Edward Elgar and His World (38 page)

The weather has been awful with one or two glorious days & we hope for a fine autumn: turn up in good time at Gloucester. [Added in pencil] Saturday 3 Sept. The Hostel, College Green, quite by noon.
¹

Mrs Worthington is here till tomorrow, & the family & she & I send all messages to Mrs Terry & to you. I send this to Cults
²
but I expect you are leaving or already left. Good luck & love to you.

Yours ever,
E. E.

1. Terry was to be a member of the Elgars' Three Choirs Festival house party at the Cookery School, Gloucester.

2. The Aberdeen suburb where Terry lived.

 

Postcard from Elgar to Charles Sanford Terry, 16 October 1910

Athenaeum

October 16, 1910

So many thanks for your note from Leeds.
¹
Kreisler was here and plays the thing superbly now & last night I had a very pleasant 2 hours with Saffery
²
& Legge
³
at the Savile
⁴
—we wanted you.

All good wishes,
Yrs ever
Ed: Elgar

1. Terry had been at the Leeds Festival,

2. Terry's brother-in-law.

3. Robin Legge, music critic of the
Daily
which the Elgars did not attend that year.
Telegraph.

4. Terry was a member of the Savile Club.

 

Note from Elgar to Charles Sanford Terry, 19 October 1910

Q.A.M.
[Queen Anne's Mansions]

Oct 19 [1910]

My dear CST,

No time to write.

Here's a sweet-looking page for you & come the besmirched pages of the whilk
¹
were despatched yesterday to N[orth]. B[ritain].
²

Love
Edward E

Just off home.

1. “Whilk” is Old English for “which.”

2. This note accompanied the first-proof score of the Violin Concerto, posted to Terry in Aberdeen.

 

Letter from Elgar to Charles Sanford Terry, 6 November 1910

Nov 6, 1910

Plas Gwyn
Hereford

My dear Terry,

This is to say that all goes well in the parish. Jake
¹
has been missing for some three weeks but Carice & I found him on Friday on the road to our great joy—in which my wife does not join.

The concerto goes well also but much tribulation over mistakes alas!

We had a good time at Sunderland
²
& were geared up by your telegram & the whole evening was merry.

Now we start to Gotham
³
tomorrow
⁴
& will make it truly Cockaigne before the week is out—you will come round to the artists room, won't you. All the folk will be there for a moment.

Love to you
from
Edward E.

I have made a new friend in the parish—a man who traps weasels: he knows little of concertos I find but the parish is backward.

1. “Jake” remains unidentified but seems to have been a local “character” whom Elgar befriended. On 24 December 1910 he wrote to Mrs. Sidney Colvin (soon to be Lady Colvin) that he had had “seasonable dealings (tobacco &c have passed)” with “Jake the Lawyer.”

2. At the request of his friend Nicholas Kilburn, Elgar conducted part of a concert given by the Sunderland Philharmonic Society and the Hallé Orchestra in Sunderland on November 1.

3. Elgar refers to London with “Gotham” which was first used as a name for New York by the American author Washington Irving (1783–1859). The
Oxford English Dictionary's
definition of
Gotham
—“the name of a village, proverbial for the folly of its inhabitants”—combined with the definition of
Cockaigne
—“an imaginary country, the abode of luxury and idleness”—provides the gist of Elgar's opinion of London.

4. Terry has written in the margin “to stay with Schuster for production of the Concerto.” Both Terry and Elgar were friends of Frank Leo Schuster (1852–1927), a wealthy patron of music.

 

Letter from Lady Elgar to Charles Sanford Terry, 2 December 1910

2 December 1910

Ladies Imperial Club
Dover Street
Piccadilly

Dear Prof. Terry,

I feel we have been remiss in letting you hear, what curious English, I mean in
not
letting you hear, oh! it is all tied up in a knot. I have only time to tell you the 2nd performance was
more
wonderful even than the 1st.
¹
More authority and more easy mastery, it seemed over too soon like a beautiful dream—many
lovely
sounds in the Orch.—came out, we heard before—Tremendous enthusiasm.

The 1st movement was so splendid. Much finer performance. Excuse such a blot. E. is looking rested & well again but this weather is so depressing, rain ceases not, & so dark. Impossible to go househunting.
²
So many
many
thanks for all the Archives. We have given over Plas Gwyn to the Arkwrights.
³
Trust he will have a splendid majority on the 5th at Hereford.

Best remembrances to you both. So glad apples are good.

Yrs. Very sincerely,
C. A. Elgar.

1. The second performance of the Violin Concerto took place on November 30, 1910. Terry was not able to attend.

2. The Elgars were looking for a larger property in London, eventually moving into Severn House in London in January 1912.

3. The Elgars were supporters of John Stanhope Arkwright, the young Conservative M.P for Hereford. In the forthcoming general election, for which Arkwright was campaigning, he held his seat, although the Liberals remained in power.

 

Letter from Elgar to Charles Sanford Terry, 4 December 1910

[London]
Dec 4 1910

My dear Terry,

We wanted you badly last Wednesday to complete our joy. “It”
¹
went well & we had the de Navarros & the Legges & Schuster to supper at Queen Anne's [Mansions] after—I borrowed a welkin & we made it ring till after 12. Since then—nothing—the weather has been awful. Saffery introduced a beaming smile, most welcome, into the artists' room & then we had a gathering of all sorts—& you not there to defend me: perhaps it was as well for you might have prevented an impulsive lady from kissing me (!) SHE DID &—well—I didn't mind so perhaps it's as well Scotland had ye in grip.

I have been better since that foggy evening
²
& shall never forget the delight I had in having you there. I hope all goes well in Aberdeen & that your journey home was not too trying.

They cut all the [illegible word, but possibly ‘sermon' or ‘scree'
³
] out of my speech
⁴
which was not bad but the room was too big for me to coruscate in—a week ago though & you will have forgotten.

We lunched with the Legg[e]s today & had a nice time. Now rain in torrents.

I fear these elections will do no good—yesterday was not much promising.

Send me a line soon. Carice is still in the Lalley County—I forget quite where it is—oh! with Granny Gandy
⁵
—she goes on to the Kilburns
⁶
I think.

Alice joins me in love. She has had a most delightful time at tea today at the Safferys: whither I could not wend.

My love to you and duty to Mrs Terry.

Yrs ever
Edward Elgar

[Addendum written sideways on the front page of the above]: I have no news of the parish. Jake is a bad correspondent though I believe I am discussed at length in the Bunch of Carrots & in less measure at the Whalebone
⁷
, but no letters.

1. “It” refers to the second performance of the Violin Concerto.

2. A reference to the evening of the first performance of the Violin Concerto.

3. Definition
of scree
in the
Oxford English Dictionary:
“a mass of loose detritus.” This may well describe what Elgar meant!

4. Elgar addressed the Institute of Journalists in London on November 26.

5. Mrs. Annie Gandy was a leading light at the Morecambe Music Festival; the Elgars met her through Canon Gorton. She was part of the Elgars' Three Choirs house party at Worcester in 1905 and on subsequent occasions. Elgar is said to have particularly enjoyed her wit and vivacity. Carice went to stay at the Gandys' country house, Heaves, near Sedgwick in the Lake District (then Cumberland).

6. Dr. Nicholas Kilburn (1843–1923) conducted choirs in Sunderland and Bishop Auckland in northeastern England and was an ardent champion of Elgar's works. Carice was to join the Kilburns while they were on holiday in Westmorland.

7. Two local pubs on the River Wye near Plas Gwyn. Both are still in existence, although the second is now named The Salmon. Elgar found inspiration in cycling along the country lanes around Hereford and would have been familiar with such local landmarks.

 

 

 

PART III

LONDON

Elgar's Critical Critics

AIDAN J. THOMSON

On December 6, 1905, Edward Elgar delivered the fifth lecture in his first series as Peyton Professor of Music at the University of Birmingham. Titled “Critics,” it was concerned less with individual critics (although several were mentioned by name) than with their function. In Elgar's opinion, music criticism should be educational as much as judgmental, both for the composer, to whose work a critic should give “the final polish” and “help us [the composers], guide us and lead us to higher things,” and for the listener, for whom the critic could provide musical analyses.
¹
Too often, however, critics seemed unaware of these responsibilities. In Elgar's view, the journalist-critic was prone to write concert reviews too quickly, for an inappropriate medium (such as a general magazine with a nonmusical editor), and, above all, without sufficient time for reflection. For Elgar, the “real, lasting, educational good” was “gained from the mature slowly-wrought opinion.”
²

Such hasty assessments thus had considerable potential to affect adversely the performance history of a work. Yet despite these concerns, Elgar was imaginative enough to envisage a role for criticism more familiar to musicologists a hundred years later than it would likely have been to his audience in Birmingham. Enlarging upon his topic, Elgar opined:

It is invariably interesting to read the opinions of various writers on the same work: I venture to suggest that such a collection might form a volume. If extracts from various criticisms on the same work, or on the same performance of a work, could be gathered together, it would form a valuable contribution to musical literature; not formed with any idea of playing off one critic against another, but to arrive at the result, which from a multitude of such counsellors should be wisdom.
³

With these remarks, Elgar promotes “reception history” as a methodological approach decades before the term was coined, although it must be stressed that his conception of reception history—to find the essential “truth” that lay at the heart of a piece of music—is very different from that of musicologists today. The centrality to Elgar's vision of what Lydia Goehr has called the “work-concept” reflects both the idealist philosophy that underpinned nineteenth-Century German music (particularly instrumental music) and the doctrine of “Art for Art's sake,” whose prevalence in Britain had grown considerably since its original espousal in the 1860s by Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater.
⁴
To an aesthetic that denied anything beyond the artistic
Ding an sich
, the idea that the “final arbiter” in reception histories should be not the work but, as Carl Dahlhaus has described it, the “‘moment in history,' i.e. the forces that condition reception,” would have seemed utterly alien; to a composer as concerned as Elgar with his place in ahistorical, ideology-free posterity, it doubtless would have seemed a threat.
⁵
Indeed, the only historical
process
that Elgar is willing to countenance in reception history is the “conversion” of a critic from a negative to a positive point of view about a particular composer, which he felt would be “seriously instructive.”
⁶
But this process, revealingly, is concerned primarily with the uncovering of an objective artistic “truth” which, once reached, is set in stone for all time. There is no suggestion that a critic's change of view might have any historically contingent or ideological stimulus behind it; rather, the “conversion” would appear to be a Damascene one.

Although Elgar's views on art are theoretically underpinned by an objective value system, it is far from clear what aesthetic criteria he used in making critical judgments. Elgar was no philosopher, and if, as Brian Trowell has observed, he shared Ruskin's “resolutely Platonic view of music as an art of great ethical power,” this was no more than most of his contemporaries did.
⁷
If any ideological position is discernible in the Birmingham lectures, it is a bias for “absolute” music: Elgar praised Hanslick in his “Critics” lecture and would later describe the symphony without a program as the “highest development of art.”
⁸
But, as Ernest Newman noted, this position was contradicted by virtually all of Elgar's oeuvre to date, and though the First Symphony would come close to realizing the ideal of absolute music, the quotations at the beginning of both the Second Symphony and the Violin Concerto seem to indicate that Elgar's view of art was not instinctively formalist.
⁹
Rather, Elgar's conception of music was that it “must be … a reflex, a picture, or elucidation of [an artist's] own life,” a position that owed more to the early Romanticism of Elgar's “ideal,” Schumann, than to either camp in the Brahms-Wagner debate.
¹⁰
This reflex was a multifaceted one, where different genres called for different approaches, thereby obscuring any specific agenda. Thus Elgar's large-scale instrumental works conform, more or less, to the criteria of absolute music (even if the “absolutism” is more honored in the breach); the mature oratorios adopt Wagnerian music-dramatic principles, at least externally; and the smaller vocal genres, marches, and occasional music reflect a functional approach that embodies Elgar's comparison of the composer's vocation to that of the “old troubadours and bards … [who] inspire the people with a song.”
¹¹
More to the point, however, a composer whose conception of music was as personal, even instinctive, as Elgar's was hardly likely to apply rigorously objective standards when evaluating the works of others. Instead, these works would be measured by their artistic sincerity, a criterion that was intuitive and justifiable in terms of common sense.