By turns adulatory and neglectful, the English did not know what to make of Elgar during his lifetime, and they have been strongly ambivalent about him ever since. He rules as a monarch over our national inferiority complex – the not quite hidden belief that nobody English could be quite that good a musician, not compared with abroad. After 150 years of mediocrity, it was disconcerting for his contemporaries to find a home-grown genius in their midst. So although the Elgar Festival of 1904 was an unprecedented event, and the greeting given to his First Symphony in 1908 not only national but worldwide, nevertheless there was also the disastrous Gerontius premiere in 1900, the indifferent public reaction to the Second Symphony in 1911, and the ill-preparedness of both orchestra and audience for the Cello Concerto in 1919. Then, after the death of his wife and the rise of the new post-war generation, Elgar was thought to have withdrawn into semi-retirement. One of the happier aspects of those years was the support he gained from his friendship with Bernard Shaw, who did more than anyone else to urge him on towards a Third Symphony. Meanwhile, on the roofs of King’s, Cambridge, the critical vultures had begun to gather – chief among them Professor E. J. Dent.

In cathedral or concert hall after Elgar’s death, the performances of the chief pieces went on. Gerontius became and remains a festival fixture; the symphonies (not so much, for various reasons, the concertos), the overtures and the Enigma Variations were in the safe hands of Sir Adrian Boult and Sir John Barbirolli. The biographers had already moved in: Basil Maine wrote one at the very end of Elgar’s life; Percy Young published his a generation later, in 1955. In that same year, a twenty-year-old author made her appearance: Diana McVeagh. In “A View from 1955” (her contribution to Sir Nicholas Kenyon’s Elgar volume), she describes with engaging modesty the circumstances. After two or three other writers had turned his proposition down, Eric Blom had commissioned a biography from her: “I was a last resort. Elgar, in the mid-twentieth century, was not thought a proper academic subject”.

If 1955 is to be taken as a rough date for a nadir of interest in Elgar, then this applies only to the academic and critical fraternity; performers and listeners tend to remain steadier in their tastes. And soon the biographical scene was to be transformed. Michael Kennedy’s Portrait of Elgar (1968; revised 1973; 1987) painted for the first time the compelling and altogether convincing picture of the complexities and contradictions of a hypersensitive man. The book was thought to mirror the 1960s, the decade in which it was written; we can now see that it was a revelation of lasting value. Jerrold Northrop Moore’s Elgar: A creative life (1984), the product of many years’ work, offered biography on a much grander scale than hitherto, but with a great command of detail and copious music examples well integrated into the text. Both these authors have continued to publish books about Elgar; Moore has produced four volumes of his letters. The already mentioned biographies remain unsurpassed. What is still lacking is a full-dress analytical examination of Elgar’s music. Alas, the person best qualified to undertake such a task died tragically in 1996: Derrick Puffett had over many years contemplated such a work, and he would have made a superb job of it.

There was a distinct revival of interest in Elgar’s music during the 1980s and 90s. A new generation of conductors who were Elgar enthusiasts had already arrived; the names of Sir Andrew Davis, Mark Elder and Richard Hickox come readily to mind. Some of the more academic interest was generated in the United States. And now the anniversary season is upon us. Elgar was 150 years old last June 2; and there has naturally been a welcome rush of performances, and not only of the best-known works. Less propitiously, the skies have darkened with flocks of celebratory books coming home to roost.

Edward Elgar and His World is best characterized by its blurb:

"The contributors explore Elgar’s Catholicism, which put him at odds with the prejudices of Protestant Britain; his glorification of British colonialism; his populist tendencies; his inner life as an inspired autodidact; the aristocratic London drawing rooms where his reputation was made; the class prejudice with which he contended throughout his career; and his anguished reaction to World War I."

The scene is like one of those period films about which one’s reduced to saying, “at least they took a lot of trouble over the vintage motor cars”. And the bewildering mixture of fact and fiction makes it immediately obvious that we’re not all singing from the same sheet. But then, for many New Musicologists – and, it must be said, those from America in particular – these are the issues that matter when it comes to Elgar. There’s something of a gulf to be bridged, here.

The gulf opens immediately. Very early in the book its editor, Byron Adams, writes:

"the Third Symphony was completed later by other hands, dishonouring his memory . . ."

And just in case we haven’t been sufficiently blown away by this blast of moral disapproval, he adds in a footnote:

"This rage for 'completing' unfinished scores by Elgar, unleashed by the completion of the Third Symphony, now includes a sixth Pomp and Circumstance march and a piano concerto, both based on the most slender of sketch materials."

Rage? Unleashed? Slender? The mixture of ignorance and venom is nicely blended, but it does tend to make the reader disbelieve anything else that Adams has to say. He should inform himself by listening. He would discover that Anthony Payne, whose “elaboration” (Payne’s word) of the Third Symphony in 1998 won him the acclaim of audiences and musicians the world over, has done more for Elgar than a thousand articles ever could.

Editorial control seems to have been at a low ebb elsewhere, too. Even if we accept that Adams’s contributors were puppets dancing to an anti-imperialist tune, they still shouldn’t have been allowed to wander off the point in meaningless excursions: a dozen well-researched but alarmingly Elgar-free pages in Deborah Heckert’s article on the Victorian music hall; an absurd detour in Rachel Cowgill’s “Elgar’s War Requiem” about the superiority of Roman Catholic to Anglican chaplains at the front line in the First World War. And Charles Edward McGuire’s “Measure of a Man: Catechizing Elgar’s Catholic avatars”, which manages to be even more pretentious than its title. After stressing Elgar’s Catholic antecedents and the importance of his Catholic education, McGuire at a late stage ceases to fudge the issue of the composer’s loss of faith and uneasy relations with the Church – and so deprives his article of its point. It comes across as arrogant and rather old-fashioned Catholic propaganda whose proper destination should be a diocesan magazine. Needless to say, there is no serious discussion of Elgar’s music – but that defect it has in common with the rest of the book.

It is with some relief that one turns to Elgar: An anniversary portrait. There is no editorial apparatus (Nicholas Kenyon provides a sensible introduction): nothing is given a date, nor its source revealed. But Hans Keller’s voice from the past is welcome. In “Elgar the Progressive” he examines the main theme of the Introduction and Allegro for Strings, which leads on to a discussion of pentatonicism in Elgar and how it relates to his “Englishness”. Most of the articles deal with the music itself. One which doesn’t nevertheless gives a useful piece of background. David Cannadine is a professional historian who is obviously also an intelligent and sensitive music-lover. His careful, reasonable study of Elgar’s upbringing, his place in Worcester society and later in London, and the influence of both places in forming his eventual political stance is well summed up:

"the composer often accused of being a vulgar, chauvinistic jingoist and a crude, unthinking imperialist turns out, on close examination, to have been, among many other things, something of a mid-Victorian liberal internationalist. This is hardly what might have been expected of someone who was the product of Tory, lower-middle-class, little-England Worcester, but Elgar was always a more complex and multi-layered figure than he at first sight appeared."

A short, rather personal, modest and honest article by Stephen Hough on “Elgar the Catholic” has all the virtues lacking from the equivalent attempt in Edward Elgar and His World. Christopher Kent then shows how the Serenade for Strings was developed from its sketches, and from an earlier string work of 1888, of which only the first movement so far has been recovered. He also discusses passages in The Kingdom and the First Symphony. This is genuine musicology, inhabiting its proper province.

A particular strength of the book is the way in which it rescues Elgar from the attentions of the musicologists and mercifully hands him over to his interpreters. Outstanding among these is Mark Elder, in conversation with Richard Morrison, who discloses a late, slow-burning but intense attraction to Elgar’s music and much experience in conducting it, in the course of which really grasping “this strange quirky mixture . . . of inner self-belief but also of a huge neurosis about nobody understanding his music” – which must be one of the best two-line descriptions of Elgar’s personality ever written. Elder has fascinating things to say about Elgar’s improvisatory habits as a recording conductor, and the diverse readings which sprang from them. Tasmin Little writes compellingly of the Violin Concerto and is full of practical suggestions about its performance, together with warnings of the toll its extreme length can take on a performer’s (and an audience’s) stamina. She mentions a cut that used to be made in the finale: but she doesn’t think that it works. Andrew Keener writes about Jacqueline du Pré’s recordings of the Cello Concerto. It is refreshing, after much emotional writing about this joyously instinctive and at present somewhat undervalued artist, to have many music examples which demonstrate how du Pré handled specific phrases.

In Edward Elgar and the Nostalgic Imagination, Matthew Riley has written a very curious book. His contribution to the Byron Adams volume was called “Elgar the Escapist”, which should have been warning enough: Elgar seems largely to have escaped from this book, too. It is built round various abstract nouns, each applied to Elgar in turn, but not without lengthy diversions on the way. The ruling abstraction is Nostalgia, which provides an opening chapter and potted history of the use of the term back to 1688. This segues into a cultural and political history of young Elgar’s time, in which Elgar himself makes a brief appearance, before he is elbowed aside by the social critic Christopher Lasch and the cultural historian David Lowenthal, the historian of American culture Michael Kammen, Robert Hewison, Svetlana Boym and Stuart Tannock, who points out that the feminist writer Gayle Greene, “in advancing a stark opposition between contemporary nostalgia and a more bracing mode of ‘feminist memory’, unwittingly reveals a nostalgia of her own for the early days of radical feminism in the 1970s”.

Other abstract nouns are given chapters of their own: Memory, Nobility, Nature, Childhood and Identity. You would think that Nobility was a sitting duck for some authentically Elgarian reflections – and sure enough here are some of the best, certainly the most relevant pages in the book. But you have to sit through a lot of other things – including pages and pages on Alice Elgar’s philosophical treatise – first. Later detours include four pages on the Great God Pan from ancient times, up to and including The Wind in the Willows; a history of the Aeolian Harp together with examples of its curious repertoire; middlebrow literature as represented by J. B. Priestley; a history of the Vikings and a survey of their appearances in Victorian literature; a dire-sounding play by David Rudkin; and poems by Siegfried Sassoon and C. Day Lewis, the latter with a long commentary on the poet’s family and some comments on the poetry itself.

If Riley represents the soft underbelly of the New Musicology, then J. P. E. Harper-Scott would appear to present us with its hard edge. The title of his book, Edward Elgar, Modernist is misleading, however. Whether it was James Hepokoski or another who invented the expression “early modernist” to deal with certain composers of the 1860 generation whom we used to call “late romantics”, the new category has only succeeded in spreading confusion. It is, or ought to be, quite clear what modernism in music is. It gained pace from 1895 onwards and much of it was achieved by 1923. Debussy led the way; Schoenberg, working along altogether different lines, followed shortly after. When Stravinsky had contributed a new concept of rhythm involving cellular structure, the foundations of modernism in music were complete. Apart from some notorious exceptions, the pieces did not become well known and enjoyed only a limited circulation for many years. But that is modernism.

Elgar – and this is neither to his credit nor discredit – remained virtually unaware of all this and continued on his own path. At least Stanford conducted Debussy’s Nocturnes a few times. But what did Elgar’s work have to do with La Mer, Jeux, Petrouchka, the Rite, Five Orchestral Pieces, Pierrot Lunaire – or for that matter Amériques? Elgar did not even have social contacts with the modernists; he turned down invitations to meet Schoenberg and Ravel, and he got out of meeting Sibelius. With Strauss and Fauré he preserved friendly relations.

Harper-Scott equips Elgar with a modernist phase lasting from 1904 (In the South) to 1913 (Falstaff), thus enclosing nearly all his finest pieces. In the South still mainly inhabits a Straussian world of the 1880s, save for two remarkable passages. The dissonant falling 5ths at fig. 21, and the subsequent rhythmically complex and harshly chromatic working at fig. 26 onwards are strikingly expressionistic and almost un-Elgarian – nearer to Elektra than Don Juan. If you compare this piece with Falstaff of nine years later, you hear immediately the immense distance that Elgar has travelled in terms of maturity and sophistication: the floating autonomous orchestra, the subtlety of pacing and of motivic transformation, the much tougher harmonic palette, and above all the greatly increased tautness of diction – all these can be heard in Falstaff and characterized as modernist traits. Nevertheless, Elgar is developing radically within his own conservative style, independent of his Continental contemporaries. How far he would have gone in a modernist direction can only be guessed at by looking at the Third Symphony.

It is not until page 65 that proper discussion of two specific pieces of Elgar’s music takes place. This is the most worthwhile part of the book, and for musicians the only interesting part. Whereas the First Symphony has already received a certain amount of critical attention from other hands, this to my knowledge is the first time that Falstaff has been attempted from the analytical point of view. I share Harper-Scott’s enthusiasm for the piece and am grateful to him for making me listen to it again. Elgar told Delius that he thought it was his best piece, and I think he was right. Harper-Scott’s writing takes on a new directness and clarity in discussing it, with insights and generally natural musical reactions that we have hardly met before. There is a particularly limpid and acute discussion of the relations between music and literature involved in programme music.

But Harper-Scott relies too insistently – even cravenly – on those he thinks of as established authorities. The extracts from Hepokoski suggest that his verbosity, resuscitation of the Pathetic Fallacy, and passion for category-making are not much use to anyone. And Harper-Scott is still partly under the scared spell of that old turnip ghost Heinrich Schenker – who has so little to tell us about music, whose range of interest is limited and narrow, who is so prepared to miss out anything inconvenient to his diagrams, whose Ursatz, in fact, is so often Ersatz. The constant invocation of such authorities gives the whole proceeding a rabbinical air. This is not scholarship, but weird amusical pedantry: and it emphasizes that the whole business of music analysis, so often cultivated by entirely unmusical people, is an activity quite remote from normal musical experience, ie, listening, playing, creating, enjoying.

What happens before page 65? First there is a rather long abstract of the contents of the book, then in Chapter Two we launch into a prolonged discussion of the work of that perennial cult figure, the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger. Next come the two musical chapters already discussed. But at page 154 we go back, under the heading “Hermeneutics and Mimesis”, to another twenty-nine pages on the Heideggerian world, with detours to W. H. Auden, Tolkien and King Lear. Elgar’s name is mentioned four times. The following “Elgarian hermeneutics” might well be thought to give us the worst of both worlds: consideration of Elgar’s music flashes on and off, like a failing torch. The idea of putting Elgar and Heidegger together is pour rire anyway: they have no conceivable connection with each other, and Harper-Scott does not succeed in making out any comprehensible case that they do. The truth is, just for once, quite simple. Harper-Scott has two enthusiasms: one is Heidegger, the other Elgar. He wants to write about both. This is really two books and should never have been prepared or published as one; its author should have been dissuaded from doing so by a supervisor or an editor at a much earlier stage.

Finally, it is a pleasure to welcome one thoroughly good result of this Elgar year. Diana McVeagh has been a devoted Elgarian all her life and her previous book on the composer was written, as already mentioned, more than fifty years ago. Its successor, Elgar the Music Maker, has the dimensions and characteristics of a handbook, and it is packed with good things. This is neither a biography nor a technical analysis, but McVeagh has hit on the perfect way of combining the best features of both. No biographical fact appears unless it is directly related to Elgar’s music; no piece is discussed without consideration of its context. The range is comprehensive and subtly discriminating; for a gentle critical assessment hovers over works large and small, down to the last part-song. If she thinks a piece is no good, she says so. There is no superimposition of alien theories or of special interests, and there are no perverse reinterpretations. The last few pages deal with Elgar’s posterity and end with a beautifully balanced study of Elgar’s personality. This is a worthwhile, useful book; and in five years’ time when the other four are forgotten, it will still be bought and read.

One wonders what Elgar himself would have said about all this literature. After all, he was irritated by Tovey: “I wish people wd. drown themselves in ink & let me alone”, he wrote to his daughter Carice. But it is a sad fact that the exceptionally gifted are defenceless in the face of stupidity – against which, as we know, the gods themselves strive in vain. One of Elgar’s lesser-known but most splendid remarks (culled from the pages of Diana McVeagh) was made in a letter to Albert Sammons about the Violin Concerto:

It is a b . . . romantic theme and I b . . . well know because I b . . . well wrote it.

Byron Adams, editor
EDWARD ELGAR AND HIS WORLD
312pp. Princeton University Press. US $60 (paperback, $22.95); distributed in the UK by Wiley. £35 (paperback, £13.50)
978 0 691 13445 1

Nicholas Kenyon, editor
ELGAR
An anniversary portrait
199pp. Continuum. £16.99.
978 0 8264 9696 6

Matthew Riley
EDWARD ELGAR AND THE NOSTALGIC IMAGINATION
254pp. Cambridge University Press. £50 (US $96).
978 0 521 86361 2

J. P. E. Harper-Scott
EDWARD ELGAR, MODERNIST
270pp. Cambridge University Press. £53 (US $96).
978 0 521 86200 4

Diana McVeagh
ELGAR THE MUSIC MAKER
200pp. The Boydell Press. £16.99 (US $29.95).
978 1 84383 295 9

Hugh Wood's setting of Geoffrey Hill's sequence of poems Tenebrae, for chorus and ensemble, premiered last year along with four other new works.

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