Lost History – The un-English influences on Edward Elgar
The music of Edward Elgar has become synonymous with a sense of British pride, sentimentality and self-assurance. But most of his musical heroes were not native geniuses, they were the colossuses of continental orchestration, daring innovators of strange styles and bold pioneers of intricate designs.
Elgar reserved little respect for the great English composers, calling William Byrd and the lesser Elizabethans ‘museum pieces’. The richness of Wagner, Berlioz and Saint-Saens informed his most iconic pieces more profoundly than the works of Tallis or Purcell. These foreign influences explain the nature of his music and the source of his singular sound.
Elgar is axiomatically a post-Wagnerian composer. His use of leitmotifs, stirring harmonies and overwhelming orchestration owes much of its force and allure to the music dramas of Wagner. The spiritually emboldening exultation of an Elgarian crescendo is a rare artistic achievement, one that Wagner capitalised on throughout his thrilling career. Those instances, like the orgasmic end of Nimrod or tear-inducing highs of Sospiri, recall the intoxicating headiness of German symphonies and French suites. Often compared to his Austro-Hungarian contemporary, Gustav Mahler, Elgar incorporated the exciting chromaticism of Wagner, allowing him to expand his spiralling expressions and deepen his emotional resonance.
A look at continental conducting repertoires reveals the international perception and comprehension of Elgar’s output and unveils the true stature of a composer who is regularly considered disappointingly ‘patriotic’ and even egregiously ‘jingoistic’ by many modern critics. Hans Richter included Elgar alongside Wagner and Brahms in his selection of pieces to premiere, Mahler and Toscanini championed Elgar’s Enigma Variations via regular inclusions in their conducting schedules, and, in 1905, the Austrian virtuoso violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler said to a British journalist; “I consider [Elgar] to be the greatest living composer”. For Kreisler, one of the greatest musicians of the century, to posit that appreciation of Elgar, while Debussy, Faure, Puccini and Strauss were at work shows the international appeal of this national symbol of native English music.
Elgar’s international pull illustrates the kind of music he intended to write, music that utilises the accomplishments of the European tradition. It also explains his preeminent status in our cannon. As Debussy was characteristically French, Puccini Italian and Strauss German, Elgar is archetypally English, not because he was solely concerned with indigenous tunes and sort to assert a quintessentially English enunciation, but because he was arguably the best consummate composer we have had since Purcell and because his music emerged during a particularly triumphant phase in our history. Anthony Burgess succinctly and wryly explained Elgar’s incomparable standing as a national musician: “I know that Elgar is not manic enough to be Russian, not witty or pointillist enough to be French, not harmonically simple enough to be German. We arrive at his Englishry by pure elimination.”
That moustached exponent of British imperial music did belong to a by-gone era, as all have and all will, but his aspirations ascended the critical assumption that he only desired to glorify himself through a glorification of his country. He was a composer in the same vein as his illustrious foreign contemporaries and forebears, while remaining wholly English in his appearance and attitude. Shakespeare made Italian poetic forms an English literary norm, but few would dare to deny his innate yet vague Englishness, a ‘ness’ that has always relied on alien influences.
Elgar’s posthumous reputation is not dissimilar to Rupert Brooke’s. Brooke’s overt love of England belied his productive appreciation of non-native poets and gratuitously limited his legacy. Unlike Brooke, however, Elgar desired to be deemed an exemplary English composer. He projected a conscious image of himself as a tweed-clad squire, who loved bucolic quiet and respected ancient institutions. This privately conducted PR campaign has unfortunately reduced his cultural relevance and concealed his authentic musical character.
Perhaps in terms of his personality, Elgar was almost absurdly English, in the most eccentric Edwardian sense of the term. While staying at his St James’s club, Brooks’s, he would telephone his Worcestershire home and ask his butler to put his beloved dogs on the receiver so that he could hear them bark.
A critic once said of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ stereotypically English sound that if you were to play his music to a wode-covered Celtic warrior, they would understand it as well as any 20th century Londoner. Though that is a ridiculous assertion, Elgar also possesses the power to unite listeners from different times, classes and locations. However un-English he was in his influences, he remains the most English of the English composers. Instead of being a poster boy of musical patriotism, he ought to be seen in full, as a genius who enriched the artistic heritage he was born into by absorbing and adapting accomplishments from abroad.