Edward Elgar and His World (45 page)

The banknote is a pertinent acknowledgment of Elgar as one of England's leading cultural figures—a clear demonstration of the place he holds in the British public consciousness at the start of the twenty-first century. It is above all as a public figure that Elgar is celebrated today. Knighted in 1904, made Master of the King's Musick in 1924 and a baronet in 1931, he is most widely celebrated as the composer of the
Pomp and Circumstance
March no. 1 (“Land of Hope and Glory”), played every year without fail during the Last Night of the Proms—the culmination of a concert series modestly billed by the BBC on their website as “The World's Greatest Classical Music Festival.”
³
Despite the best efforts of a new generation of Elgar scholars to show other sides to the composer, Elgar the man is popularly regarded as an example of the stereotypical English Edwardian, whose gruff, pompous exterior masked considerable inner turmoil and emotion. The musical compositions that Elgar is most respected for, by both scholars and music lovers, are large-scale orchestral and choral works: the two symphonies, the two concertos, the three mature oratorios, and the Variations on an Original Theme, op. 36 (the
Enigma
Variations).
⁴
During his lifetime, however, probably the most commercially successful and best known of Elgar's works was the short
Salut d'amour
for violin and piano (1888), an elegant salon piece, endlessly arranged for other instrumental combinations and still widely available on a range of compilation albums, including
Radiance 2: Music for Wine and Candlelight
and
Perfect Summer Wedding.
⁵

Music and the composers who created it have long held a conflicted place in British cultural life. As far back as the eighteenth century, music was generally regarded as the domain of those standing outside the mainstream of intellectual and artistic thought. The professional musician was usually expected to be a lower-class foreigner, and amateur music was stigmatized and dismissed as an upper-class female accomplishment.

The position of the musician and assumptions about his, and increasingly her, class or nationality were rapidly changing during the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, throughout that century and well into the next, male musicians faced the stigma of being perceived as effeminate or womanly. During the period usually characterized as the “British Musical Renaissance,” and in the retelling of the musical history of that period throughout the twentieth century, there was a continual self-conscious attempt to move music away from its associations with the feminine and the foreign—to create a full-blooded “masculine” and British music. In 1889, for example, an anonymous writer in
The Musical Times
tried to dissociate male musicians from the female, feminine, and effeminate, arguing that “effeminacy and capriciousness, so far from being essential characteristics of all musicians, are only the accidental qualities of some,” and that “the manlier an artist has proved himself to be, the better musician,
ex ipso facto
, has he generally been.” Drawing clear parallels between the effeminate and the drawing room, he wrote:

About these pests of the drawing-room congregates a swarm of pallid
dilettanti
, cosmopolitan in sentiment, destitute of any manly vigour or grit, who have never played cricket or been outside a house in their lives. It is from contact with these nerveless and effeminate natures that the healthy average well-born Briton recoils in disgust and contempt.
⁶

From Hubert Parry to Ralph Vaughan Williams and beyond, male composers created images—or had images created for them—that stressed suitable vigor and grit. In his 1926 biography of Parry, Charles L. Graves passes swiftly over Parry's socialism and feminism to concentrate on portraying him as above all a sportsman and gentleman, “robust, manly, and intrepid.”
⁷
Images of Elgar, images encouraged by the composer himself and constructed for him by contemporary and later commentators, are similarly full of contradictions. As early as 1903, a journalist wrote, “Dr. Elgar gives no hint of the popular notion of a musician, and might pass for an Army officer in mufti [more] than anything else.”
⁸
One of his close friends was to remark: “Elgar possessed extreme sensitivity, great tenderness of feeling and pronounced emotional qualities… . Outbursts of almost boisterous humour often alternated curiously with his reticence.”
⁹
The upright, military figure who seemed reluctant to admit to being a musician, who loved golf, bicycling, and dogs, and sold his violin to buy a billiard table seems far removed from the man who cried when he conducted his own music and could write of that music (in this case the Violin Concerto): “It's
good!
Awfully emotional! Too emotional but I love it.”
¹⁰
It would be too simplistic to see this dichotomy merely as a tension between a public facade and a private personality. But it does seem bound up with the tensions between late-Victorian and Edwardian expectations of manliness and an expressive sensitiveness associated with femininity.

It is certainly clear that Elgar desired to be a public figure, aching for recognition in the form of civic honors, longing for enthusiastic capacity audiences for performances of large-scale works at prestigious venues.
¹¹
He was always acutely aware that his Catholic, provincial, lower-class, self-educated background set him apart from the apparently effortless ease and confidence of those from the Protestant, upper-middle-class, Oxbridge, conservatory musical establishment—men such as Hubert Parry or Charles Villiers Stanford. But it is worth remembering that he shared his outsider status with several other contemporary composers such as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (whose father was African), Rutland Boughton (a political radical), and Ethel Smyth. Smyth, like Elgar, felt perpetually slighted by what she called “the Machine,” blaming her gender and her German musical education for the establishment's neglect.

The public musical world of the late nineteenth century that Elgar and Smyth aspired to was one of large choral festivals, such as the longestablished annual Three Choirs Festival held alternately in the three cathedral towns of Gloucester, Worcester, and Hereford; of orchestral concert series at venues such as London's St. James's Hall and the Crystal Palace in Sydenham; of ballad concerts where the best-selling songs of the day were sung by the most popular vocalists of the day; and of chamber music series such as the high-brow Monday and Saturday Popular concerts at which leading performers such as pianist Clara Schumann or violinist Joseph Joachim were heard. This was a world closely connected to the music conservatories such as London's Royal College of Music and endlessly chronicled in the music reviews of the daily newspapers. But it was by no means the only musical world of fin de siècle Britain. This was a time when private music making provided vibrant, stimulating, yet now virtually unacknowledged opportunities for performers, composers, and audiences.
¹²
Private music making took place in the lavish music rooms of the artistically inclined upper classes, the drawing rooms of the well-to-do middle classes, and around the family piano in rather less well-off homes. In these private worlds the audience—if there was one—was invited rather than paying. The amateur musician played an important part in such private milieus, often—in upper-class venues—on the same platform or in the same room as the professional, insofar as the two categories could easily be distinguished in these settings. Private music making provided a space for more than the genres categorized as “salon music,” now denigrated works such as character piano pieces, songs, and ballads.
¹³
Such works were certainly heard in drawing rooms, but so were both established classics and adventurous new music.

Besides groups of friends and family gathering to play together (often but not exclusively from the educated middle classes), private music making included the society gatherings organized by the celebrated music patrons of the day, such as Mabel Veronica Batten, Lady Gladys de Grey (later Marchioness of Ripon), Lady Radnor, Frank Schuster, and Edgar Speyer, women and men who also gave considerable support to struggling performers, composers, and institutions. At a time when women were only gradually moving into a more public musical sphere—whether as instrumentalists, composers, critics, or conductors—these gatherings provided a supportive space where they were able to work and perform alongside their male contemporaries. It helped, of course, that many of the women patrons and amateur musicians came from the assured, confident upper or upper-middle classes. Their education had stressed the acquisition of accomplishments—including singing and piano playing, alongside painting with watercolors or learning European languages—and many of them acquired considerable musical skills. The private musical world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a decidedly feminized space.
¹⁴

The world of society musicians is one that Mary Gladstone (1847–1927), the music-obsessed daughter of prime minister William Gladstone, recorded extensively in the thirteen volumes of her diaries.
¹⁵
Mary Gladstone was an accomplished pianist who endlessly accompanied her friends (usually when they played arrangements of “great works” for concertina and piano) as well as performing at more formal private events and public charity concerts. Her diaries are invaluable in providing one of the few detailed accounts of society musical gatherings in the late nineteenth century. Gladstone attended enormous numbers of musical events—from opera at Covent Garden and orchestral concerts at St. James's Hall or Crystal Palace to private, society concerts—often given after dinner and involving the same high-profile performers as the public concerts. One of her early entries records an after-dinner party in 1870:

Oh, my winkie, Joachim played. It was marvellous. I was introduced to him and my feelings were nearly too many for me. An Andante of Mozart's, but the great thing was a Concerto of Mendelssohn's, Sullivan accompanying on the P[iano].F[orte]. I am so excited with the remembrance, I can hardly write.
¹⁶

Other entries record events such as an 1876 house party at Lord Brownlow's estate at Ashridge Park, with guests including the violinist Wilma Neruda (later Lady Hallé), whom Gladstone herself accompanied in the slow movement of a Beethoven violin sonata.
¹⁷
British composers of the musical establishment, as well as performers, writers, and critics were also to be found at these private musical parties. In 1877, Gladstone went to Frank Balfour's “very higher ground Concert. Not a thing I had heard before. The new Brahms Liebeslieder were really beautiful, Henschell [
sic
] sang most satisfactorily, and Richter, and Hubert Parry's delightful Violin Suite took extremely well.”
¹⁸
In 1880 she recorded J. A. Fuller-Maitland playing Chopin “beautifully” at a party given by the Tennysons.
¹⁹
In May 1883 she dined with the Stanfords in Cambridge: “After dinner Gompertz came and played Joe's [Joseph Joachim's] Hungarian concerto. Mr. S[tanford] played some of Hubert's [Hubert Parry's] new symphony, the Scherzo and Trio delicious.”
²⁰

While Gladstone was accompanying Neruda at Ashridge or listening to new music at Frank Balfour's soirees, Elgar was still firmly ensconced in the musical world of Worcester, coming up to London for the occasional violin lesson or orchestral concert. One wonders if Elgar also attended the Rubinstein concert on April 21, 1877, which Gladstone vividly described as “a real rotten Concert, bad, flashy, vulgar music played to perfection, such a sarcasm, it was fun watching him and his marvellous performance on the [Piano Forte], but
really
as a composer!?”
²¹
Elgar, like Gladstone, was involved in musical events in which both amateurs and professionals, women and men, took part. In the late 1870s he was the leader of the Worcester Amateur Instrumental Society and the Worcester Philharmonic as well as a violinist in the orchestra for the Three Choirs Festival when it came to Worcester. This was public music making, but Elgar also spent much time playing music with friends in private. This was not yet the society world he was to start moving in after his marriage and the success of the
Enigma
Variations, but it was still one in which talented women played a significant part. In the 1880s, he frequently took part in musical evenings at Severn Grange, home of the proprietor of an organ-building firm. Among the other regular musical guests here was Harriet Fitton, an amateur pianist who had studied in Germany and London and who played for the Herefordshire Philharmonic Society.
²²
Elgar frequently played chamber music with Fitton and anyone else staying at her Malvern house, including her two daughters, Hilda and Isabel. Isabel, to whom he gave viola lessons, was immortalized in the sixth
Enigma
variation as “Ysobel.”

Several of the musicians with whom Elgar played chamber music at this early stage in his career were men: Charles Buck, Basil Nevinson (“B.G.N.” of the twelfth
Enigma
variation), Hew David Steuart-Powell (“H.D.S-P.” of the second
Enigma
variation), Frank Webb, and others. But just as many were women: the Fittons, Buck's mother, Webb's sisters, and others. Women also played important roles in organizing local musical institutions. Pianist Winifrid Norbury (“W.N.” of the eighth
Enigma
variation) was one of the cofounders and first secretaries of the Worcestershire Philharmonic Society, formed in 1897 with Elgar as its conductor. Serving on the society's committee was the one member of the aristocracy with whom Elgar developed a friendship at this early stage in his career: Lady Mary Lygon (1869–1927), daughter of the sixth Earl Beauchamp. Lygon was a dynamic character and enthusiastic musician who founded and often conducted at a local competition festival at the family estate, Madresfield Court. She, too, was almost certainly immortalized in an
Enigma
variation—the contested thirteenth variation, headed “***.”