David Matthews: A wistful sophisticate
Premise Checker
The TLS March 11, 2005
THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO ELGAR. Daniel Grimley and Julian Rushton,
editors. 253pp. Cambridge University Press. Pounds 50 (paperback, Pounds
17.99). US $50 $17.99). - 0 521 82623 3.
ELGAR. Child of dreams. Jerrold Northrop Moore. 212pp. Faber. Pounds
14.99. - 0 571 22337 0.
At the public premiere, in February 1998, of Anthony Payne's masterly
reconstruction of Elgar's Third Symphony, the audience in a packed Royal
Festival Hall gave the work and its composer by proxy a standing ovation.
As I enthusiastically joined in the applause, I couldn't also help
reflecting, somewhat ruefully, that no piece written today would ever be
likely to receive such acclaim at its first performance. What the audience
was hearing was new to them, yet their response was more than a
straightforward reaction to a work in a familiar language; it demonstrated
a longing for music that expresses heartfelt warmth and openness of
feeling, qualities that, sadly, are rare in most of the music of our own
time. Edward Elgar is the best-loved of British composers, and this is
surely because, like his contemporary Gustav Mahler, he speaks to us
directly of things that matter. There is something about his melodies in
particular that irresistibly moves us: their pent-up passion seems to
express the very essence of the English character, apparently restrained
but seething with emotion just below the surface.
The touchingly unselfconscious statements that Elgar made about the way he
composed, several of which are quoted in Christopher Kent's essay on his
compositional methods in The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, edited by
Daniel Grimley and Julian Rushton, give a clue to this directness of
utterance.
Elgar's belief that music is all around us, that he only had to listen
attentively to be able to write it down, might sound naive -the Hollywood
idea of the composer - but with him at least it was true (though the
Hollywood version might play down the hard work that went into acquiring a
technique adequate to develop the ideas he was hearing). He will not have
known that he was instinctively following Ruskin's advice to the artist to
go directly to nature. For him, nature was most suggestive when it was his
own: away from his native Worcestershire, the ideas would not come so
readily. In Elgar: Child of dreams, Jerrold Northrop Moore lays great
emphasis on the child Elgar as father of the man. He traces almost
everything in the music back to the first tune Elgar wrote down at the age
of ten, when he returned to Broadheath, his birthplace, to spend a holiday
at a nearby farm. Elgar later used this tune in his Wand of Youth suite.
Moore relates its characteristic rocking rhythm and ascending and
descending shape to the contour of the Malvern Hills which dominated the
landscape of his childhood. Elgar would probably have agreed with Moore's
thesis that the most revealing -and most quoted -statement he made about
his music is from a 1921 letter:
I am still at heart the dreamy child who used to be found in the reeds by
Severn side with a sheet of paper trying to fix the sounds & longing for
something very great . . . . I am still looking for This.
The fifteen contributors to The Cambridge Companion provide a rich fund of
new thoughts on the man and his music. Robin Holloway speaks up fervently
for the neglected early choral works, making a strong case for The Black
Knight as a worthy sibling to Mahler's Das klagende Lied; Byron Adams
intriguingly draws the Elgar of The Dream of Gerontius and The Apostles
into the perfumed world of Wildean decadence. The whole range of Elgar's
minor works, most of them hardly ever performed today, is comprehensively
covered, rather at the expense of the major orchestral pieces -but these
have been adequately discussed elsewhere in the Elgar literature. Many of
the writers provide arresting insights into Elgar's character, which build
up a fresh and detailed portrait of his complex personality, with all its
contradictions. The familiar image of the tweed-jacketed squire with his
dogs, his love of country walks and his reactionary politics, contrasts
with the sophisticate who happily embraced many aspects of modern life: he
had a telephone installed as early as 1904; he liked cars and planes (in
1933, at the age of seventy-five, he flew to Paris to record his Violin
Concerto with the young Yehudi Menuhin and to visit Delius); he was one of
the first composers to exploit the new mediums of the gramophone and the
radio; he even flirted with advertising, endorsing Du Maurier cigarettes
and receiving free monthly supplies.
These may have helped to kill him: he died of throat cancer.
In Elgar's music too, there are inconsistencies. Byron Adams wonders why
he was so dismissive of his own oratorios during his 1933 visit to Delius.
Could it simply have been gentlemanly tact in the face of Delius's known
disdain for religious music? We do not know if the loss of his faith in
later life was enough to make Elgar repudiate the works in which he had
once asserted his belief, or rather his struggle to believe -for Gerontius
hardly expresses a calm, Bach-like confidence, any more than do Mahler's
Second or Eighth Symphonies. Both Mahler and Elgar strove to encompass a
religious view of life, and their aspirations -of "something very great"
-are the more moving for the uncertainties that accompany them. This is
not the only area in which Mahler and Elgar draw close: both of them also
had to suffer accusations of lack of taste because of their popularism,
their uninhibited use of a vernacular language. But Elgar's public voice,
his Edward-ianism, is most unlike Mahler, who was quite incapable of
writing occasional music. During his lifetime, Elgar was compared with
Kipling, another daring employer of the vernacular, yet Kipling was much
more a creature of his time, and his reputation has faded accordingly.
Elgar's so-called imperialist manner was in fact much more rooted in the
past than in the present -in visions of medieval chivalry, above all in
the plays of Shakespeare, of which he had a scholar's knowledge. The
quintessential Elgarian work is Falstaff: here his public and private
voices come together and, at the end, chivalric splendour fades into
wistfulness, then final darkness, with that searing sense of loss which is
rarely absent from Elgar's music.
Moore is eloquent on the topic of loss. His short book is a distillation
of his much larger Edward Elgar: A creative life, published in 1984 and
generally acknowledged to be the most authoritative work on the composer
to whom, as Timothy Day remarks in The Cambridge Companion, Moore "clearly
feels reverence and an almost mystical attachment".
Indeed one might almost imagine its exquisitely wrought prose as an
autobiography dictated from beyond the grave, so empathetic is Moore to
Elgar's hypersensitive personality. But the new book ends on a
disappointingly sour note. Edward Elgar: A creative life had included an
extensive account of Elgar's attempt to write his Third Symphony to a BBC
commission in the last year of his life. Since the publication of that
earlier volume, Anthony Payne's "elaboration" of Elgar's sketches has
confounded almost all those who had doubted that such a splendidly
convincing work could emerge from such apparent incompleteness. Not Moore,
however, who, taking at face value the composer's expressed wish that "no
one must tinker" with the work (though disregarding Elgar's equally
authoritative remark to his doctor that "If I can't complete the Third
Symphony, someone will complete it -or write a better one -in fifty or
five hundred years"), dismisses Payne's version without mentioning it by
name: "if (Elgar) himself had drawn no synthesis from the disparate
materials", he concludes, "how void of meaning must be any outside attempt
to do it in his place".
Moore now even seems to want to diminish what Elgar himself achieved by
distorting the facts: "A second subject rose apparently from a friendship
with a woman half his age who had pursued him", he writes, though he knows
well that it was Elgar who ardently pursued the woman in question -Vera
Hockman -and that Elgar wrote "V. H.'s own theme" over the sketch of the
second subject of the first movement referred to. It is one of his most
affecting melodies. (The full story of Elgar's last muse, whose
inspiration fired his final burst of creativity, can be read in Kevin
Allen's book Elgar in Love). Like the Third Symphony, the realization of
the Piano Concerto which Robert Walker has worked on for many years (and
which is now available as a recording from Dutton) is based on incomplete
sketches and fragments, but in this case also some piano improvisations
that Elgar committed to disc in 1929, the same year that he wrote down a
version of the middle movement as a short score for two pianos and gave it
to Harriet Cohen. Elgar began sketching ideas for a piano concerto in
1913, and was still thinking about the piece shortly before his death.
From the evidence of Walker's realization, however, Elgar's ideas hadn't
reached as convincing a formal coherence as in the Third Symphony. The
first movement, for instance, begins with a haunting melody in Elgar's
favourite rocking rhythm, which Elgar orchestrated himself; the mood is
similar to the first movement of the Cello Concerto. The contrasting
material, however, takes us into very different territory, sometimes
recalling the urbane jauntiness and pageantry of the Cockaigne overture:
this material sits uneasily alongside the first idea, and I personally
would have preferred a first movement centred firmly and perhaps
exclusively on the emotional world of its opening. Then the contrast with
the middle movement, a light hearted and charming intermezzo, would have
been more marked and effective, and jauntiness and pageantry left for the
finale.
As it is, the finale is not totally convincing and contains a lot of
note-spinning. Walker has done an admirable job in assembling and scoring
these sketches in a convincingly authentic manner, and the opening is so
good that it alone justifies performing the Concerto; yet I was left
unsatisfied.
This is a quite different case from the Third Symphony where he was
overtaken by illness and death; if Elgar had really wanted to complete the
Concerto, he had plenty of time and opportunity to do so. But it seems
that his heart wasn't finally in it.
Matthew Fields
like this. I don't buy the wistful and no composer today business one
bit.
--
Matthew H. Fields http://www.umich.edu/~fields
Music: Splendor in Sound
To be great, do better and better. Don't wait for talent: no such thing.
Brights have a naturalistic world-view. http://www.the-brights.net/