Elgar at 150

With a characteristically British approach to the arts, and classical music in particular, the most noticeable event concerning Sir Edward Elgar in his 150th anniversary year has been his effacement from the £20 note in favour of an economist. Not wishing to knock the humble British philistine, though- our suspicion of the arts and of ideas in general probably saved us from the worst excesses of communism and fascism, but it does also mean that the man with the best claim to be considered England’s national composer slips out of the public eye when he probably deserves to be rediscovered.

Everybody knows a bit of Elgar, of course- the piece variously known as Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, Coronation Ode or Land of Hope and Glory, variously used as a graduation march in American schools and inevitably associated with the Last Night of the Proms. It’s a disservice to Elgar, however, to think of him primarily as a composer of bullish Edwardian patriotic songs; his major works include two symphonies, concertos for the violin and cello and the Enigma Variations, as well as several works for choir, reflecting the popularity of the choral society in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. A third symphony, based on sketches left by Elgar at his death, has since been elaborated into a complete work by Anthony Payne. This in itself doesn’t make him our most prolific orchestral composer- in this he’s substantially outscored by Vaughan Williams for one- but it’s worth remembering two things about English classical music which help to explain Elgar’s importance. Firstly, before Elgar, English orchestral music was Henry Purcell, who died in the 1690s- since then, what English composers had existed had followed German and Italian models, dominated by the presence of Handel, who had arrived in England from Brandenburg and popularised the Italian opera. There was, to be quite brutal, no English response to the tremendous developments in music which were taking place in continental Europe in the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany and Austria. And secondly, the late nineteenth century was characterised by the emergence of a spirit of nationalism in European music, to which we owe the works of composers such as Sibelius from Finland, Grieg from Norway, Dvorak, Smetana and Janacek from Bohemia and a group of equally passionate nationalists in Russia.

It’s also worth noting that, even though the necessary technical developments occurred at the end of his life, Elgar was one of the first composers to embrace the opportunities offered by the new recording media of the early twentieth century. Over the last seven years of his life, Elgar conducted recordings of all his major works- it’s sobering to realise that until this technology remained available, short of being fortunate enough to hear and orchestral performance, many music-lovers had to rely on transcriptions for piano if they wanted to hear symphonic works. Elgar was very much inspired by the English countryside and his native Worcestershire in particular, and much of his work does have a typically English pastoral feel to it. However, his major works- by which I particularly mean the Symphonies and Concertos- while occasionally dismissed as "insufficiently symphonic"- while having a particularly English sensibility to them, also have an emotional power of their own which isn’t quite so English. As a nation we aren’t the most demonstrative, but we perhaps do wistfulness best of all, and there’s certainly a lot of that in the Concertos, but also a lot of dignity and reflection in the Symphonies, while the lesser orchestral works are often engaging in their own way. The great misfortunes as regards Elgar’s reputation have been to have been associated so strongly with the Edwardian establishment and to have lived for two decades- in comparative silence following the death of his wife in 1920- beyond the end of that era and into a post-First World War age which had no time for unthinking nationalism or for pastoral nostalgia. But it’s difficult not to feel that most other countries would have marked the anniversary better- there have been no stamps, no coins and the business with the £20 note seems a particularly crass piece of poor timing on the Bank of England’s part. We live in an age- and in a Britain- where national identity seems more fluid and yet more fragile than ever, and it’s difficult not to wonder how much these tensions might not be repaired if we took some time to listen to what our great composers have written and how the music speaks to us today.