Edward Elgar and His World (25 page)

The marches also rest upon a tension between archaic and modern elements. In part, this can be explained through reference to Elgar's interest in chivalry. In an interview with Rudolph de Cordova in
The Strand Magazine
in 1904, for example, Elgar is recorded as saying:

I like to look on the composer's vocation as the old troubadours or bards did. In those days it was no disgrace to a man to be turned on to step in front of an army and inspire the people with a song. For my own part, I know that there are a lot of people who like to celebrate events with music. To these people I have given tunes. Is that wrong? Why should I write a fugue or something which won't appeal to anyone, when the people yearn for things which can stir them—?
³⁶

As Aidan J. Thomson and others have shown, chivalry is a prominent feature of Elgar's earlier music, from the concert overture
Froissart
to cantatas such as
The Black Knight,
and it represented at least in part an attempt to imagine the modern world according to a sense of renewed moral and aesthetic order.
³⁷
But it also embodied Elgar's notion of music as a form of spectacle or display. In an obituary in the
Sunday Times,
Ernest Newman remarked that Elgar “saw the outer world as a magnificent pageant, every line and colour of which thrilled him,” an interpretation that reinforces the sense in much of Elgar's work of ceremony as both entertainment and ritual.
³⁸
Elgar's interview in
The Strand Magazine,
however, also suggests that the marches assumed an anti-institutional quality, Elgar juxtaposing popular appeal (a good tune) against more conventionalized academic standards (fugue). Elgar thus draws attention to his own sense of isolation from formal centers of musical practice while simultaneously pointing to his wider public acclaim. The idea of a chivalric mode of musical discourse, or of Elgar portraying himself as an ancient bard in modern dress, may have been one means of addressing this potential imbalance between popular success and academic critical esteem.

The formal layout of the marches reflects these tensions and dualisms. Even the dedication of the first march, to Elgar's close friend Alfred Rodewald “and the members of the Liverpool Orchestral Society,” suggests a bringing together of private and public spheres.
³⁹
The introduction begins with hard-edged modernist linear counterpoint in contrary motion—one of the most famous Neapolitan openings in the repertoire. The initial emphasis on E
is enharmonically reinterpreted by the chromatic rise in measure 7 so as to lead
upward
to the dominant A. The main section of the march proper is characterized by a motoric energy: it is modern urban music that evokes the sounds of commerce or manufacturing industry as much as military activity. If, as James Hepokoski and others have suggested, the driving rhythms in the second half of Sibelius's tone poem
Finlandia
can be heard as a representation of a steam engine, thrusting into the future, it is possible to imagine a similar machine-like momentum with the sounds of pistons and valve gear in the outer sections of Elgar's march.
⁴⁰
The heavy pesante tread of the poco allargando measures therefore becomes a sudden application of the brakes that attempts to bring the rolling musical locomotive under control. In contrast, the largamente first appearance of the trio is presented as an idealized tune or processional, a “national hymn” according to Arthur Johnstone's review of
Coronation Ode
in the
Manchester Guardian,
which suggests a ritualized space or mood of civic dignity even without the references to national pride and territorial expansion later supplied by A. C. Benson's text. If the emphasis in the main sections of the march is on a forward vector, constantly pushing onward in a spirit of modernist progress, the emphasis in the trio (even in its transformed molto maestoso apotheosis) is on circularity and repetition, and the tune ultimately avoids closure.
⁴¹
As a whole, therefore, the march combines two fundamentally opposed musical impulses, one forward-looking and progressive, and the other circular and retrospective.

If not universally acclaimed by critics, the first
Pomp and Circumstance
march can reasonably lay claim to being Elgar's most popular work. But, as the above analysis suggests, its populism is contingent and contested. Though for many commentators, such as Michael Kennedy, the march represents the elevation of empire and a particular (for some, problematic) vision of Englishness, it can equally be heard as a vivid illustration of contemporary urban life. This allusion to processes of mass production and industrialization foreshadowed the work's early reception history: Elgar recorded the complete march on gramophone no less than four times, and “Land of Hope and Glory” three times, and in these forms the piece reached its widest possible audience, most poignantly during the First World War.
⁴²
The catalogue entry for Elgar's first wartime recording, of a truncated version of the march, proclaimed:

That thrilling broad march melody, now known to every British ear, “Land of Hope and Glory,” is played with unspeakable breadth of tone and majesty by these fine players directed by Elgar. No one can listen without experiencing feelings of noble patriotism, such is the nature of its immediate appeal. Every Britisher should possess this unique record.
⁴³

Though we are now able to listen to Elgar's recording on CD transfer, it is hard to imagine exactly how the piece would have originally sounded played on a gramophone in the trenches or on the home front. Surely at no other time would the music's tensions between its different modes of expression, active and static, modern and retrospective, have seemed quite so stark and polarized: the “spirit-stirring drum” must have beaten hollow indeed.
⁴⁴

The third and final category of popular music in Elgar's work relies on a similar tension between modern and retrospective modes of musical discourse. But the works in this category construct the popular in a manner diametrically opposed to the contemporary urban sounds of the first
Pomp and Circumstance
march. In these pieces, the popular is heard as a lost voice, the image of an idealized Arcadian past that is fleetingly recaptured or momentarily regained as though from a considerable musical or historical distance. It therefore becomes the trace of a vanished presence or loss, rather than an affirmation (as in the outer sections of the march) of a modern civic identity. Paradigmatic examples of works in this category include the “canto popolare” (literally, “popular song”) in the concert overture
In the South,
and the so-called Welsh tune in Introduction and Allegro. In both cases, the popular melodies have the character of folk songs, and are symbolic of a preindustrialized pastoral idyll or former natural wholeness.
⁴⁵
This symbolic content is foregrounded through sharp juxtaposition of these “popular” melodies with music of a more overtly modernist character. As Matthew Riley has observed, such gestures are motivated by “a sense that ‘reality'—determined by the conventional frame and form of a movement—gives way, in a sudden moment of transformation, to a magical ‘inner' world of pastoral simplicity, childlike innocence, or imaginative vision.”
⁴⁶
Therefore the impression that the tunes are musically unprepared or unmotivated by their context lends them their sense of enchantment or bewitchment. In other words, they act as Proustian gateways: moments of intense sensory awareness (heightened musical expressivity) that give way to fragmentary glimpses of lost time.

Elgar's symphonic study
Falstaff
is a challenging final case study in this third category of popular music expressive of lost innocence or Arcadian nostalgia. Elgar himself suggested, “I have, I think, enjoyed writing [
Falstaff
] more than any other music I have ever composed, and perhaps, for that reason, it may prove to be among my best efforts.”
⁴⁷
Despite his estimation, however,
Falstaff
remains among the most problematic of Elgar's major works. Contemporary reviews of early performances dwelled on the work's complex formal layout, the relationship between the music and its literary program, and the music's perceived academicism: the general impression was that the music was “clever” rather than intrinsically beautiful. The
Pall Mall Gazette
complained after the London premiere on November 3, 1913, for example:

Perhaps it is because there is a need for a good deal of pictorial delineation and incident that “Falstaff” strikes one as being aesthetically unsatisfactory. Putting aside the question of the construction of the work, a lengthy composition without a measure of sensuous charm, of intrinsic beauty of theme, can hardly fail to give the impression of something lacking. “Falstaff” truly is rather forbidding in this respect, and the amazing cleverness is but a poor substitute. One feels, indeed, that, however closely the subject-matter may be said to represent the intended idea, not enough is gained when music's greatest power, its emotional appeal, is so seldom called into play.
⁴⁸

Such critical misgivings may have reflected a deeper disquiet concerning the work's complex and at times contradictory response to its Shakespearian source. Elgar's preliminary generic designation of “character study” is significant, since the piece is structurally and gesturally defined by its critical engagement with the character of Falstaff himself. Elgar's music is
interpretative
, in the sense that it presents a number of different and often conflicting aspects of Falstaff's stage character: chivalrous, pompous, fat, recalcitrant, comic, and, above all, populist. Falstaff, more than any other Shakespearean character, craves an audience and plays to the crowd. It is the closing bars of Elgar's work that are therefore the most problematic. The manner in which Elgar responds to the dramatic denouement of Shakespeare's plays, the rejection of Falstaff by the new king, Henry V, at the end of
Henry IV Part 2,
suggests an anxiety about the state of social order or civic authority that adds a new dimension to Elgar's relationship with the popular in music.

The complex formal structure of
Falstaff,
with its multiple disjunctions and layers of meaning, has recently been analyzed in depth by J. P. E. Harper-Scott, and little further needs to be added to this reading.
⁴⁹
Elgar's own account of the work, published in an analytical note to accompany the premiere, suggests an opening section that functions as an exposition with varied restatement.
⁵⁰
The second section includes musical textures associated with a conventional developmental space such as fugal passages and points of thematic transformation and liquidation. This development section includes two virtually self-contained movements: a scherzo, based on the Eastcheap tavern material, which includes a full trio and scherzo reprise; and the dream interlude, where Falstaff imagines himself as a young boy (and “page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk”). The reentry of the full orchestra at the Straussian upbeat in measure 743 (rehearsal number 81) has the character of a thematic reprise, but the restatement is swiftly aborted and the music leads into a second developmental episode based on the Shrewsbury battle sequence (
Henry IV Part 1,
Act 5). This new developmental episode parallels the first in that it also includes a self-contained interlude or dream sequence, one of Elgar's most magical and luminous passages, as Falstaff lingers in Judge Shallow's orchard in pastoral Gloucestershire while en route back to London. The fourth and final section, titled “King Henry's Progress,” serves as a structural reprise or recapitulation, and includes an apotheosis of the “Prince Hal Theme,” a broad martial tune superficially similar to the
Pomp and Circumstance
marches in Elgar's favorite E-flat major.
⁵¹
The regular pattern of this recapitulation is interrupted, however, by a series of harmonic and thematic crises, a decisive thematic collapse following Falstaff's rejection, and an extended postlude with wistful reminiscences of earlier material.

Elgar's sketches reveal that he remained unsure about the ending until virtually the final stage of composition. As originally conceived, the work finished in measure 1392 (nine measures after rehearsal number 146), following the statement of what Elgar described to Ernest Newman as a theme that expressed “the undercurrent of our failings and sorrows.”
⁵²
Diana McVeagh has drawn attention to the significance of the placement of this theme: it is first heard as a countersubject during the Eastcheap roistering at rehearsal number 64, but by its final appearance the theme is transformed so that, according to McVeagh, “it is no longer a counterpoint, but at the last a prime, expressive melody, serenely accepted.”
⁵³
Regarding gesture, this “failings and sorrows” theme corresponds to the third category of popular music in Elgar's work. It assumes the character of a lost voice or folk song, distantly heard, whose effect is uncanny rather than serene. Like the “canto popolare” from
In the South,
or the Mendelssohn quotation from the Lygon movement in the
Enigma
Variations (variation XIII), the music inspires thoughts of melancholy, loss, and nostalgia. Such moments, according to Carolyn Abbate, assume a special narrative significance: the clarinet melody is one of those “rare gestures in music” associated with the act of enunciation, which “seem like voices from elsewhere, speaking (singing) in a fashion we recognize precisely because it is idiosyncratic.”
⁵⁴
Set off from the main body of the work, and isolated within its own otherworldly context, the tune could be heard as a graphic representation of the moment of Falstaff's death, an event that is only cursorily reported by Shakespeare in the first act of
Henry V
.
⁵⁵