Edward Elgar and His World (39 page)

But such a commonsensical approach merely conceals biases that are far from objective, and which certainly do not transcend history; instead, they are inextricably connected to the historical and critical concerns of early-twentieth-century British music. These biases are all too apparent in Elgar's lectures, even, for example, in the critics of whom he approved and disapproved. It is clear that the composers most likely to suffer from the overhasty journalistic judgments that Elgar condemned would be young, unknown, and probably English—a particular concern for the composer given that, in his inaugural lecture, he had spoken of an “English School of Music” driven by a “younger generation [who] are true to themselves … and draw their inspiration from their own land.”
¹²
So it is surely no coincidence that several of the contemporary critics he singled out for praise had all actively promoted English composers: Joseph Bennett (the chief music critic of the
Daily Telegraph)
, Arthur Johnstone (of the
Manchester Guardian
, until his death in 1904), Ernest Newman (Johnstone's successor at the
Manchester Guardian)
, and George Bernard Shaw. Conversely, Elgar's one example of the “shady side of music criticism” involved the disparagement of a British composer, namely the obituary of Arthur Sullivan in the
Cornhill Magazine
in 1900, written by J. A. Fuller-Maitland (although Elgar did not name him in the lecture). For Elgar, this was a “foul unforgettable episode”; Fuller-Maitland was simply wrong. But at no point did Elgar explain
why
Fuller-Maitland was wrong, let alone admit that his argument—that Sullivan was a composer capable of genius (notably in
The Golden Legend
and in his incidental music for
The Tempest)
who rarely fulfilled it because of his readiness to compromise his style to popular taste—might have some truth to it.
¹³
Not surprisingly, Elgar's comments attracted negative press coverage:
Musical News
, conscious of similar faux pas that Elgar had directed at Stanford in earlier lectures, observed that Elgar seemed unable to “open his mouth apparently without finding himself embroiled in some more or less lively controversy.”
¹⁴

That Elgar should have condemned Fuller-Maitland perhaps reflects another instinctive bias on his part. Fuller-Maitland (1856–1936) was no ordinary journalist, but the chief music critic of the
Times
and a distinguished scholar—he was the author of an important recent monograph on English music and, at the time of the lecture, was editing the revised edition of
Grove's Dictionary of Music.
¹⁵
He was also a central figure in the English musical “renaissance” set of composers and critics, based around the Royal College of Music, where the group's two most important composers, Parry and Stanford, were professors. As Meirion Hughes has pointed out, the members of this set were mostly from the university-educated, upper-middle classes and Fuller-Maitland was particularly keen to emphasize their social and intellectual elitism.
¹⁶
He was less keen, however, to acknowledge the achievements of a lower-middle-class, self-taught, provincial Roman Catholic like Elgar. His reviews of Elgar premieres in the
Times
were frequently ambivalent and often hostile, as both Hughes and Jerrold Northrop Moore have noted. With the works that appeared before the
Enigma
Variations, Fuller-Maitland was often as concerned with Elgar's provincial background as with the music; the Variations themselves were damned for their “obscure” program;
The Dream of Gerontius
was compared unfavorably with Stanford's
Eden
and Parry's
Job;
and the Concert Allegro for piano suffered because of an alleged lack of “organic connection between one part and another.”
¹⁷
Fuller-Maitland's attitude toward Elgar hardened with each of the composer's successes. The critic was absent from the premiere of the First Symphony in 1908 and, after criticizing the composer for his overcolorful orchestration at the work's London premiere, conducted an unsuccessful campaign against the piece in the
Times.
¹⁸
It is uncertain exactly how aware Elgar was of Fuller-Maitland's later writing about him, given the composer's claim that after 1900 he never read any (negative) criticism of his own work. But even if that claim were true, the mixed reception of
Gerontius
, to which Fuller-Maitland contributed, had hurt Elgar and one could understand it if his rebuke of the critic were a way, subconsciously, of settling scores.

The significance of Fuller-Maitland's criticism of Elgar, however, is not the extent to which it was fueled by personal enmity, but that it provides any evidence of a negative view of the composer. Until recently, Elgar scholarship, perhaps understandably, has emphasized the many positive reviews of the composer's work and concentrated less on the dissenters; the one significant exception among the latter is Edward J. Dent, to whose infamous assessment of Elgar in the 1920s we shall return below.
¹⁹
But Fuller-Maitland and Dent are only the best known of a significant minority of critics who were skeptical of the popular and critical acclaim afforded to Elgar, particularly following the successful German performances of
Gerontius
in December 1901 and May 1902. For the most part, these critics differed from their pro-Elgarian counterparts in their social provenance and in their philosophical and aesthetic views, particularly in their attitude to Wagner. With the exception of the ultraconservative Bennett, whose enthusiasm for Elgar stemmed more from their shared autodidactic background than from purely musical reasons, the pro-Elgar critics were generally pro-Wagner and/or pro-Strauss.
²⁰
This group included not only Newman and Shaw, but two other pro-Wagnerians: Alfred Kalisch (1863–1933), from 1912 the critic of the
Daily News
, and Herbert Thompson (1856–1945), between 1886 and 1936 the critic of the
Yorkshire Post.
²¹
Moreover, all of these critics shared with Elgar the fact that they were outside the London establishment of the “renaissance” clique: Bennett and Newman were self-taught provincials; Shaw was Irish (and a socialist to boot); Thompson, Cambridge-educated but Leeds-born and based, was steeped in the conservative traditions of the English choral tradition (his father-in-law, Frederick Spark, was the secretary of the Leeds Music Festival in 1898 when
Caractacus
received its premiere); and Kalisch, though London-born, was of German-Jewish extraction. By contrast, the “critical critics” were mostly part of (or close to) renaissance circles, and shared the predominantly anti-Wagner views of Stanford and, especially, Parry, who disliked Wagner's ideology and his late works—a consequence partly of the failure of his opera
Guenever
(1886) and partly of his puritanical sensibility.
²²
The significance of this particular bias is considerable. A key aim of the renaissance critics was, through their writing, to influence, rather than simply reflect, musical “good taste”: a concept that, in theory, was ideologically neutral but, in practice, often betrayed the critics' anti-Wagnerian aesthetic agenda. The value of their discourse on Elgar is therefore not that they reveal the hidden “essence” of his music (insofar as that objective was ever possible), but that they reveal much about the forces that conditioned the reception of his works and those of his contemporaries. In doing so, they offer proof, if any were needed, that Elgar's works, far from transcending the period in which they were written, are grounded in the historical, critical concerns of the early twentieth century.

The aim of this essay, then, is not to revisit the positive criticism of Bennett, Johnstone, Newman et al., which has been covered adequately elsewhere in Elgar scholarship. Instead, it is to show how Elgar's detractors viewed him as an uncomfortably progressive addition to British musical life: first, by consciously (and negatively) distancing him from the “safe” figure of Parry; and second, by associating him with the ethically suspect school of Wagner and his followers. Elgar emerges from this criticism as a deeply politicized figure, the vessel through which particular critical critics directed their arguments about the future of British music.

One such critic is Dr. Charles Maclean (1843–1916). Maclean's background was typical of the renaissance set: public school (Shrewsbury) and Oxford (where he was a classical scholar), further musical training under Ferdinand Hiller in Cologne, and then the musical directorship of Eton College between 1871 and 1875. His musical activities in Britain were curtailed somewhat during the twenty-two years in which he worked in the Indian civil service (as an inspector of schools, a magistrate, and a government translator), but they resumed on his retirement in 1893, whereupon he became active both as a critic and within the Musical Association (later the Royal Musical Association).
²³
In 1899 he was invited to join a committee, chaired by Parry and including Stanford, John Stainer, Fuller-Maitland, and Ebenezer Prout among others, whose aim was to “further the objectives … in England” of the Internationale Musikgesellschaft (hereafter IMG), which had recently been founded in Leipzig by the German musicologist Oskar Fleischer.
²⁴
In practice, this meant setting up a British national section, and Maclean, with his linguistic skills, was the obvious candidate to become group secretary and national group editor of the society's monthly periodical,
Zeitschrift der internationalen Musikgesellschaft
. The
Zeitschrift
was one of two IMG publications, but whereas the content of the quarterly
Sammelbände der internationalen Musikgesellschaft
was essentially scholarly, that of the
Zeitschrift
aimed at a wider readership. It included concert and book reviews, lists of forthcoming lectures and performances of old music, a comprehensive list of recent literature in music periodicals of all countries, reports of papers given at local group meetings, and short articles on musical subjects, most of which were written in either German or English. Its function was thus similar to that of
The Musical Times
, but with one vital difference: its readership extended beyond Britain to a larger, international audience. Consequently, the role of the national group editors of the
Zeitschrift
went well beyond being their countries' musical diarists. What they wrote about individual composers had the potential to shape the opinions of foreign readers who had little or no direct experience of those composers, as well as mold the scholarly discourse on their music. The columnists thus represented the music-critical voices of their respective nations. For Maclean this entailed the additional responsibility of making a case for British music to a readership that, by and large, still considered Britain to be
das Land ohne Musik.
²⁵

At best, Maclean's attitude to Elgar was ambivalent; at worst, it was downright hostile. Writing about the performance of
Gerontius
at the 1902 Three Choirs Festival, he described the composer as a “polemic modernist,” a comment that, given the generally negative tone of the article, was certainly not intended as a compliment.
²⁶
Maclean's objections to Elgar can be classified as at least one of three forms: aesthetic (where Elgar's compositional style is weighed in the balance, on its own merits, against Maclean's preferred musical criteria, and generally found wanting); ad hominem (attacks on Elgar, as well as objections to composers who had clearly influenced him); and cultural (those where Elgar's music is deemed unmanly, un-English, or both). In practice, these factors were interlaced, for Maclean's aesthetic standpoint inevitably found its ideal in some composers more than in others, and given that his
Zeitschrift
column was frequently concerned with the future direction of English music, it is unsurprising that the composers whose works came closest to realizing his personal vision were lauded as models for emulation. Maclean's vision was a conservative one, but it is by no means untypical (as will become clear when we consider other writing about Elgar in this period). Indeed, paradoxically, a critical view of Elgar such as Maclean's actually serves to highlight the progressiveness of many of the composer's scores composed at this time.
²⁷

Maclean's influential position within the IMG and his consistent disparagement of Elgar make him a figure of more than marginal interest. Unaccountably relegated to a minor position in Elgar scholarship, Maclean assumes the role of a focal figure—perhaps
the
focal figure—in this essay due to his influential status and aspirations as an arbiter of musical taste. To use Maclean's opinions as a lens through which to view the reception of Elgar's music during this period brings into sharper focus the significance of several other critical critics, most notably Fuller-Maitland and W. H. (later Sir Henry) Hadow (1859–1937). Originally a classics don at Worcester College, Oxford, and later vice-chancellor of the University of Sheffield (where he was instrumental in establishing a professorial chair in music), Hadow was also the author of many significant books on music in the 1890s and 1900s, including two oft-reprinted volumes,
Studies in Modern Music
(which considered the careers of six leading nineteenth-Century composers); a number of contributions to Fuller-Maitland's revised edition of
Grove's Dictionary;
and, perhaps most notably, the fifth volume of the
Oxford History of Music
series of which he became editor in 1896.
²⁸
His interests also included British music. In 1921, he wrote a report on the history and prospects of British music for the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust and, in 1931, a monograph titled
English Music
, part of a series of books on English Heritage edited by Viscount Lee of Fareham and J. C. Squire.
²⁹
A protege of Fuller-Maitland, Hadow initially held views on Elgar mirroring those of his mentor, but, as will become apparent, Hadow's espoused views in
English Music
are quite different from those he had embraced twenty-five years earlier.
³⁰