The Master Musicians - Elgar

The Master Musicians

New Series Edited by Eric Blom

ELGAR

UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME

C. F. Abdy Williams

Marion M. Scott

J. H. Elliot

Lawrence Erb

J. Cuthbert Hadden

Edward Lockspeiser

Alfred Einstein

C. F. Abdy Williams

J. Cuthbert Hadden

S. S. Stratton

Eric Blom

Henry Coates

J. A. Westrup

Edmondstoune Duncan

Annie W. Patterson

Edwin Evans

Dyneley Hussey

Robert L. Jacobs

William Saunders

The Master Musicians

ELGAR

by

W. H. REED

All rights reserved

PREFACE

IN writing this book and endeavouring to piece together the various incidents in Edward Elgar’s life in chronological order I had the constant and willing help of his daughter Carice (Mrs Elgar Blake), to whom I wish to acknowledge my great indebtedness. Searching for scraps of information in old diaries kept intermittently by her mother, Lady Elgar, by Elgar himself or one of his sisters, she was able to give me a good deal of information concerning his early life and that other period between his childhood and the first years of his fame, before I actually knew him personally.

I must also thank Sir Edward’s niece, May Grafton, for her enthusiastic support and helpful information.

It will be obvious to the reader that it has not been possible to bring very much in the way of analysis or discussion of Elgar’s works within the scope of such a volume as this, but in the last chapter I have tried to show some of the salient points in three of his great orchestral works.

One other thing: I have striven to make a readable narrative from what might easily have become a mere chronicle of facts after the manner of a certain school history-book that was a bugbear to me in the days of my youth, taking warning too from a speech delivered by Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, in Shakespeare’s King Richard II:

As in a theatre, the eyes of men,

After a well-graced actor leaves the stage,

Are idly bent on him that enters next,

Thinking his prattle to be tedious.

W. H. R.

  CROYDON,

     21st September 1938.

CONTENTS

          PREFACE

APPENDICES

A. CALENDAR

B. CATALOGUE OF WORKS

C. PERSONALIA

D. BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. LIST OF ELGAR’S HONOURS

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

ELGAR IN 1928 (Camera Portrait by Richard Hall, Gloucester)

ELGAR’S BIRTHPLACE AT BROADHEATH, NEAR WORCESTER

ELGAR’S PARENTS

ELGAR IN HIS STUDY AT MALVERN

SKETCH FOR THE CONCLUSION OF THE VIOLIN CONCERTO (manuscript in the author’s possession)

CAROLINE ALICE ELGAR (Camera Portrait by Claud Harris)

ELGAR’S SKETCH FOR A SETTING OF ‘THE SPANISH LADY’

ELGAR AND HIS DAUGHTER AT MARL BANK, WORCESTER

CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

IN the year 1857, on 2nd June, Edward William Elgar was born at the village of Broadheath, near Worcester.

This typical Worcestershire village, a few miles from Worcester in the direction of Bromyard, lies on the western side of the river Severn, the way to it from the city being across the river by the wide bridge (which has lately been rebuilt), and then almost straight on up a gradually rising hill, leaving Malvern on the left and the race-course and road to Martley and Tenbury on the right.

The village itself consists of a few cottages clustered round a fair-sized common, some tall old trees and a small shop or two. The author has many times strolled about the common and roads adjoining it with Elgar and his dogs; even in the last year of his activity—1933—the whole place was practically unchanged, Elgar said. The same trees were there: he remembered nearly all of them from his childhood. The cottage in which he was born looked exactly as it did seventy years before.

A short walk down the well-remembered road brought him in sight of the city of Worcester with its famous cathedral standing boldly there by the banks of the shining river. From here also the Malvern Hills could be seen, as indeed they can from almost anywhere within thirty miles, so prominent and dominating a feature are they of this part of the three shires—Gloucester, Worcester and Hereford.

It is necessary to mention these surroundings because they undoubtedly had much influence upon the mind of a growing child of such a sensitive and observant nature as the boy Edward: an influence which, it will be seen, permeated all his work and gave to his whole life that subtle but none the less true and sturdy English quality.

Born and reared for the first years of his life in such an idyllic spot, he began at a very early age to show an acute perception of its beauties. Nothing that took place around him passed unnoticed; every mood of nature, every change of colour, every odd saying of his parents or the country folk in the village—all these things were indelibly recorded in his memory, and his memory was such that he had no difficulty in recalling, with complete details, any incident from his earliest boyhood. His eyes dwelt with affectionate familiarity on every aspect of the countryside, the Severn, the rolling hills, the woods and lanes; and the people who dwelt in these surroundings were an abiding source of interest and amusement to him, their doings and quaint saying being quoted at appropriate moments all through his life.

One cannot but conclude that it is one of these impressions which is recorded in one of his very latest compositions, the Nursery Suite; it is called The Wagon Passes, and is a reminiscence of those days of his childhood, simple yet true to life. Elgar gives us a picture of one of these country wagons passing through his native village, probably on its way to Worcester, the wagoner sitting on the shafts with a straw sticking out of his mouth, shifting it to the side to whistle this inconsequential tune:

the harness jingling on the horses, the wheels rumbling over the ruts in the road and, as it passes out of sight, the sound gradually dying away in the distance.

Elgar’s father, W. H. Elgar, was a native of Dover and left that town to join the music-publishing business of Messrs Coventry & Hollier, Soho, London. Having gained experience in this firm, he went to Worcester in 1841, and with the aid and partnership of his brother established a music business in that city. He became organist of the Roman Catholic church of St George, a position he retained for thirty-seven years, and quickly made his influence felt in the musical life of Worcester, playing the violin in the orchestra engaged for the festival of the Three Choirs and taking part either with viola or piano in the musical activities in the neighbourhood. He married Anne Greening, a native of Weston in Herefordshire, who, according to all accounts, was a lady with literary tastes who read a great deal and retained what she read, so that in after years she was able to quote passages from books upon a variety of subjects for the edification of her children.

ELGAR’S BIRTHPLACE AT BROADHEATH, NEAR WORCESTER

The boy Edward, as may be imagined, was all ears and plied her with endless questions, asking the names of the various authors from whom she quoted and begging her to recite again and again stanzas from poems whose words caught his fancy. In his earliest years, perhaps before he could appreciate the full meaning of what he heard, he was entranced by the sound of his mother’s voice as it rose and fell, the sound of the words as they flowed in well-turned phrases, and the sound of the rhymes and the metrical rhythm he quickly learned to appreciate in the poetry to which he listened. Something indefinable was already moving within him: the desire to make beautiful sounds himself, a subconscious stirring of a gradually forming desire for self-expression.

Soon means to this end began to dawn upon him. His father played the violin, he heard the organ and the singing in church, he heard his father’s friends play on other instruments, the flute, the oboe. When he was a little older he begged his father to let him sit with him in the organ-loft at St George’s; here he would listen with rapt attention to the music used in the singing of the Mass, the rise and fall of the priest’s voice and the liturgical responses. These visits to the church with his father were made possible by the removal of the family from Broadheath to the city of Worcester itself. In 1861 it was found necessary to be nearer the various professional activities of Elgar senior; so a house was found in Edgar Street, in the college precincts. Here they dwelt for a time before moving again to the father’s seat of business, which was in the High Street.

It very soon appeared that Edward was bent upon learning a musical instrument. He watched his father play the piano and violin, and begged to be allowed to try to play himself; so when a little later he went, as most children do, to a ladies’ school, he took his first lessons on the pianoforte, and not being wholly satisfied with that instrument and wishing very ardently to learn the violin he took a few lessons from Frederick Spray, a local violinist who led the orchestra at the concerts given by the Worcester Glee Club in those days, Dr Done being the conductor. Elgar was often heard to refer to Mr Spray and those lessons of his childhood; he had a great opinion of his teacher and always spoke of him in terms of affection and in such a way that a certain warmth, one might even say wistfulness, crept into his voice as he recalled his early tuition.

The rehearsals of the Worcester Glee Club, founded in 1810, were a source of perpetual joy to him. The Elgar family began to be associated with it about 1843, when W. H. Elgar joined as second violin, Louis D’Egville being first violin and leader. The works of Corelli, Handel and Haydn were the chief sources from which the programmes were drawn on the instrumental side, while all the well-known glees, madrigals and partsongs were given by the more numerous vocal members, strongly reinforced by the lay-clerks of the cathedral.

In a few years young Edward had made such progress with his violin that he was invited to play in the orchestra with his teacher, Mr Spray, who had now become principal first violin and leader; he also acted as accompanist at the piano, and it very soon became manifest to that musical circle that he had outstanding abilities.

In 1879 we find in the printed programmes of these concerts that Elgar was now appearing as ‘pianist and conductor,’ and that four other members of his family were playing in the orchestra under his direction. The programme of music underwent a distinct change in these new circumstances, and we find this orchestra performing works by Rossini, Auber and Mozart, all of whose scores had to be somewhat rearranged to suit the necessities of the occasion. Certain instruments not being available, the essential notes allotted to them had to be added to some other instrument. This meant the actual re-scoring of certain passages here and there, and this was done skilfully by the young ‘pianist and conductor.’ This exercise was by no means labour lost, for he undoubtedly learnt the very elements of good orchestration from this practical experience; he was able to hear at first hand, as it were, the effect of the changes he had to accomplish. He had to divide his strings, for instance, finding a suitable instrument to play notes written for second horn, perhaps, when he had only one, and that one probably not too reliable. Or he may have had only one bassoon when two were needed, and so on. At any rate he saw to it that no essential note in the harmony was omitted, and obtained a satisfactory and artistic result.

And here, to show that this kind of ‘arranging’ is still going on at the present day, owing to the same difficulty that struggling musical societies have in finding sufficient financial help to engage a complete orchestra for their performances, a few lines from an article by Dr Ralph Vaughan Williams in Music & Letters, vol. xvi, No. 1, January 1935, may perhaps be quoted: ‘Many conductors with limited orchestral resources when dealing with modern works are under the painful necessity of dispensing with the extra instruments, they must either leave them out altogether or write them in for some other instrument.’ Dr Vaughan Williams goes on to explain that he had just had to do this with certain works by both Wagner and Elgar, and he found that ‘. . . with Wagner the extra instruments could always be dispensed with altogether, with a little loss of colour it is true, but with no damage to the texture. But when it came to Elgar the case was quite different. Even in the accompaniments to choral movements there was hardly anything that could be left out without leaving a hole in the texture.’

Elgar’s early efforts in this direction, even when he was a boy, gave him an invaluable experience and a knowledge of the exact value of every note in the score. Was it there to add colour or to give strength to an otherwise weak entry by the device known as doubling, or had it to stand alone to achieve a correct balance with all the other parts? These and similar problems needed solution.

Apart from the very elementary instruction Elgar had as a boy, and except for a few trips to London to take some lessons with the noted violinist Pollitzer, of whom more later, he was cast entirely upon his own resources. He was one of a family of growing children, and despite the fact that he showed outstanding musical ability at a very early age, his father could do no more for him in the way of education in that direction than for the others. He had no special privileges and no exceptional opportunities. He therefore used his eyes and ears, and developed his extraordinarily analytical mind; he studied everything that came his way, he listened critically to all the musical performances that took place around him. No one guided him through the tortuous paths of harmony, thoroughbass (as it was called), counterpoint, canon and fugue. No one instructed him in the mysteries of form or orchestration. He foraged for himself among the books in his father’s musical warehouse; he found there Catel’s Treatise on Harmony, translated by Mary Cowden-Clarke, the Succinct Thorough-Bass attributed to Mozart, translated by Sabilla Novello, Cherubini on counterpoint, Stainer’s Harmony. These and Parry’s articles in Grove’s Dictionary of Music sufficed to whet his appetite and to develop the necessary urge to start composing music for himself in his own way.

By this method of acquiring knowledge he escaped the common fate of most young composers in their early days, the unfortunate likeness to some much-admired composer or the distinct influence of some very strong personality (usually their teacher’s), which pervades so much of the early work of young composers.

He was greatly amused by the contradictory statements in some of the theory books, one insisting upon the due observance of some rule, another ignoring it but setting out another, apparently of the author’s invention. He sifted the wheat from the chaff and evolved his own methods. Relying upon himself, he invented for himself and so undoubtedly formed that distinctive character found in his music, in everything he wrote from his earliest small piece to his later works on the largest and grandest scale—that personality and abiding something which has become known to all musicians as ‘Elgarian.’

CHAPTER II

IN SEARCH OF A CAREER

WHEN Edward had grown beyond the instruction received at his first school, he was entered as a scholar at Littleton House, a school at which from twenty-five to thirty boys received education from Francis Reeve, and here he attended for some memorable years of which in later days he often spoke with some emotion. He never forgot that to Mr Reeve he owed his first idea of writing an oratorio about the twelve Apostles, and he remembered exactly what was said and the impression it made upon him at the time. Reeve, addressing his pupils, said: ‘The Apostles were poor men at the time of their calling; perhaps before the descent of the Holy Ghost not cleverer than some of you here.’ It is recorded that Elgar’s own words spoken to one who was interviewing him many years afterwards were: ‘This set me thinking, and the oratorio of 1903 is the result.’

One can almost follow the trend of thought in young Edward’s mind. If the twelve Apostles could be inspired by the descent of the Holy Ghost (men no cleverer than he and his fellows before the descent), why should not he, if he really and sincerely applied himself to the task he set himself and if he could only have enough faith, why should not he also receive spiritual help from above? He knew full well that nothing could be done without hard and incessant toil, and he applied himself with renewed vigour to the study of the music used in his own church, the music used at the services in Worcester Cathedral, to Bible study and the religious exercises of his church; it was as if indeed the seed sown at Littleton House was already germinating, so that some strong urge possessed him and a thirst for knowledge spurred him on. When one considers the obstacles he surmounted in his progress towards the eventual realization of this dream, one is left in no doubt that it was his sublime faith and belief that gave him the courage to go forward, that gave him tenacity and perseverance. He staunchly believed that if he gave his utmost strength to the task, he too, like the Apostles, would receive spiritual help and inspiration.

But it was not possible for him to devote all his time to the pursuit of the goal he had set for himself. He had to descend to earth and the mundane affairs of life. In the year