive Introduction and Allegro for strings is a bridge between the 18th-century concerto grosso and Vaughan Williams’s “Tallis Fantasia” and Tippett’s Double Concerto. Then there are the enchanting Edwardian-style stage works, “The Starlight Express” and “The Sanguine Fan”; great part songs, still underperformed; and strange miniatures like the song “Submarines.”

Elgar’s two symphonies are psychologically complex, and they explore the harmonic hinterland behind their ostensible keys. Elgar can use limpid scales to express innocence, but at anguished climaxes — in the opening movement of the First Symphony or the Rondo of the Second — the distortion approaches Expressionism.

Commentators argue whether this “typical” Englishman was overemotional or repressed. But it is exactly this tension between passion and inhibition that makes him so compelling.

Elgar was uneasily poised between cultures. Born and rooted in Worcestershire, in verdant central England, he has been seen as primarily a pastoral composer. The American-born Elgar scholar Jerrold Northrop Moore most persuasively argues for this. But as soon as Elgar could afford it, he made a bid for London, and he was at his most carefree vacationing in Bavaria and Italy. He was a Roman Catholic who never composed a mature Mass, and he spent much of his life among the three great Protestant cathedrals of the Three Choirs Festival, accepting an invitation for an Anglican Te Deum and Benedictus. He was born into trade, married into a county family, then leapfrogged over that rank to mingle with the aristocracy.

A tougher man might have drawn strength from such diversity. Elgar was by no means the only creative artist of his time to rise socially. James Barrie and Thomas Hardy, like Elgar, all started life with few material advantages. All three rose to fame in the first half of the last century; all three were loaded with honors; all three were awarded the Order of Merit. Class-conscious though England may have been, people with outstanding ability and perseverance could rise to the top.

But for the thin-skinned Elgar, such balancing acts meant insecurity, and he made it worse by his determination to live, once established, only by his composing. Unlike his English contemporaries, he proudly refused to seek a salaried professional post. He never achieved a stable personality but was subject to violent despondencies, and he made some shockingly bitter remarks that need to be set in a sympathetic context. In later life he could adopt irritating poses, like rating horse racing above composition.

For all that, he had devoted, tenacious friends. He was also one of the great letter writers of all time, pouring out ridiculous puns next to heart-rending confessions and thoroughly practical instructions for the printing of his music.

He saw himself as disadvantaged by having been self-taught. Yet without undue early influence he developed his noble tunes, aspirational sequences and vigorous rhythms into an instantly recognizable style. He worked in the provinces as organist, accompanist, arranger, violinist (solo and orchestral), conductor, bassoonist and teacher, to say nothing of composer. He could hardly have acquired a finer practical training anywhere.

His contrapuntal technique is essential to the integration of his symphonic movements and is the very web and woof of his “Falstaff.” Yet he wore his hard-won learning lightly. His “Enigma” Variations, which catapulted him to fame in 1899, sound absolutely spontaneous but can bear strict analysis. The eighth variation (‘‘W. N.”), a portrait of a delicate country household, is a tissue of extensions, chromatic inflections and rhythmic and melodic reversals, all ingeniously derived from the theme. Into the bluff, emphatic fourth variation (“W. M. B.”), he nonchalantly tossed a couple of bars of close canon.

His Violin Concerto, given its premiere in London in 1910 by Fritz Kreisler with Elgar conducting, marked the peak of his career. His Second Symphony, of 1911, brought a more puzzled response. Change was in the air. Edward VII was dead; Stravinsky was composing “The Rite of Spring”; the Great War was coming nearer.

That war destroyed Elgar’s world. As it ended, he withdrew inward, composing chamber music and his poignant, haunted Cello Concerto. Was that a requiem for the war dead, for the cultural world he knew, for his own increasing age, even for a lost early love? It could be none or all of these.

Elgar was never parochial. His technique owes much to Wagner, his orchestration to French composers. It was Hans Richter, who had given premieres of works by Brahms, Wagner and Dvorak, who introduced the “Enigma” Variations to London. The first truly successful performance of “Gerontius” was in Düsseldorf under Julius Buths. In Elgar’s heyday he was taken up by Artur Nikisch, Fritz Steinbach, Bruno Walter and Felix Weingartner; and by Theodore Thomas in Chicago and Frank and Walter Damrosch in New York. Mahler conducted the “Enigma” Variations in New York in 1911.

Unlike the generation of British composers that followed him, Elgar did not find inspiration in folk song. The only charge England might lay against him is that his genius overpowered his lesser but still fine near-contemporaries, until the advent of Vaughan Williams and Britten. The great merit of the Bard festival which begins on Friday, is to place Elgar in that wider context.

In 1899 Horatio Parker’s oratorio “Hora Novissima” was given in Elgar’s hometown, Worcester, the first American work to be performed at a Three Choirs Festival. In 1905 Professor Parker, initiating a tradition, performed the “Pomp and Circumstance” March No. 1 at Yale when an honorary doctorate was conferred on Elgar.

Elgar was introduced as a composer “honored for his genius” in an art that “voices the profoundest spirited emotions and the deepest longings of the heart.”

“Commanding the homage of the musicians of Germany, of France and of America,” the commendation went on, “he is heartily welcomed among us.”

Diana McVeagh is the author of “Elgar the Music Maker” (Boydell Press).