The Cambridge Companion to Elgar. Ed. by Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton. pp. xix + 253. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, £50/£17.99. ISBN 0-521-53363-5/-82623-3.)
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<p>‘From among the crudities which one of the many—why are there so many?—unbrilliant university men has used in reference to myself, the following comes to mind. I am said to have “left the humdrum atmosphere of Worcester for” etc.’ Even in his mid-seventies Elgar was still smarting at perceived slights about his origins, and was sufficiently resentful of the academic musical establishment in Britain to begin the Foreword to his boyhood friend Hubert Leicester’s pleasant book <italic>Forgotten Worcester</italic> (1930) on a sour note. He was not altogether deluded, though. A storm was soon to blow up around the remarks on Elgar in the <italic>Handbuch der Musikgeschichte</italic> edited by Guido Adler when the second edition appeared in 1930. They were written by Edward J. Dent, by then Professor of Music at Cambridge, distinguished author and critic, and cosmopolitan President of the International Society for Contemporary Music. Dent devoted only a few paragraphs to Elgar, but in that short space uttered a handful of pungent phrases that have since become infamous and that rankle with Elgarians to this day. For instance: ‘He was . . . a Catholic, and more or less a self-taught man, who possessed little of the literary culture of Parry and Stanford’; ‘To English ears Elgar’s music is too emotional and not quite free from vulgarity. His orchestral works—two symphonies, concertos for violin and cello, and several overtures—are vivid in colour, but pompous in style and of a too deliberate chivalrousness [<italic>Ritterlichkeit</italic>] of expression.’</p>
<p>But these two extracts represent only a single moment in a far longer history of ambivalence between Elgar and British university scholars. He began his musical career as a teacher and professional orchestral violinist; he lacked academic musical training and came to distrust the culture of Oxford and Cambridge and the London colleges. His brief stint as a university professor at Birmingham (1905–8) was troubled and controversial, not least on account of the barbs he directed at those very targets during his semi-public lectures. The ill feelings were reciprocated, and after his death Elgar’s reputation in the academy remained low for many years, especially at Cambridge, where the legacy of his sometime adversary Stanford was subtly felt. British Ph.D. theses on Elgar were few and far between for most of the twentieth century, and research was left to unaffiliated scholars. Even in the mid-1990s, when, as a Master’s student, I mooted the idea of a doctorate on Elgar to a potential supervisor, I was gently guided in other directions. Studying Elgar was not a good career move, it seemed. It was ‘something you can always come back to later’.</p>
<p>In fact, by that time things were already changing. At the start of the twenty-first century Oxford awarded two D.Phils. on Elgar, and he will figure prominently in several forthcoming dissertations from other universities. English-language musicology journals began to publish articles on his music, while conferences, study days, and monographs—including one from an American author—added impetus to the academic revival (see Julian Rushton, <italic>Elgar: ‘Enigma’ Variations</italic> (Cambridge, 1999) and Charles Edward McGuire, <italic>Elgar’s Oratorios: The Creation of an Epic Narrative</italic> (Aldershot, 2002)). Several more monographs and multi-author volumes are expected in the near future to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth in 2007. By a strange irony, Elgar, who venerated the canon of German masterworks and fervently aspired to breathe new life into it with symphonies, concertos, and symphonic poems of his own, has benefited from the New Musicology’s deconstruction of that canon and its re-evaluation of neglected or disparaged repertories. Scholars need no longer worry that his music is ‘not quite free from vulgarity’. Indeed, the vulgarity might make it all the more interesting.</p>
<p>That insight has fortunately taken some of the immediate heat out of discourse on Elgar, for he has the power to rouse passions unlike any other modern British composer. Somehow the mental image of Vaughan Williams the upper-middle-class gentleman poking around among farm labourers does not polarize British opinion in the same way as that of Elgar the shopkeeper’s son marrying a general’s daughter, climbing his way through rural Worcestershire society, creating the soundtrack for royalty and Empire with hit tunes, and then losing faith in it all and rounding off his oeuvre with lush, autumnal elegies. Elgar’s petit bourgeois origins, his Catholicism, his music’s characteristic mood of ennobled melancholy, the unashamed popular appeal of his melodies, and his nostalgia for childhood and the countryside strike chords—or raw nerves—in a nation that has recently experienced decolonization, post-colonial immigration, and deindustrialization, and that, despite all efforts, still bears the imprints of Victorian attitudes to class. Elgar himself carried through his later life a collection of contradictory frustrations, including anger at a system that he believed marginalized and denigrated him, and embarrassment at the lowly origins that occasioned that very denigration. There are thus plenty of unresolved questions for <italic>The Cambridge Companion to Elgar</italic> to get to grips with.</p>
<p>The editors have assembled an impressive list of contributors, most of whom (but by no means all) hold academic positions in Britain. There is a healthy mixture of junior and senior scholars. The sixteen chapters fall into two types: those that cover parts of Elgar’s oeuvre and those that set Elgar in context or deal with aspects of his creative life (links with British contemporaries, publishers, compositional methods, recording, broadcasting, aspects of reception). Biography is largely eschewed (the field is well covered in the existing Elgar literature), although the editors’ Introduction makes an exception, sketching Elgar’s life, but dwelling on the problems of interpreting it and also indicating some significant themes in Elgar’s reception (modernism, Empire, landscape). They begin tellingly with two of Elgar’s most oft-quoted letters: one to A. J. Jaeger delivering reprimands to respectively God and the English public after the failure of the premiere of <italic>The Dream of Gerontius</italic>, and one to Sidney Colvin from 1921 memorably linking childhood vision, idyllic landscape, and smouldering resentment.</p>
<p>Most of the early chapters use Elgar’s personal complexities as a starting point, but turn the tables in one way or another. Jeremy Dibble (‘Elgar and his British Contemporaries’) aims to break down exaggerated perceptions of Elgar’s detachment and outsider status by examining his relationship to contemporary composers and moving him a little closer to the mainstream of musical culture in Britain. The chapter seems to conduct a dialogue with parts of Michael Kennedy’s <italic>Portrait of Elgar</italic> (2nd edn. (Oxford, 1982), esp. pp. 62–4 and 150–6), with which it should be read in conjunction for a clear picture of the issues at stake. I was refreshed and partly convinced by the argument, though not completely. For instance, Dibble quotes many of Parry’s positive judgements on Elgar’s music but omits his intemperate remarks on <italic>Gerontius</italic> (which are in line with Parry’s view of Catholicism in general), and Stanford’s snide comment on the work is relegated to a footnote.</p>
<p>Robert Anderson (‘Elgar and his Publishers’) points out that in some ways the music shop that later caused Elgar so much embarrassment was an advantage to him, introducing him to the ways of publishers and their respective specialisms. The firm of Novello does not emerge especially well from this valuable chapter, and one wonders whether Elgar was wise to remain relatively loyal to them—at least, after the death of Jaeger. Diana McVeagh (‘Elgar’s Musical Language: The Shorter Instrumental Works’) likewise begins by stressing the advantages of the shop and the rich, practical early education it gave Elgar. This wide-ranging essay is filled with insight into Elgar’s characteristic idiom, its development in the early and lighter instrumental works, and the influences that helped to shape it.</p>
<p>Christopher Kent (‘Magic by Mosaic: Some Aspects of Elgar’s Compositional Methods’) compresses an enormous topic into a single brief chapter. He describes Elgar’s sources of inspiration (places, landscapes, literature), his methods when at his desk or piano, and the evidence of his working methods provided by his sketchbooks. Elgar often built up pieces from fragments in a ‘mosaic’ method, which proved surprisingly effective for him. He also reused and relocated material in inventive ways. Kent concludes that there are further opportunities to broaden the area of Elgar sketch studies. It is hard not to be struck by the discrepancy between the careful procedures evinced in the drafts, proofs, and sketches and Elgar’s repeated insistence that music was ‘written on the skies for you to note down’ and ‘in the air . . . all around us’ so that you can simply ‘take as much as you require’. Perhaps these Romantic tropes helped him project the source of his music onto the objective world and deny its real, and slightly discomfiting, origin: his memories of other people’s music learnt mainly in the shop and among the orchestral violins.</p>
<p>Robin Holloway (‘The Early Choral Works’) is faced with a difficult brief: to make sense of some of the finer manifestations of genres that were immensely prestigious in their time but which soon went out of fashion and stayed that way. It is hard to imagine that the Victorian oratorio or cantata, as genres, will ever enjoy revivals. However, some of Elgar’s choral works from the 1890s contain fine music, and Holloway makes a thoughtful case for them, especially <italic>The Black Knight</italic> and <italic>Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf</italic>. The accounts sometimes verge on the blow-by-blow, but the prose is enjoyably sparky and informal.</p>
<p>The later choral works—<italic>Gerontius</italic>, <italic>The Apostles</italic>, and <italic>The Kingdom</italic>—are more familiar, and the first of them is securely established in the repertory. Introductory guides are available elsewhere, so a different approach is justified. Byron Adams’s account (‘Elgar’s Later Oratorios: Roman Catholicism, Decadence and the Wagnerian Dialectic of Shame and Grace’) certainly provides it. Indeed Adams assumes basic familiarity with the works, and advances a startling and subtle interpretation of their meaning both in the context of their time and culture and in Elgar’s compositional career. Despite the apparent artistic gulf separating Elgar and Oscar Wilde (the former would surely have professed alarm at any proposed association), Adams finds a network of connections linking Wilde and the movements of Decadence and Aestheticism with Catholicism, Cardinal Newman’s poem, Wagner (especially <italic>Parsifal</italic>, the model for <italic>Gerontius</italic> in some ways), and Elgar’s music and choice of subjects. Through his Wagnerian language of chromaticism and the characters of Gerontius, Mary Magdalen, Peter, and Judas, Elgar was able to articulate aspects of his own deepest feelings of shame, disloyalty, and disillusion. He trod a delicate path, for, as Adams shows, the oratorios at times came close to an atmosphere that was regarded at the time as distinctly ‘un-English’ and ‘unmanly’. The chapter stands out from the rest, and makes an unruly sibling for the others. However, it is the most thought-provoking—and at times moving—in the book.</p>
<p>John Butt (‘Roman Catholicism and Being Musically English: Elgar’s Church and Organ Music’) continues the theme of Elgar’s religion and its ambivalent relationship to his musical nationality, arguing that his Catholic background has been neglected in biographies but provides a key to his musical language. Butt’s discussion of Gregorian chant and pentatonic elements in Elgar’s style is revealing, as is his comparison of Elgar’s Anglican and Catholic chants. Although several books have attempted to come to grips with Elgar’s Catholic heritage, their insights have been partial, and there is surely more work to be done in this area.</p>
<p>The next three chapters deal with the major instrumental compositions. This is familiar territory, but all the authors find something new to say. Daniel M. Grimley, in ‘ “A smiling with a sigh”: The Chamber Music and Works for Strings’, situates these works somewhere between homely landscape influences (Wales, the Wye valley, Sussex) and Continental musical models (Bach, Fauré, Franck). He is especially interesting on what he calls the ‘heroic masculine subjectivity’ of the chamber music, ‘whose authority is continually denied, refused or undermined’. Julian Rushton (‘In Search of the Symphony: Orchestral Music to 1908’) gives a brief but expert overview of the shorter pieces, concert overtures, ‘Enigma’ Variations, and Symphony no. 1. Like several other commentators of recent decades, Rushton offers a negative reading of the symphony’s seemingly triumphant peroration: it seems that modern—or rather, postmodern—critics find it hard to hear this music ‘straight’, especially given our awareness of the ironic discourse surrounding the symphonies of Mahler, Shostakovich, and other twentieth-century composers. Christopher Mark (‘The Later Orchestral Music (1910–34)’) echoes Grimley by tracing the progress of a musical ‘subject’ through various public and private spaces in the Violin Concerto and Symphony no. 2. He is especially sensitive to the idyllic, the melancholic, and the nostalgic traits in Elgar’s later music: the account of <italic>Falstaff</italic> focuses on the first ‘Dream Interlude’, while that of the Cello Concerto analyses the way the music conveys melancholy. Whether Anthony Payne’s ‘elaboration’ of the sketches for a Symphony no. 3 deserves the place it is allocated in this chapter is more doubtful.</p>
<p>J. P. E. Harper-Scott (‘Elgar’s Unwumbling: The Theatre Music’) shares with Holloway the difficult task of coming to terms with repertory that now seems dated or even disturbing. The problematic pieces include <italic>The Crown of India</italic> (imperialism), <italic>The Fringes of the Fleet</italic> (rumbustious shanties), <italic>Le drapeau belge</italic> (militarism), and <italic>The Starlight Express</italic> (wartime escapism). Harper-Scott wisely acknowledges the drawbacks of these works while making a case for a balanced assessment. The theatre pieces are mainly from the period 1914–18, and Charles McGuire (‘Functional Music: Imperialism, the Great War, and Elgar as Popular Composer’) covers some of the same territory, along with Elgar’s pre- and post-war ceremonial and patriotic compositions. McGuire is alert to the history of the reception of this music, within which he adroitly positions his account. These two essays are welcome, even though Elgar’s wartime music has recently been examined in some detail (Lewis Foreman (ed.), ‘<italic>Oh, my horses!’: Elgar and the Great War</italic> (Rickmansworth, 2001); reviewed in <italic>Music & Letters</italic>, 85 (2004), 325–9).</p>
<p>During the 1920s, when Elgar was no longer composing works of stature, he was not musically idle. Timothy Day (‘Elgar and Recording’) and Jenny Doctor (‘Broadcasting’s Ally: Elgar and the BBC’) explain what he was doing. Although both topics have been explored elsewhere, the contributors bring them up to date with current thinking. Day puts Elgar’s work in the context of developments in recording technology and analyses his motivation for recording, his conducting technique and performance style, and the significance of his recordings for today’s performers and scholars. Doctor views Elgar’s relationship with the BBC in the light of the organization’s music policy in those early days. She concludes that the association was symbiotic. Elgar helped the BBC to shape its musical identity by providing a sense of stability and tradition, standing almost as a national icon, while also appealing across social boundaries and offering a varied range of music to appeal to all tastes. Given the current musicological climate it seems likely that Elgar’s recording and broadcasting activities will be further explored in the future.</p>
<p>Aidan Thomson (‘Elgar in German Criticism’) offers an unusual perspective. We are used to thinking of Elgar as a relatively unexportable product for much of the twentieth century, but in fact his profile was high in central Europe in the 1900s. Thomson extracts several themes from German Elgar criticism of that time, including Englishness, Catholicism, mysticism, and landscape, and is as enlightening on the cultural work Elgar could do for the German critics as on the insights they brought to the music. Given that Elgar’s rise to national renown in Britain owed much to performances of <italic>Gerontius</italic> in Germany, this topic is another that deserves still more attention.</p>
<p>In a book such as <italic>The Cambridge Companion to Elgar</italic>, which endeavours to give a rounded portrait of a composer and a snapshot of current research, there are inevitable pressures on space, and it is only too easy for the reviewer to point out gaps in coverage. Nevertheless I would like to indicate two areas of omission. Most notably, there is little explicit writing on reception outside the pages of the Introduction and Thomson’s essay, yet, given the provocative issues of class, politics, and religion that surround Elgar, along with his iconic status and his music’s entrenched position within national ceremonial, the story of his reception in Britain over the twentieth century is of vital importance, and unsurprisingly enjoys a growing literature. Indeed the issue looms large on page 1 of the <italic>Companion</italic> as a ‘bate’ to the reader. As regards the music, aside from the discussion of theatre pieces there is little reference to Elgar’s solo songs, with either piano or orchestral accompaniment (including <italic>Sea Pictures</italic>), or his numerous part songs. Elgar may have denigrated the latter genre in private letters, but as a composer he took it seriously at times. He was inspired by the ideals of the competitive choral festivals such as that at Morecambe, and there are some masterpieces among his part songs. His enthusiasm for this aspect of Edwardian musical life represents a chapter in his career that remains to be written and understood in detail.</p>
<p>Finally, a small textual point. Percy M. Young’s edition of Elgar’s University of Birmingham lectures (Edward Elgar, <italic>A Future for English Music and Other Lectures</italic> (London, 1968)) confusingly uses small capitals to indicate emphasis in Elgar’s text and italics to indicate passages in the final typescripts that are significantly altered from drafts and earlier versions of the text. When quoted elsewhere, the italics should be removed and small capitals converted into italics if the prose is not to look eccentric or even suggest illiteracy on Elgar’s part (see the <italic>Companion</italic>, pp. 16–17).</p>
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