Elgar Studies

Raymond Monk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351568500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Edward Elgar rose from obscurity to become the most popular English composer of his day. Elgar's music is known world-wide and works such as the 'Enigma Variations' and 'The Dream of Gerontius' together with the two symphonies and the two concertos have established him as one of the greatest British composers of all time. The Elgar Society was founded in 1951 to further the cause of Elgar's music and the present volume of essays has been compiled as an expression of gratitude for the work that it has done. These essays reflect the variety and richness of Elgar's music and the debate that this music continues to encourage. The book is not simply for academics however; lovers of music in general will find much to entertain them and it will add greatly to our appreciation of Elgar.

1 Elgar’s musical apprenticeship

Peter Dennison

When in 1900 the University of Cambridge conferred an honorary doctorate of music on Edward Elgar, the Public Orator referred to him as ‘autodidactes’, and from that time, when he was on the threshold of a widely-acclaimed mastery, Elgar was often described as self-taught. This was an epithet that he himself endorsed, and a few years later he elaborated on its significance in his career.

When I resolved to become a composer and found that the exigencies of life would prevent me from getting any tuition, the only thing to do was to teach myself. I read everything, played everything, and heard everything I possibly could … I am self-taught in the matter of harmony, counterpoint, form, and, in short, the whole of the ‘mystery’ of music.¹

Elgar had resolved to become a composer by 1873, the year in which he turned sixteen. From that time, and propelled largely by his own instincts, he began a thorough study of music, its techniques and language through playing, principally as an orchestral violinist, and through voracious listening and reading.

Elgar’s musical apprenticeship can be said to have virtually concluded by 1899, the year of the Enigma Variations, his first unqualified masterpiece. Nevertheless his style remained susceptible to major external influences until about the end of 1902. In that year he made his last visit to Bayreuth and also came to know Richard Strauss and a number of his major works most closely. It was also the year of the first performance in London of an orchestral work by Debussy, Prelude à l’après-midi d’un faune, music with which Elgar shared some common lineage from Wagner but with which he felt little empathy. Throughout the years of his apprenticeship Elgar had avidly sought out music from Europe and Russia, but now for the first time the work of a major new European composer did not attract him. By this stage his particular canons of taste had been formed and his musical apprenticeship had finally come to an end. Elgar’s mastery, which was achieved finally at the age of 42, was a product of his emerging genius and those diverse musical experiences that he had been pursuing with such singularity of purpose since the early 1870s. It is an investigation into those musical experiences, and their role in the making of his mastery, that is the subject of this study.

Through the preservation of a wealth of material, largely at the Elgar Birthplace Museum at Broadheath, one can build a substantial picture of his formative musical experiences.² Elgar kept the programmes of most of the concerts that he attended as listener and performer, and in his earlier years he annotated some of these. Appendices 1 and 2 list the most significant and substantial works by other composers, British and European, as far as it has been possible to trace, that Elgar heard or performed in public up to about 1902, and particularly significant works heard or performed between 1902 and 1913³ The tables omit only works of the type that Elgar himself dismissed as without interest. They list in bold type all the works that he is known to have performed; before 1897 he usually performed as a violinist but from that year he conducted the work in question. There remain at the Birthplace only a selection from Elgar’s library of scores and books on music, but these too give some insights into his musical concerns, and some are sporadically annotated. Appendix 3 lists the significant books on music, Appendix 4 scores and parts, and Appendix 5 opera librettos that have survived there. From the time of their marriage in 1889, Elgar’s wife Alice kept diaries,⁴ although for the first ten years or so these do little more than record that Elgar attended a concert or an opera. But sometimes they do express a musical opinion and these are probably those of Elgar himself. Valuable, if biased memoirs of Elgar were written by Rosa Burley, who first met Elgar in 1891, and by Mrs Richard Powell, Dorabella of the Enigma Variations, who first met him in 1895. Both give some insight into Elgar’s musical tastes. Finally there are the letters that Elgar wrote to friends expressing something of the excitement of musical discovery, and the aspirations and apprehensions of the composer in his formative years.⁵

In the second half of the nineteenth-century, until the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, the predominant foreign influence in England ranging from royal connections to spheres of the arts came from Germany. In many respects, the English musical establishment was an outpost of the Leipzig school where the influences of Mendelssohn, Brahms, Joachim and Clara Schumann were dominant. Prompted initially, no doubt, by this prevalent German bias the young Elgar turned his attentions towards the most advanced music that was emanating from Germany. This is confirmed by Adolphe Pollitzer with whom Elgar studied the violin in London in August 1877. Pollitzer encouraged his pupil to pursue composition and later observed that ‘although leaning towards the modern German school, [he] does not lose either his love or respect for the composers of the past.’⁶ Besides the Germanic school, however, there were the riches of the British choral tradition in which Elgar h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Author
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of plates
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Editor’s Preface
• 1. Elgar’s Musical Apprenticeship
• 2. Elgar’s Harmonic Language
• 3. King Olaf and the English Choral Tradition
• 4. Friends Pictured Within
• 5. Elgar the Edwardian
• 6. Elgar’s Magus and Projector
• 7. Elgar and Falstaff
• 8. Elgar and the Wonderful Stranger: music for The Starlight Express
• 9. Shaw and Elgar
• 10. Some Elgar Interpreters
• Appendix A Select Elgar Discography
• Envoy
• Indices, including index of Elgar’s music