Edward Elgar and His World (48 page)

Anything you do—or think of doing—will
always
interest me—and I shall do what I can to further your interests, the moment I get back and go
amongst people again
. It can only be done by talking—and when I run against the right person—as I hope to do—I shall
talk
no end!
¹⁰⁰

Elgar's letters show that Schuster soon became a valued friend. During 1903 the form of address changes from “My dear Schuster” (signing off “Ever yours, Edward Elgar”) to “My dear Frank” (signing off “Yours always, Edward”).
¹⁰¹
In 1904 Elgar dedicated the overture
In the South
to Schuster, writing to him: “You will find sunshine & romance &, … light-hearted gaiety mixed up in an orchestral dish which with my ordinary orchestral flavouring, cunningly blent, I have put in a warm cordial spice of love for you.”
¹⁰²
In 1904 Schuster came to stay with the Elgars at Plas Gwyn and gave them a sundial. Elgar wrote to thank him: “I love having it & am really happy; coming from you makes it perfect… . Also it is feminine, & only beams & smiles in sunshine.”
¹⁰³

Schuster traveled all over England to hear performances of Elgar's music as well as organizing them himself. He also specialized in lavish parties to celebrate premieres. The day before the opening of the Covent Garden Elgar Festival in 1904, for which Schuster acted not only as instigator but also as guarantor, he threw a dinner party and decorated the walls of his dining room with Elgar's initials and the names of his works spelled out in flowers.
¹⁰⁴
After the premiere of the Violin Concerto in 1910, Schuster gave a dinner party complete with menus headed with a theme from each of the three movements of the concerto at each of the three tables.
¹⁰⁵

With just as much thought, Schuster also arranged for important private hearings of Elgar's music. It was at his suggestion that W. H. Reed gave a private performance of the Violin Concerto (before Kreisler's London premiere) at the Gloucester festival of 1910. Of this event, Reed recalled, “Nearly all the prominent musicians engaged at the Festival were there… . The room was full; and all the lights were turned out except for some device arranged by Frank Schuster for lighting the piano and the violin stand.”
¹⁰⁶
Other notable performances included a concert at Schuster's London home in 1919 in which Albert Sammons, W. H. Reed, Raymond Jeremy, Felix Salmond, and William Murdoch played Elgar's string quartet, the quintet, and the slow movement from the violin sonata, with Adrian Boult turning the pages. This concert was repeated in public at the Wigmore Hall a month later.
¹⁰⁷
At Alice Elgar's funeral it was Schuster who suggested and organized W. H. Reed's quartet to play the slow movement from the string quartet—a touching gesture of friendship for which Elgar was deeply grateful.
¹⁰⁸
To celebrate Elgar's seventieth birthday in 1927, Schuster presented an “Homage to Elgar” in the form of a chamber music concert at The Hut. This was the occasion famously described by Osbert Sitwell, one of several members of the younger generation who were present, as a ghostly gathering of relics of the Edwardian age, with Elgar himself as “a personification of Colonel Bogey.”
¹⁰⁹

Schuster was clearly extremely important to Elgar, and not just for his money and contacts. After Schuster's death in 1927, Elgar wrote to Frank's sister Adela:

I have said in music, as well as I was permitted, what I felt long ago,—in F[rank]'s own overture “In the South” & again in the final section of the second symphony—both in the key he loved most I believe (E flat)—warm & joyous with a grave & radiating serenity: this was my feeling when the overture was dedicated to him 24 years ago & is only intensified now.
¹¹⁰

Elgar's occasional discomfort in Schuster's world of high society and his embarrassment at the loud behavior of some of Schuster's more outrageous young friends has also been documented. Henry Wood described Elgar being “very silent and stand-offish” at the party Schuster gave before the 1904 Elgar Festival.
¹¹¹
However, most of Elgar's discomfort and rudeness seems to have started in the early 1920s.
¹¹²
This was a time when Schuster, like many hitherto wealthy people, found himself in reduced financial circumstances, possibly due to the economic aftermath of the world war. An emotional letter to Boult, written on September 3, 1921, describes Schuster's last moments at his London home: “It is 9.25, and in five minutes the Juggernaut vans will be here to tear my household goods from my arms.” The letter ends: “22 Old Queen St. bids farewell to its dear schoolboy [illegible] friend.”
¹¹³
A couple of years later Elgar wrote to Alice Stuart-Wortley:

Frank called one day—he is at the Hut—Bankrupt he says & very vague: this afternoon he was sitting in the back of a smart car—the young man was driving with an
odd looking
—I hate to say it—
”bit of fluff”!!
in flamboyant PINK on the front seat, all laughing loudly; they did not see me & I was glad for I shd. have been thoroughly ashamed.
¹¹⁴

Would a less wealthy Schuster perhaps have become a less attractive friend to Elgar? Schuster remained a loyal supporter to the end and his financial situation seems to have improved gradually. He was certainly able to leave Elgar a considerable sum of money. In 1928 Schuster's sister Adela wrote to Elgar to tell him about one of the clauses of Schuster's will: “To my friend, Sir Edward Elgar O.M. who has saved my country from the reproach of having produced no composer worthy to rank with the Great Masters, the sum of £7,000.”
¹¹⁵

Immersed in a private musical world that occasionally overlapped with the public world of the big choral festivals, clearly homosexual and continually perceived as “not English” (despite the Eton education), Schuster is a central figure of the feminized and overlooked space that was so supportive and vital to Elgar's musical career. Adams suggests that it was Schuster's homosexuality that made Elgar so ambivalent toward him.
¹¹⁶
Given the late-nineteenth-Century preoccupation with establishing the general manliness of British musicians, Schuster's remarkable yet discomfiting influence thus begins to raise many important questions about Elgar's relationship to the private musical world over time.

Perhaps Elgar's discomfort was a reaction not only to Schuster's camp behavior and what it signified but also to the general frivolity sometimes apparent in Schuster's upper-class friends. Did Elgar feel that this private musical world was one in which he—the self-made, hardworking son of a shopkeeper—never really belonged, despite all attempts to welcome him? It is also possible that Elgar's behavior toward Schuster reflects establishment unease at a musical world so different from the official world of British music. As Elgar himself became a fixture of the British musical establishment—as his works were widely performed at important public venues and he received official honors and recognition—so he may have taken on more of those conventional beliefs and attitudes.

There is a distinct discomfort, not just from Elgar but from later commentators and scholars as well, in acknowledging the importance of a world that was not obsessed with finding manly qualities in its musicians or their music. This was a world that opened its doors to women, to lesbians and gay men, to foreigners, to Catholics and Jews—to all those who were different and faced exclusion from the Anglican, patriarchal mainstream.

In 1907 Ernest Walker published his
History of Music in England
. He described Elgar as a composer who has “preferred to live outside the whirl of the recognized musical circles, and has held no official position of any importance.”
¹¹⁷
Walker continued by dismissing the private musical world in ways that were echoed throughout the twentieth century by other commentators:

Elgar, till he was considerably over thirty years of age, was known chiefly by, so to speak, “smart society” music—the
Salut d'amour
kind of production that seeks and finds its reward in the West End drawing room, clever and shallow and artistically quite unpromising; and even in the days of his high fame, he has had … the heavy millstone of aristocratic fashionableness hanging round his neck, and may over and over again well have prayed to be delivered from his friends.
¹¹⁸

With this paragraph, the misunderstanding of the West End drawing room, as well as the attempts to distance Elgar from the musical salons—surely the most nurturing of the musical worlds that he inhabited—had begun in earnest.

On the current British 20–pound note Elgar is depicted not only by an angel representing one of his works and a venue representing his public triumphs but also by the reclining figure of St. Cecilia, female patron saint of music. Probably unwittingly, the Bank of England designers have acknowledged that beyond the military moustache, music itself is perhaps best and most immediately symbolized by a feminine image. And despite himself, did Elgar ever acknowledge that he might have been lost without a world that gave him a space in which he could drop the mask of manly grit and vigor, and which gave his music such an appreciative, knowledgeable, and supportive audience?

NOTES

1. See
www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/about/withdrawn_notes.htm
.

2. The Bank of England has claimed that Elgar's bushy moustache acts as a useful deterrent to forgers. Wulstan Atkins remarked: “He would be the first to appreciate that the complexity of that would be very difficult to copy, and it would have given him real pleasure to know that.” See BBC News, 22 June 1999.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/the_economy/375091.stm
.

3. Proms 2006 (
http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/
) offered the world premiere of
Pomp and Circumstance
March no. 6, realized from sketches by Anthony Payne. Charlotte Higgins, “‘New' Version of Pomp and Circumstance for the Proms,”
Guardian
, 28 April 2006;
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1763456,00.html
.

4. In March 2006, “Nimrod” from the
Enigma
Variations came sixth in the top ten classical downloads from iTunes.
Pomp and Circumstance
March no. 1 was seventh. Charlotte Higgins, “Big Demand for Classical Downloads Is Music to Ears of Record Industry,”
Guardian
, 28 March 2006.
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/netmusic/story/0,,1741087,00.html
.

5.
Radiance 2: Music for Wine and Candlelight
(Denon DEN 17488, 2005);
Perfect Summer Wedding
(Naxos Regular CD 8.557979, 2006).

6. “Manliness in Music,”
The Musical Times
30 (August 1889): 460–61.

7. Charles L. Graves,
Hubert Parry: His Life and Works
(London: Macmillan, 1926), 365.

8. “‘The Sketch': Photographic Interviews LXII—Dr. Edward Elgar,”
The Sketch
(7 October 1903): 419.

9. Edward Speyer,
My Life and Friends
(London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1937), 174.

10. Edward Elgar to Frank Schuster, 8 May 1910, quoted in
Letters of Edward Elgar and Other Writings
, ed. Percy M. Young (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1956), 195.

11. Elgar immediately offered himself as Master of the King's Musick when the post fell vacant in 1924; at the same time he was hoping for a peerage. See Jerrold Northrop Moore,
Edward Elgar: A Creative Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 769–70.

12. It is surprising how little attention has been paid to the private musical milieus by scholars working in the field of British music studies. Work such as Jeremy Dibble's essay “Edward Dannreuther and the Orme Square Phenomenon,” in
Music and British Culture,
1785–1914:
Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich
, ed. Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), are all too rare.

13. For a discussion of Elgar's attitude toward his own “salon music,” see Daniel M. Grimley's essay in this volume.

14. That the private musical world was such a feminized space is doubtless largely responsible for its neglect by musicologists and music historians. In the world view of these scholars, it was only the public, masculine musical spaces that were worth investigating. Feminized spaces were simply assumed to be trivial, frivolous, and insignificant.

15. The diaries are in the British Library: Additional Manuscripts 46254–46266. A useful selection has been published:
Mary Gladstone (Mrs. Drew) Her Diaries and Letters
, ed. Lucy Masterman (London: Methuen, 1930).

16. Masterman,
Mary Gladstone
, 52.

17. Ibid., 100–101. Wilma Neruda (1839–1911), born in Moravia, was a frequent visitor to England where she was a much celebrated and loved performer, appearing at high-profile concerts throughout the country and doing much to popularize the violin as an instrument suitable for women to play. In 1888 she married the naturalized English pianist and conductor Charles Hallé.

18. Ibid., 123.

19. Ibid., 191.

20. Ibid., 291.

21. Ibid., 121.

22. Moore,
Edward Elgar: A Creative Life
, 89–91.

23. “Musical Notes,”
The Monthly Musical Record
(September 1885): 208.

24.
The Monthly Musical Record
(June 1889): 137.

25.
The Musical Times
21 (1880): 600.

26.
The Musical Times
23 (1882): 82.

27.
The Musical World
64 (5 June 1886): 366.

28. Margaret Myers,
Blowing Her Own Trumpet: European Ladies Orchestras and Other Women Musicians 1870–1950 in Sweden
(Goteborg: Goteborg University, 1993), 144.