Edward Elgar and His World (27 page)

9. See Robert Anderson,
Elgar in Manuscript
(London: British Library, 1990), 8–9, for a summary of the compositions known as “sheds,” so named after the building at the back of the Elgars' garden where the wind band used to rehearse.

10. Carl Dahlhaus,
Nineteenth-Century Music
, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 314–15.

11. For a discussion of problems in the reception of Sibelius's miniatures, with an attempt to redress the critical balance, see Veijo Murtomäki, “Sibelius and the Miniature,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius
, ed. Daniel M. Grimley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 137–53, esp. 137–42.

12. Jerrold Northrop Moore,
Edward Elgar: A Creative Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 227.

13. Letter dated 20 October 1898, in Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life,
247.

14. Dahlhaus,
Nineteenth-Century Music,
317.

15. Ibid.

16. On the reception of Grieg's music, see Daniel M. Grimley,
Grieg: Music, Landscape and Norwegian Identity
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), introduction.

17. John Butt, “Roman Catholicism and Being Musically English: Elgar's Church and Organ Music,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Elgar,
ed. Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 114.

18. Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life,
227.

19. Dahlhaus,
Nineteenth-Century Music,
315.

20. In this context, it is significant that Elgar's youngest sister, Ellen Agnes (known as “Dot” or “Dott”), took vows and became sacristan, organist, and music mistress, and later prioress, in the Dominican Order. See Percy M. Young,
Elgar, O.M.: A Study of a Musician
(London: Collins, 1955), 36–37, and Richard Smith, “Elgar, Dot and the Stroud Connection—Part One,”
Elgar Society Journal
14, no. 5 (July 2006): 14–20.

21. Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life,
266.

22. Based on programs held at the Elgar Birthplace Museum, Moore lists the repertoire of the Worcester Glee Club between 1870 and 1872 as including “the Overtures to
Zampa
(Hérold),
Norma
(Bellini),
Masaniello
(Auber), and
Maritana
(Wallace) … and occasionally a big selection from one of the operas—
Norma
or
Il Trovatore.
”
Elgar: A Creative Life,
45. In an interview with Rudolph de Cordova in
The Strand Magazine,
May 1904 (repr. in Redwood,
Elgar Companion,
115–24), Elgar recalled having played in the orchestra when visiting opera companies performed at the Worcester Theatre, whose repertoire included
Norma, La Traviata, Il Trovatore,
and
Don Giovanni
.

23. For further discussion of
The Crown of India,
see Corissa Gould, “Edward Elgar, The Crown of India, and the Image of Empire,”
Elgar Society Journal
13, no. 1 (2003): 25–35; J. P. E. Harper-Scott, “Elgar's Unwumbling: The Theatre Music,” in
Cambridge Companion to Elgar,
172–73; and Deborah Heckert, “Contemplating History: National Identity and the Uses of the Past in the English Masque,” Ph.D. diss., SUNY at Stony Brook, N.Y., 2003. See also the chapters in this volume by Nalini Ghuman and Deborah Heckert.

24. Quoted in Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life,
154.

25. Dora M. Powell,
Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), 35–36.

26. Quoted in Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life,
234.

27. Quoted in Richards,
Imperialism and Music,
64.

28. Gray,
A Survey of Contemporary Music
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), 78.

29. Arnold Bax's opinion of the work is similar, and motivated by similar feelings following the cataclysm of the First World War: “Difficult as it may be to reconcile these contradictions, the fact remains that the impulse to turn out such things as ‘Land of Hope and Glory,' the
Imperial March,
the
Coronation Ode
and the regrettable final chorus of
Caractacus
was an integral part of the makeup of this man, a representative, even an archetypal Briton of the last years of Queen Victoria's reign.”
Farewell My Youth and Other Writings,
ed. Lewis Foreman (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992), 125.

30. Gray,
Ssurvey of Contemporary Music,
79–80.

31. Brian Trowell, “The Road to Brinkwells: The Late Chamber Music” in “
Oh, My Horses!”: Elgar and the Great War,
ed. Lewis Foreman (Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 2001), 351.

32. Bernard Porter,
The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 24.

33. Bernard Porter, “Elgar and Empire: Music, Nationalism and the War” in Foreman,
Elgar and the Great War,
156.

34. Porter,
Absent-Minded Imperialists,
144.

35. Moore,
Elgar: A Creative Life,
338–40. Moore also links the melody to Elgar's work on a symphony based on the life of General Gordon, for which the representation of a “noble defeat” would have seemed equally apt.

36. Rudolph de Cordova, “Elgar at Forli,”
The Strand Magazine
(May 1904), repr. in
Elgar Companion,
123.

37. Aidan Thomson, “Elgar and Chivalry,”
19th-Century Music
28 (2005): 254–75; see also Robert Anderson,
Elgar and Chivalry
(Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 2002).

38.
Sunday Times,
25 February 1934, repr. in Redwood,
Elgar Companion,
155.

39. On Elgar's devastated reaction to Rodewald's sudden early death, see Byron Adams, “The ‘Dark Saying' of the Enigma: Homoeroticism and the Elgarian Paradox,” in
Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity,
ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 218–19.

40. James Hepokoski, “Finlandia Awakens,” in Grimley,
Cambridge Companion to Sibelius,
90–91.

41. The final measure of the third climactic statement of the tune is elided with the reprise of the march (
tempo primo
, rehearsal letter T), so that, strictly speaking, the melody never actually achieves full cadential closure.

42. The complete march recordings took place on June 26, 1914; April 27, 1926; November 12, 1931 (trio alone); and October 7, 1932. “Land of Hope and Glory” recordings made in 1924 and 1931 were never commercially released, but a recording from 1928 with the Philharmonic Choir was issued.

43. Quoted in Foreman, “The Winnowing Fan: British Music in Wartime,”
Elgar and the Great War,
121.

44. On Elgar's creative response to the First World War, in particular his attempts to create a popular ritualistic musical representation of intense grief and collective and personal loss, see my “‘Music in the Midst of Desolation': Structures of Mourning in Elgar's
The Spirit of England,”
in
Elgar Studies,
ed. J. P. E. Harper-Scott and Julian Rushton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Such works occupy a separate Elgarian category of popular music, principally because of their particular historical context.

45. There is no evidence that Elgar ever quoted an actual folk song in any of his works, even though the composition of the Introduction and Allegro coincided with the sudden explosion of interest in folklore in Britain among musicians such as Vaughan Williams, who trained at the Royal College of Music under Stanford and Parry. Elgar seems to have been aesthetically opposed to this kind of activity, and once remarked, “I write the folk songs of this country,” an attitude that could perhaps be regarded as further evidence of his desire to appeal to popular appreciation over and above membership of formal academic musical institutions. Quoted in Michael Kennedy,
Portrait of Elgar
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 74. For a rich contextual analysis of this passage, see James Hepokoski in Harper-Scott and Rushton,
Elgar Studies.

46. Matthew Riley, “Rustling Reeds and Lofty Pines: Elgar and the Music of Nature,”
19th-Century Music
26, no. 2 (2002): 177.

47. Interview with Gerald Cumberland [Charles Kenyon],
The Daily Citizen,
18 July 1913, quoted in Christopher Kent, “Falstaff: Elgar's Symphonic Study,” in
Edward Elgar: Music and Literature
, ed. Raymond Monk (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 105.

48. Anonymous review,
Pall Mall Gazette,
4 November 1913, Elgar Birthplace Museum, EB Box 1332 (June 1911–June 1914).

49. J. P. E. Harper-Scott, “Elgar's Invention of the Human:
Falstaff,
op. 68,”
19th-Century Music,
28, no. 3 (2005): 230–53; see esp. his formal summary of the work, 240.

50. Edward Elgar, “Falstaff,”
The Musical Times
54 (1913): 575–79.

51. Significant differences, however, given the programmatic context, are the “Prince Hal” tune's modal instability (its second strophe shifts toward E minor) and the fact that Elgar never marks it
nobilmente,
a direction that occurs frequently throughout the
Pomp and Circumstance
marches. These details suggest that musically, from the outset, Elgar's representation of “gracious” Prince Hal is at least tonally ambivalent.

52. Letter dated 26 September 1913, quoted in Anderson,
Elgar in Manuscript,
127.

53. Diana McVeagh, “Elgar and Falstaff,” in
Elgar Studies,
ed. Raymond Monk (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990), 141.

54. Carolyn Abbate,
Unsung Voices: Opera and Narrative in the Nineteenth Century
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 29.

55. This narrative silencing of Falstaff is all the more savage for its betrayal of Shakespeare's promise at the end of the final act of
Henry IV Part 2
, that Falstaff's story would be resumed in the succeeding play. In Laurence Olivier's wartime film version of
Henry V,
Falstaff's death becomes an extended moment of wistful reflection, accompanied in Walton's score by a Purcellian chaconne with descending bass line.

56. William Empson,
Essays on Shakespeare
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 37.

57. George Bernard Shaw,
Shaw's Dramatic Criticism, 1895–98,
ed. John F. Matthews (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1971), 165.

58. J. Dover Wilson,
The Fortunes of Falstaff
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943, repr. 1953), 20.

59. Elgar does not appear to have been aware of Bradley's work, but the essay was an important source for Tovey's analysis, which Elgar certainly read. He made no attempt to correct where Tovey had relied on Bradley's reading of the play, although he had more general reservations about Tovey's approach.

60. A. C. Bradley, “The Rejection of Falstaff” (1909), repr. in
Shakespeare, Henry IV Parts 1 & 2: A Casebook
, ed. G. K. Hunter (London: Macmillan, 1966), 69.

61. Empson,
Essays on Shakespeare,
67–68.

62. Ibid. This reading, of course, conceals another more common prejudice, namely that homosexual behavior can be dismissed as youthful experimentation, something to be abandoned and rejected in adulthood.

63. Elgar, “Falstaff,”
The Musical Times
54 (September 1913): 579.

64. Ibid. The quotation is from
Henry IVPart 2,
2.2.134–35; also quoted by McVeagh, “Elgar and Falstaff,” 137.

65. Peter Burger and Christa Burger,
The Institutions of Art,
trans. Loren Kruger, introduction by Russell A. Berman (Lincoln, Neb., and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 10.

66. Ibid., 11.

 

 

 

PART II

DOCUMENTS

Early Reviews of
The Apostles
in British Periodicals

SELECTED, INTRODUCED, AND ANNOTATED BY AIDAN J. THOMSON

The success of
The Dream of Gerontius
in Germany in December 1901 and May 1902 propelled Elgar into Britain's national consciousness on a scale that would have seemed unimaginable just two years earlier.
Gerontius
soon became a favorite with audiences at the larger English provincial choral festivals, ranking alongside
Messiah
and
Elijah
in popularity. Consequently, when it was reported in the musical press in 1903 that Elgar was composing an oratorio for the Birmingham Festival on the life of the apostles, public interest in the project was considerable. The composer, characteristically, played his part in generating publicity. An exchange of letters that took place in late February and early March of 1903 between Elgar and Alfred Littleton, the chairman of his publishers, Novello, reveals the composer's concerns about when the print media should be informed about
The Apostles;
Littleton suggested that
The Musical Times
, Novello's house journal, should be given the right to make the first official announcement of the new work. Elgar responded by meeting the editor, F. G. Edwards, on March 14, 1903, the result of which was two articles: one concerning the libretto of the oratorio, which appeared in the April issue of the periodical; and one about the work's music, which was published in July.
¹
These pieces were supplemented in the October issue of the periodical by an essay about the plot and theological implications of
The Apostles
by Canon Charles Vincent Gorton (who had recently founded the Morecambe Festival and through that had befriended Elgar) and complemented by a series of interviews Elgar gave to
The Sketch
(September 16, published on October 7) and to R. J. Buckley of the
Daily Dispatch
(September 24). The
Pall Mall Gazette
, meanwhile, published a piece about the composer on the day of the premiere, October 14.
²
Most importantly, at the composer's suggestion, Novello brought out two guides to the work in time for the premiere: an interpretation of the text by Gorton and an analysis of the music by August Jaeger.
³
In short, Elgar had done as much as he could to ensure that the audience at the premiere would be as well informed about his new work as possible, in the hope of a favorable reception.