In Tune With the Times

...Richard Strauss’s Salome was termed disgusting and degenerate...

...Elgar’s setting is starkly dramatic, with Wagnerian leitmotivs, majestic melodies, offstage choruses, and swelling orchestral accompaniment conspiring to produce a monumental effect...

...With such a triumphant climb, what more could Elgar want...

...At the Bard Festival Botstein and his band of musicians performed The Dream of Gerontius and other choral and chamber works that fell into disfavor in the 20th century’s rush to embrace a more dissonant, atonal idiom...

...But it is especially striking in his choral works...

...One senses that Elgar was attempting to create a pan-Christian work, in the fashion of Bach’s B-Minor Mass, rather than a Catholic polemic...

...The bulk of the essays in Edward Elgar and His World focus on these obstacles, which may have been responsible for producing a man with a dual persona...

...The famous trio from Pomp and Circumstance March No...

...1—the heroic melody whose crescendos spur the swelling of parents’ chests at American commencements— was so pride-inducing that Elgar recycled it to great effect in the Coronation Ode as a hymn, “The Land of Hope and Glory...

...Beginning with Hyperion (which Elgar cited throughout his life) and continuing through The Song of Hiawatha and Tales of a Wayside Inn, Longfellow created a poetic lingua franca for English-speaking readers that was almost as popular in Britain as it was in the United States...

...He studied music with his father, a journeyman musician, and eventually succeeded him as organist of St...

...Elgar’s Enigma Variations, cello and violin concertos, and string works, written at the beginning of the modern era, found a place in the international repertory and served to reestablish England’s reputation on the music scene...

...Grimley calls this “drum-stirring music,” but it goes beyond that...

...in London, none materialized, and within two years he was forced to leave the city to live in Malvern, where he eventually served as conductor of the Worcestershire Philharmonic Orchestra...

...Still, were it not for the ubiquitous use of Pomp and Circumstance March No...

...He was knighted in 1904, and awarded honorary degrees from Cambridge, Oxford, Aberdeen, Leeds, and Yale, which he visited in 1905, on the fi rst of several trips to America...

...Born 150 years ago last June 2, Sir Edward Elgar tends to be appreciated chiefl y in Britain, where he is hailed as the founder of the 20th-century English Music Renaissance, the fi rst great native-born composer since Henry Purcell (who died in 1695...

...George’s, he eventually moved to London in 1889 at age 32...

...1 at graduation ceremonies, Elgar would not be a household name in America...

...Elgar’s choral works, often based on historical romances or the Bible, capture this populist spirit...

...George B. Stauffer is dean of the Mason Gross School of the Arts and professor of music history at Rutgers...

...By producing works that were distinctly British—“at once breezy and beefy,” as a writer in the Manchester Guardian put it—Elgar built a strong and loyal following...

...Longfellow’s poetry, with its lyrical, easy-to-memorize verse, opened the world of classical learning to middleclass readers, while its surface propriety veiled intense and vaguely erotic emotions...

...Moreover, as an autodidact who built his career writing for amateur choruses, he was slow to fi nd acceptance in the European community of professional composers...

...Just how fl at could be seen at the London premiere of the fi rst Pomp and Circumstance March in 1901...

...While Elgar was enjoying the British acclaim, his more progressive colleagues on the continent were taking hits...

...We see this serenity in Elgar’s string music and in the pastoral passages of the well-known concertos, symphonies, and Enigma Variations...

...Elgar’s crowning choral work is The Dream of Gerontius...

...Debussy’s Pell?as et M?lisande was booed mercilessly and La Mer dubbed Le Mal de Mer...

...As a Catholic, he stood apart from England’s Protestant majority, and as the son of a jack-of-all-trades musician (as late as 1897 he termed himself “a pianotuner’s son”), he remained outside the British upper class...

...This quickly became the unoffi cial anthem of the Tory party...

...If he was attacked for anything, it was for appearing to embrace British imperialism and serving as its chief musical propagandist...

...Based on the doctrinal Roman Catholic poem of John Henry Newman, it portrays the death of an old man and his rebirth in the next world...

...1—the part unfamiliar to most Americans—is a brash, frenetically paced march...

...As Daniel M. Grimley notes in an essay on Elgar and populism, Elgar appears to have reveled in his ability to write rousing melodies, once remarking to a friend that he had just composed “a tune that will knock ’em—knock ’em fl at...

...Unfazed by the lack of interest in Elgar here, the Bard Music Festival, led by its artistic director Leon Botstein, devoted two weekends of concerts last summer to the composer’s works...

...Respect and inner peace, one suspects...

...After working his way through local music organizations, as conductor of the Worcester Glee Club, as “composer in ordinary” at the Powick County Lunatic Asylum, and then as organist at St...

...Within the last decade or so we’ve marked a Brahms Year (1997, the 100th anniversary of his death), a Bach Year (2000, the 250th anniversary of his death), and a Mozart Year (2006, the 250th anniversary of his birth), and the music festivals and scholarly conferences spawned by these celebrations have offered rich opportunities to survey composers’ lives and works and weigh how their stock is doing in recent days...

...There is no romance here, no nobilmente, only the stark realism of 20th-century warfare...

...Although Elgar claimed that the work was humanistic in nature, and represented man’s universal plight, Gerontius was nevertheless banned for many years at Gloucester Cathedral for being “too Catholic...

...It is lamentable that Elgar’s far gentler choral works are seldom performed here...

...Books&Arts In Tune With the Times A second look at Edward Elgar BY GEORGE B. STAUFFER Edward Elgar and His World Edited by Byron Adams Princeton, 448 pp., $22.95 Musicians and music institutions, it seems, are always eager to celebrate major anniversaries of major composers...

...Although you wouldn’t have known it here in the United States, we recently concluded an Elgar Year...

...The Enigma Variations, so called because each section is prefaced by the initials of fancied names of Elgar’s friends who are portrayed in the music, and his symphonies and concertos, brought him fame...

...If Longfellow invented poetry as a public idiom, as Christoph Irmscher has claimed, Elgar similarly wished to break down the barriers of high culture and create music that would speak to general listeners...

...And this is to say nothing of the riot provoked by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at its fi rst performance in Paris in 1913...

...They show a very different side of the composer, a man seeking universal peace and transcendence...

...Merely to restore order, I played the march a third time...

...For although he was feted in Britain as the Empire’s most important composer, he nevertheless remained an outsider, frequently haunted by inner doubts...

...And that, I may say, was the one and only time in the history of the Promenade concerts that an orchestra item was accorded a double encore...

...Edward Elgar was born in 1857 into a solid working-class family in Broadheath, near Worcester in west-central England...

...Not many composers used the designation nobilmente in their scores...

...In music, the classical and romantic periods seem to have passed Britain by (the Germans called it “The Land without Music...

...He was also appointed Peyton Professor of Music at the University of Birmingham, where he presented a series of lectures on the state of music in Britain...

...Gerontius has been termed the greatest English oratorio, and at the end of the manuscript Elgar quoted from John Ruskin: “This is the best of me...

...Perfectly tailored to choral-society performances, they engender communal warmth and catharsis...

...Covent Garden devoted a three-day festival entirely to his music, the fi rst time an English composer was so honored...

...Now that such music has moved into a postmodern phase, and Richard Danielpour, Bright Sheng, and other composers are giving us plush, tonal scores once again, perhaps it is time to return to the real thing...

...The famous trio from Pomp and Circumstance March No...

...Given the paradoxes in his life and works, this is not an easy task...

...After the death of his wife in 1919 he returned to Worcester, where he died in 1934...

...In fact, they refused to let me go on with the program...

...It sounds mechanical and angular, like the gnashing of gear-teeth or the pumping of pistons...

...It is diffi cult to believe they were written by a man who relished being knighted...

...A series of rousing marches— most notably the Imperial March for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the Coronation March for George V, and the Pomp and Circumstance marches— brought him glory...

...As Grimley points out, Elgar may have complained to a friend that the audience at the premiere of his Second Symphony sat and listened “like stuffed pigs,” but his fundamentally conservative and comfortable idiom never incurred the wrath leveled at his pathbreaking contemporaries...

...With these successes Elgar was able to return to London in triumph, moving into Severn, a graciously appointed, custom-built house in Hampstead...

...A series of successful cantatas and oratorios written for provincial choir festivals—The Black Knight, Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf, Caractacus, and fi nally his choral masterpiece, The Dream of Gerontius, completed in 1900—brought him recognition...

...The festival not only resurrected pieces rarely heard on American soil but also produced this handsome volume of essays by a dozen scholars, who strive to assess Elgar’s place in music history...

...On the one hand there is the Worcestershire Elgar, who cherished privacy, loved riddles (his musical scores are fi lled with cryptic quotations), praised country life, and wrote gentle string music...

...The festivals, in particular, have also provided the chance to scrutinize the composers’ lesser-known creations, to see if we’ve missed anything in our rush to hear the blockbuster masterpieces one more time...

...Accepting and maybe even embracing the paradoxes posed by the patriotic marches, we might want to consider giving Sir Edward Elgar’s best pieces another look, even if the Elgar Year is behind us...

...Aside from a few professional violin lessons in London, Elgar was self-taught...

...The lesson was not lost on Elgar, who wrote four more Pomp and Circumstance marches over the next three decades...

...In Worcester, Elgar had depended heavily on private students for income...

...But they would not listen...

...Elgar seems to be portraying the metallic edge of modernism, something akin to military machinery throttling up for action...

...In his lectures at the University of Birmingham, Elgar lamented the poor taste of British audiences and advocated state-subsidized music, a national opera, and the construction of large public halls in every town—halls that could host cultural events at affordable prices...

...I had to play it again—with the same result...

...Several of his best pieces—The Black Knight, The Saga of King Olaf, and to some extent The Apostles—are based on the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow...

...1 was so pride-inducing that Elgar recycled it to great effect in the Coronation Ode as a hymn, ‘The Land of Hope and Glory.’ This quickly became the unoffi cial anthem of the Tory party...

...On the other hand, there is the Lord Elgar, who coveted London social gatherings, championed pure instrumental music, went to the theater, and wrote bombastic marches...

...The conductor, Henry Wood, reported: The people simply rose and yelled...

...Will the real Elgar stand up...

...As Leon Botstein notes in a summary essay, although Longfellow and Elgar worked at opposite ends of the 19th century, they were kindred spirits in many regards: Both wished to enlighten, educate, and unify their audiences...

...George’s (Roman Catholic) Church in Worcester...

...Works such as The Empire March, The Crown of India (which included the song “The Rule of England”), and the Pomp and Circumstance marches stirred patriotic feelings about British rule...

...The remainder of Pomp and Circumstance No...

...And Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was described as the glorifi cation of the stuff fi lthy pencils write on lavatory walls...

...After considerable delay, while the audience roared its applause, I went off and fetched Harry Dearth who was to sing Hiawatha’s Vision [the next piece on the program...