Edward Elgar and His World (26 page)

Example 2. Elgar,
Falstaff
, conclusion

Elgar's decision to extend the ending of
Falstaff
beyond this point, however, was motivated by a radical reading of Shakespeare's plays. In the copy of the miniature score of the work that Elgar presented to Alice Stuart-Wortley following the premiere, he marked the flyleaf
“Falstaff
(Tragedy).” Elgar's designation is important because it is not clear that Shakespeare's
Henry IV
plays are, in fact, tragic. Rather, these history plays are characterized by what William Empson calls a deliberate sense of
dramatic ambiguity.
⁵⁶
This ambiguity centers on Falstaff's moral role within the work, and his fate at the end of
Henry IV Part 2
. Summoned to London for the coronation of the new king, Falstaff waits in attendance, only to be dismissed with the words “How ill white hairs become a fool and jester! … I banish thee, on pain of death,” (5.5.48 and 63). Almost as an afterthought, the King summons the Lord Chief Justice, and Falstaff is remanded to Fleet Prison. For some critics, such as George Bernard Shaw, the tone and content of Shakespeare's play were inherently problematic. In a review of a production at the Haymarket Theatre in London, Shaw remarked:

Everything that charm of style, and vivid natural characterization can do for a play are badly wanted by
Henry IV,
which has neither the romantic beauty of Shakespeare's earlier plays, nor the tragic greatness of the later ones. One can hardly forgive Shakespeare quite for the worldly phase in which he tried to thrust such a Jingo hero as Harry V down our throats. The combination of conventional propriety and brute masterfulness in [Hal's] private tastes is not a pleasant one.
⁵⁷

Following Shaw, later critics have noted that the
Henry IV
plays reflect the “real world” of Tudor politics all too closely. Though Shaw was to concede that Falstaff appeared as “the most human person in the play,” he was nonetheless of dubious moral character, a “besotted and disgusted old wretch.” His populism was therefore a negative moral force: an appeal to the lowest common denominator. Furthermore, for Shaw, Shakespeare's work promoted a grim nationalist agenda, an essentially violent and militaristic view of England, and was therefore unacceptable. But for J. Dover Wilson, writing in 1943 at a time of national crisis, the
Henry IV
plays embodied an urgent political truth or allegory. Falstaff represented a conglomeration of conventional dramatic types: the Devil of the miracle play, the Vice of the morality, and the Riot of the interlude. “As heir to the Vice,” Dover Wilson suggests, “Falstaff inherits by reversion the functions and attributes of the Lord of Misrule, the Fool, the Buffoon, and the Jester, antic figures the origins of which are lost in the dark backward and abysm of folk-custom.”
⁵⁸
Falstaff therefore becomes a manifestation of the irrational, the primitive, and the uncontrolled. For Dover Wilson and other writers, Shakespeare's scheme at the end of
Henry IV Part 2
admitted no element of doubt or ambiguity. The rejection of Falstaff was both a necessary and preordained act, in keeping with the mythic role of Prince Hal as prodigal son and, more pressingly, the new king of England. The rule of the Carnival King, as represented by Falstaff, must be brought to an end for the nation's moral and political survival. Falstaff's rejection therefore represented the triumph of a new civic order.

Other critics, from Dryden and Maurice Morgann onward, have interpreted Falstaff as an essentially positive moral presence. A particularly relevant discussion is A. C. Bradley's “The Rejection of Falstaff.”
⁵⁹
Bradley maintains that “Falstaff's dismissal to the Fleet, and his subsequent death, prove beyond doubt that his rejection was meant by Shakespeare to be a catastrophe which not even his humor could enable him to maintain.” For Bradley, Falstaff's rejection was tragic, since “the bliss of freedom gained in humor is the essence of Falstaff.”
⁶⁰
Falstaff is therefore seen as a worldly, liberating presence, both for his comic ability to entertain, and, as Empson argues more forcefully, for his critique of the English class system. Falstaff represents precisely the anti-institutional populism that Elgar himself had advocated in his interview for
The Strand Magazine
in 1904. Hence the rejection of Falstaff assumes a sinister quality, since, as Empson suggests, “the real case for rejecting Falstaff at the end of
Part II
is that he was dangerously strong, indeed almost a rebel leader.”
⁶¹
Empson's final point, that Dover Wilson's interpretation “is due to a distaste for homosexuality, which is regarded nowadays in rather more practical terms than the Victorian [critics']; the idea of Falstaff making love to the Prince, they feel, really has to be resisted,” ultimately reinforces his argument.
⁶²
Falstaff's rejection is more concerned with the imposition of a repressive social order and convention than dramatic necessity.

The closing measures of Elgar's
Falstaff
engage, in some sense, with all of these interpretations. The retrospective character of the “failings and sorrows” theme suggests a sense of loss occasioned by Falstaff's death. In context, this melody seems all the more poignant: the passage opens with a slow playing of the complete Prince Hal theme, with its minor-mode shift, and seems to prepare a simple final cadence in E-flat major. The entry of the woodwind and horns, however, turns the music toward C major, and the cadence is brightened by the addition of trumpets and trombones playing muted and pianississimo. Falstaff's death, in Elgar's interpretation, has an almost visionary quality of transfiguration and a quiet, inward peace. The final eight measures, however, are more ambiguous. Elgar's commentary, in his analytical note, offers little by way of definitive explanation: “The King's stern theme is curtly thrown across the picture, the shrill drum roll again asserts itself momentarily, and with one pizzicato chord the work ends;
the man of harsh reality has triumphed
.”
⁶³
The function of Elgar's late addition to the score is to undermine the retrospective effect of the preceding passage. The music denies any sense of transfiguration, or of Falstaff's narrative presence. Rather, the coda turns toward an objective, hard-sounding E minor and the impersonal military rhythm of the king's theme. The effect of the final pizzicato string chord is deadening, in sharp contrast to the warm glow of Falstaff's death. Elgar's characterization of the new king is therefore surprisingly uncompromising and gritty. The accession to the throne, in
Falstaff
, ultimately has none of the positive, optimistic hope for the future which we might have expected from the composer of
Coronation Ode
or the closing bars of the
Enigma
Variations. It represents a crisis of civic identity, or the brutal silencing of the popular voice.

The central critical question remains whether Elgar's revised ending of his symphonic study presents the rejection of Falstaff as a positive or negative event. Elgar's suggestion, to Alice Stuart-Wortley, that the work was essentially tragic underlines the sense of loss and hollowness in the final measures. His analytical note, however, seems closest to Bradley's reading of the play: that Falstaff's demise was a necessarily ruthless act by the new king, whose career path, in
Henry V
, was to lead to greater violence and bloodshed on the French battlefield rather than a period of political and social stability. There is also a sense, perhaps, that Elgar anticipated the cool reception his work would initially receive, especially following the relatively muted premiere of the Second Symphony.
Falstaff
is Elgar's first large-scale work to turn decisively away from the spirit of positive faith or reconciliation that characterizes so much of his earlier music. The music's “message” is therefore hard to process, and this is possibly the most compelling reason why it has never received the unqualified popular acclaim that has met Elgar's other works, such as the
Pomp and Circumstance
marches. However closely Elgar may have associated himself with the character of Falstaff, his last-minute alteration of the ending completely undermines any sense of idealization. The reassertion of moral order at the end of
Falstaff
hardly has the feeling of triumph, and the final attainment of narrative closure has a distinctly modern edge. Elgar appears to have sensed as much. In the final paragraph of his analytical note, he gave the last word to Prince Hal, and not to Falstaff: “We play fools with the time, and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us.”
⁶⁴

The dramatic ambiguity of the final measures of
Falstaff
suggest that Elgar's approach to the idea of a popular audience, at least as embodied in his musical representation of the Shakespearean character, was a deeply ambivalent one. Falstaff, according to Elgar, represents a powerfully deconstructive, anti-institutional force, and as such is an irresistibly attractive figure. But there is also a sense that such popular appeal is somehow dangerous, or needs to be contained. The poignancy of the conclusion concerns the sense of loss that such containment inevitably creates. This in turn suggests a broader interpretative model for understanding Elgar's popular music. Peter Burger suggests that “the problems of mass-market literature and the elite consciousness of the artist arise as a result of these contradictory demands confronting art—to be both guardian of a humanity that can no longer be found in life-praxis and yet be available to all.”
⁶⁵
It is for this reason that the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy exists at all, “to act as guardian of human emancipation in a society whose actual life processes do not allow its realization.”
⁶⁶
Elgar's music adopts a number of strategies in order to try to resolve this contradiction. In his salon music, which builds upon a rich preexistent nineteenth-Century genre, the illusion of autonomy is maintained by the innovative employment of a range of conventionalized gestures associated with acts of meditation or contemplation. In
Pomp and Circumstance
March no. 1, Elgar articulates a thrilling dualism between opposed modes of musical expression: a modern, progressive, machine-like music inspired by the sounds of the contemporary urban world and a more circular, repetitive music that suggests a sense of civic ritual or ennoblement. In
Falstaff
, however, the tensions between the transformative function of art as autonomous object and the processes of mass production associated with art's commodification are projected through a deep interpretative reading of Shakespeare's play, in which the spirit of the popular imagination, Falstaff, is ultimately crushed by a sense of “harsh reality.”

These case studies offer an experience disconcertingly similar to that provided by the Elgar Route in Worcestershire. They trace a strangely discontinuous and idiosyncratic narrative that ranges across much of Elgar's creative life, charting his relationships with his audiences in a diverse number of venues, arriving ultimately (but fittingly perhaps?) at the ghostly revenant of a madhouse.

NOTES

I would like to thank Byron Adams and J. P. E. Harper-Scott, whose generous and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this essay resulted in numerous improvements.

1. The quotations are from the route guide published by Worcester City and Malvern Hills District Councils (anonymous, undated). The emphasis in the penultimate quotation is mine.

2. For a critical analysis of Elgar's associations with Worcestershire, see Jeremy Crump, “The Identity of English Music: The Reception of Elgar, 1898–1935,” in
Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920
, ed. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 164–90; and Jeffrey Richards,
Imperialism and Music: Britain 1876–1953
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 44–46.

3. Similar mythologies also operate for aspects of Elgar's biography, where associations with people, and childhood, similarly serve to deflect attention away from his music's abstract quality.

4. Tim Barringer, “‘In the Air All Around Us': Elgar's Aesthetics of Landscape,” inaugural lecture, AHRC Framework Seminar: “Land, Air, and Water,” University of Nottingham, 2 July 2005.

5. F. G. Edwards, “Edward Elgar,”
The Musical Times
(1 October 1900), repr. in
An Elgar Companion
, ed. Christopher Redwood (Ashbourne: Sequoia, 1982), 35–36.

6. Cyril Ehrlich, “The Marketplace,” in
The Blackwell History of Music in Britain: The Twentieth Century
, ed. Stephen Banfield (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 41.

7. Ibid., 44.

8. On difficulties of categorization with particular reference to British music, see Richard Middleton, “The ‘Problem' of Popular Music,” in
The Blackwell History of Music in Britain
, 27–38, esp. 27–29; and “Locating the People: Music and the Popular,” in
The Cultural Study of Music
, ed. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 251–62.