Edward Elgar and His World (42 page)

Maclean's complaints about Elgar's alleged lack of lyricism reflect a dislike less of Wagner than of his English disciples. Maclean certainly had grave reservations about the morality of Wagner's mature stage works, but in his eyes moral lapses in plot did not necessarily taint the German composer's music.
⁷¹
On the other hand, he expressed contempt for Ethel Smyth, whose
Der Wald
he damned as “one of the dreariest specimens of pseudo-Wagner ever presented to an audience on a first-class occasion.”
⁷²
His objection to the work stemmed partly from the extent to which Smyth's scenario mirrored passages in
Siegfried
and
Tristan
, but more from her use of what he considered an alien style of vocal writing. In his view, English opera (and, implicitly, English choral writing in general), “has remained to this day instinctively lyrical… . Italian examples, Weberian influences, Wagnerian temptations, have all left that main tendency much as it was.”
⁷³
The implication is that any English composer who wrote in an anti-lyrical manner was at the very least unpatriotic and, given the reference to “Wagnerian temptations,” quite possibly immoral.
⁷⁴
As one who had consistently yielded to such temptations, Elgar was thus guilty as charged in the court where Maclean served as both judge and jury.

Elgar, Orchestration, and Strauss

If the decline of English lyricism was primarily a concern of Maclean, the charge that Elgar's highly colored scoring led to formlessness was made by several writers. Ernest Walker, in
A History of Music in England
(1907), felt that there was a “lack of sustained thematic inventiveness” to Elgar's music: “Even when, in a way, quite original, the material sometimes consists of scraps of music, neither individually nor collectively of any particular interest beyond mere colour, joined together by methods not altogether convincing.”
⁷⁵
Walker was not alone. Common Time, for instance, wrote that for all its brilliance in orchestration, there was a “scrappiness of effect” in the
Cockaigne
Overture, and that Elgar had “worked from detail to detail”: “There does not seem any reason why the composition should come to an end when it does; simply because there is formality there is no real musical form or architecture.”
⁷⁶
Walter Bernhard, writing in
Musical Opinion
, noted the claim of the music critic of the
Observer
that the “‘magnificently modern' orchestration” of the First Symphony had acted “as a dress efficiently disguising the skeleton.”
⁷⁷
One suspects, however, that those critics who valued Parry's soberly delineated forms more highly than Elgar's variegated orchestral kaleidoscope in such works as
Cockaigne
would have considered this orchestral dress to be less Savile Row and more the emperor's new clothes.

The concern that English critics of this period had for formal coherence is well illustrated by a paper that Maclean presented to the Musical Association in 1896, in which the author argued that established forms, such as sonata or rondo, were essentially elaborate versions of simpler (and implicitly universal) formal procedures: the strophic, the episodic, and the balanced. Maclean concluded this paper by remarking that it would be more difficult to find a work that did not reflect these procedures than one that did.
⁷⁸
The only contemporary genre that might have been charged with formlessness was the symphonic poem, so it should come as no surprise that over the next two decades Maclean would frequently decry its shortcomings: overly chromatic harmony, excessively elaborate orchestration, and structures derived from nonmusical scenarios. While a handful of leading composers could compose in the genre, Maclean felt that “for the rank and file, and for our own times, the ‘symphonic poem,' which is understood to be programme-music liberated from all troublesome forms, has proved the haven of the tuneless.”
⁷⁹
The immediate stimulus for the composition of symphonic poems in Britain was the growing popularity of Richard Strauss, whose status as the “world's leading composer” was accepted by conservative and liberal critics alike by the early 1900s.
⁸⁰
In the eyes of some, however, Strauss's popularity had developed into a virtual cult. “Ours is not the only country where concern is felt at the neglect of native composers,” ran a
Musical News
editorial. “This perhaps has arrived at a more advanced stage with us than the French. They only seem as yet to be involved in the Wagner cult. We have to reckon with the Straussians.”
⁸¹

But with Straussians came an anti-Straussian backlash—and one which indirectly affected Elgar. As we have seen, Strauss's toasting Elgar as the “first English progressivist” meant that a number of touchy British musicians had a personal reason to dislike the German composer, and it is interesting how certain critics managed to promote anti-Strauss sentiment without in any way questioning his preeminence. In Maclean's case, this took a patriotic form that, given his criticism of Strauss's Düsseldorf speech noted above, as well as his promotion of a leading renaissance composer, is a clear dig at Elgar:

It is to be hoped that the Nile will not inundate here with imitation-Strauss. Our younger composers will get little good from that, and had much better follow their own leaders (admirably typified by a new Stanford Irish Rhapsody at an extra Platt-Strauss concert) and develop the genius of their own country.
⁸²

More common, however, was the criticism that Strauss's musical language emphasized realism rather than beauty. In a review of the English premiere of the
Sinfonia Domestica
, for instance, Fuller-Maitland, though admiring Strauss's orchestration, questioned whether it could depict anything more than everyday banality: “We cannot enter into the question whether all this array of instruments … was worthwhile in order to enforce upon the hearers no idea of greater value than the facts that in Germany some couples fall out and agree again, while some babies are washed both morning and evening.”
⁸³
(Such a critical mind-set perhaps explains why E. A. Baughan had a few months earlier dismissed Elgar's most conspicuous piece of Straussian realism, namely Judas's glittering repudiation of the thirty pieces of silver in
The Apostles
, as “cheap.”)
⁸⁴
Fuller-Maitland's flippant point is developed by Hadow, who, in his “Some Tendencies” essay, points out that “in the first place the function of music is to beautify and idealize; and not everything can be expressed in terms of beauty, but only those aspects of life and nature which are capable of idealization.” Strauss's music could “excite,” “intoxicate,” and “dazzle us with coruscations of brilliance and set us tingling with a pleasure that is sometimes very near to pain, but it leaves out of account all the nobler side of human nature; the tenderness that is too deep for tears, the chivalry that is too high to threaten, the indwelling spiritual power with which all great music has held communion.” For Hadow, Strauss's tone poems lacked the idealistic qualities and, above all, the moderation that was required to underpin a healthy aesthetic. “All this,” he concluded, “bears the clear impress of a decadent and sophisticated art.”
⁸⁵

Elgar, Decadence, and Debussy

Hadow's comments about Strauss make for an interesting comparison with those of Herbert Thompson about the orchestration of
The Apostles
. Thompson, a critic disposed to favor Elgar, inadvertently revealed the difficulty many critics had with Elgar's scoring when he remarked that “the magnificence and variety of the colouring are almost bewildering, and one only fears lest they should dazzle one's critical faculties and make it difficult to judge dispassionately so striking a work.”
⁸⁶
The danger that aesthetic judgments might be made as a result of sensual rather than intellectual processes was one that unnerved many British critics, as their comments about Elgar's music bear witness. A particularly striking example is C. L. Graves, the music critic of the
Spectator
, who described the effect of the “musical pandemonium” of Elgar's concert overture
In the South
in almost pathological terms as “painfully stimulating.” He harbored similar doubts about the First Symphony, where the working out of themes “borders at times on feverishness.” Graves continued by asserting that the “human ear is only capable of absorbing a certain volume of sound at a single hearing, and the continuous sonority of this symphony, which eschews those pauses and silences which furnish some of the most eloquent and affecting moments in the works of Beethoven and Schubert, begets a sense of physical fatigue.”
⁸⁷
Such “unhealthiness” was also noted by Ernest Walker. A fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, Walker's views typify some of the academic skepticism toward Elgar that we have already encountered with Fuller-Maitland and Hadow. Walker believed that Elgar's music lacked the “bracing sternness that lies at the root of the supreme music of the world,” and instead relied upon “a rather hot-house type of emotionalism.” That Walker considered this emotionalism to be inherently unnatural is made clear by his remark that the eponymous protagonist's confession of faith in
The Dream of Gerontius
, “though sincere, nevertheless suggest[s] an atmosphere of artificial flowers,” a choice of metaphor that hints at the work's evident affinities with
Parsifal.
⁸⁸

Walker's juxtaposition of Elgar's emotionalism with
Parsifal
is surely more than coincidence. As Byron Adams has noted, the so-called decadent aesthetic movement of 1890s Britain and France placed Wagner on a pedestal above all other composers, and
Parsifal
above his other works.
⁸⁹
Quoting Ellis Hansen, Adams observes that decadent aesthetics were pervaded by a connoisseurship of “failure and decay,” in art, language, or society, for decay itself was considered by the decadents as “seductive, mystical, or beautiful.”
Parsifal
, a work that celebrated the degeneration of a sick society at least as much as the regeneration which was the work's notional raison d'être, was thus particularly attractive to the decadent movement.
⁹⁰
Consequently, when critics write about Elgar's music in terms that suggest some sort of mental illness—or if they draw attention to excessive color, emotionalism, or sensuous beauty—they allude to decadent traits within his work. Perhaps no decadent signifier was more significant than fragmentation itself (whether motivic, thematic, or formal), as the following example from the review of
The Apostles
by Common Time illustrates:

Cleverness piled on cleverness, complexity making complexity more obscure is not great workmanship. You might as well admire the overornate designs of certain decadent periods of furniture designing, merely because all kinds of unexpected things are done in the thick plastering of decorations… . Many of the ingenious devices and well thought out complexities serve no end: they are mere scrolls and figures and gilding. You may admire each for itself, but you cannot pretend that each plays its part in the whole design.
⁹¹

Alongside fragmentation, the most striking decadent signifier for Elgar (and certainly the most Wagnerian) was the composer's harmony, then considered far more radical and colorful than perhaps it is today. Indeed, Maclean linked the names of Elgar and Debussy, labeling both as harmonic “extremists” in whose music it was difficult to recognize the “ordinary chords” of traditional harmony. (Maclean raised no such objections to Richard Strauss, whose harmonies “are not particularly strange and are in any case quite clear through all his orchestration and passing-notes.”)
⁹²
This view was echoed, though less pejoratively, by F. J. Sawyer, in a paper he delivered to the Incorporated Society of Musicians at their Lowestoft conference in January 1906, which subsequently appeared as an eight-part article in
Musical Opinion
titled “Modern Harmony: Exemplified in the Works of Elgar, Strauss and Debussy.” Almost three-quarters of Sawyer's article was concerned with the “richness of harmonic invention” of Elgar's most recent works, particularly
Gerontius, The Apostles
, and
In the South
. Compared with Elgar's daring, Strauss's harmony was “generally more normal and ordinary… . He does not seem so decidedly to have gone out of his way to invent fresh passages as Elgar has done; but, when we turn from these composers to the Frenchman Debussy, we seem to have left behind all former ideas and to be lost in a new world of sound.”
⁹³
For Sawyer, Elgar provided a link between Strauss and Debussy.

In his monograph on Elgar, Ernest Newman compares Debussy unfavorably to the English composer, describing the Frenchman's music as “neurotic, wherein the intellect plays so little part, while the nerves are just whipped or soddened by floods of tone of which the main element is the merely sensuous.”
⁹⁴
This depiction of Debussy as anti-intellectual, sensational, possibly febrile, and certainly feminine, provided Newman with a Mediterranean Other against whom he could posit Elgar as a strong, intellectual, masculine, pan-Germanic Self. But if one turns to Hadow's article a markedly different picture emerges. Hadow explicitly described Strauss as “decadent” while Debussy is “almost too fragile for daily life … never robust or vigorous”—and unable to “express the larger and broader aspects of humanity.”
⁹⁵
The similarity of Hadow's comments about Elgar's music—“Before the highest and noblest conceptions it invariably falters” and “want of largeness and serenity often appears in the handling of the music”—to his description of Debussy's art is striking: both compose miniaturist musical material that compares unfavorably to Parry's broad melodies and relies excessively on timbre. As post-Wagnerians, albeit of differing hues, Elgar, Debussy, and Strauss are all, to some extent, tarred with the same decadent brush.