the struggles of great men, spurred by the desire for free, sincere,
and personal speech, to wrest the musical language out of the triteness
long conventional usage has given it; to make it say something new; to
add, so to speak, to the impersonal organ chord it sounds an overtone
of their particular human voices. This is what stirs us when we think
of Beethoven, after he had written two symphonies in the style of Haydn
and Mozart, finding himself at the opening of "a new road," leading
he knew not whither, but irresistibly summoning him; of Gluck, at
fifty, protesting against the hollowness of the Italian operas he had
been writing up to that time; of Franck, still older, finding at last
the secret of that vague, groping, mystical harmonic style he made so
peculiarly his own. Men dread liberty, says Bernard Shaw, because of
the bewildering responsibility it imposes and the uncommon alertness
it demands; no wonder that they acclaim as truly great only those
artists who fully accept this responsibility and successfully display
this alertness. And it may be suggested that the more conventional, and
therefore paralyzing to personal initiative, the style from which the
artist takes his departure, the more alertness does he require, and the
more credit does he deserve if he arrives at freedom. If this be true,
Sir Edward Elgar, who, starting at English oratorio, has arrived at
the cosmopolitan yet completely individual musical speech of the first
Symphony, the Variations, and parts of "The Dream of Gerontius," is
surely one of the great men of our time.
For nothing, not even stark crudity, is so unfavorable to artistic
life as the domination by a conventional formalism like that of the
Handel-Mendelssohn school from which Elgar had to start. It may take a
great artist like Dvořák or Verdi to build an art on the naïvetés of
Bohemian folk-song or the banalities of Italian opera; but to free an
art from the tyranny of drowsy custom, as Elgar has done, requires not
only a great artist, but something of a revolutionary.
Elgar is English in character, but cosmopolitan in sympathies, style,
and workmanship. In other words, while retaining the personal and
racial quality natural to all sincere art, he has been magnanimous,
intelligent, and unconventional enough to break through the charmed
circle of insularity which has kept so many English composers from
vital contact with the world. Such insularity cannot but be fatal
to art. It is bad enough when it confines the artist to narrow
native models. It is even worse when, ignoring native music of the
finest quality, such as that of Purcell, it follows blindly, through
timidity or inertia, traditions imported by foreigners of inferior
grade. Generations of English musicians have stultified themselves
in imitating Handel's burly ponderousness and Mendelssohn's somewhat
vapid elegance. They have turned a deaf ear, not only to the greater
contemporaries of these idols--to Bach and to Schumann--but also to
the more modern thought of Wagner, Franck, Tschaikowsky, and Brahms.
They have been correct and respectable in an art which lives only
through intense personal emotion. They have narrowed their sympathies.
They have been national in an age of dawning internationalism.
Elgar, on the contrary, together with a few others whose work deserves
to be better known than it is, has had the courage to aspire to a
cosmopolitan breadth of style. He has made up for the lack of what are
called "educational advantages" by something far more valuable--an
insatiable intellectual curiosity. Self-taught except for a few violin
lessons in youth, he has been all his life a tireless listener,
observer, and student. When he was a boy, having no text-books on
musical form, he wrote a whole symphony in imitation of Mozart's in G
minor, "following the leader" with admirable and fruitful docility.
As a youth he would play violin, at the last desk oftentimes, in
any orchestra to which he could gain admission, for the sake of the
experience; and between rehearsals would laboriously collate the
instrumental parts to find out why a certain passage sounded well or
ill. He would travel two hundred and fifty miles to London, from his
home in Worcester, to hear a Crystal Palace Saturday concert, returning
late at night. Knowing well that any potent individuality like his
own grows by what it assimilates, he has had none of the small man's
fear of injuring by the study of others his "individuality." The
internal evidence of his works shows that there are few modern scores
he has left unpondered; yet no living composer has a more unmistakably
personal style than his.
His intellectual activity has by no means confined itself to music.
He has always been an omnivorous reader. And while much of this
reading naturally proceeded in desultory fashion, for the sake of
relaxation, and took him sometimes as far afield as Froissart, the
fourteenth-century French chronicler, as suggested by his early
overture of that name, he has never lost the power of concentration,
and can study a book to as good purpose as a score. His analytic
notes to his symphonic study "Falstaff" (1913) reveal a surprisingly
detailed knowledge both of Shakespeare and of Shakespeare's
commentators. Science also interests him, and for some years his
hobby was scientific kite-flying. He is of the nervously irritable
temperament so often coupled with mental alertness, walks about
restlessly while conversing, and detests all routine work like
teaching. "To teach the right pupil was a pleasure," he once said,
"but teaching in general was to me like turning a grindstone with a
dislocated shoulder." In 1889 he married, gave up most of his teaching,
and moved to London. Since then he has lived partly among his native
Malvern Hills, partly near London, but has devoted himself almost
entirely to composing and conducting.
Elgar's whole life has thus been a gradual and progressive
self-emancipation from the limitations of inherited style, an escape
from habit to initiative, from formality to eloquence, from insularity
to cosmopolitanism. Nor has this progress been the less inspiring
in that it has been spasmodic, subject to interruptions, and never
complete. In that respect it shares the lovable imperfection of
all things human. It has been instinctive rather than reasoned, has
proceeded largely by trial and error, and has counted among its
experiments almost as many failures as successes. There are commonplace
pages in almost everything Elgar has written, unless it be the "Enigma"
Variations. But the important point is that however much, in moments of
technical inattention or emotional indifference, he may fall back into
the formulæ of his school, he has at his best left them far behind, and
made himself the peer of his greatest continental contemporaries in
wealth and variety of expression--of such men as Strauss in Germany and
d'Indy in France.
What are these never-quite-ejected formulæ, lurking in Elgar's brain,
ever ready to guide his pen when for a moment he forgets to think and
feel? If we look at the opening chorus of "The Black Knight," written
in 1893, and numbered opus 25, we shall get a working notion of them
(Figure X, page 102).
[Illustration: =FIGURE X.
Opening chorus from "The Black Knight."=]
How this passage calls up the atmosphere of the typical English choral
festival: the unwieldy masses of singers, the scarcely less unwieldy
orchestra or organ, the ponderous movement of the music, half majestic,
half tottering, as of a drunken elephant, the well-meaning ineptitude
of the expression, highly charged with good nature but innocent
of nuance! There is the solid diatonic harmony, conscientiously
divided between the four equally industrious parts. There is the
thin disguising of the tendency of this hymn-tune type of harmony
to sit down, so to speak, on the accent of each measure, by a few
conventional suspensions. There is the attempt to give the essentially
stagnant melody a specious air of busyness by putting in a triplet here
and a dot or short rest there. And there is the sing-song phraseology
by which a phrase of four measures follows a phrase of four measures
as the night the day. In short, there is the perfectly respectable
production of music by the yard, on the most approved pattern,
undistorted by a breath of personal feeling or imagination.
How far Elgar, whenever his imagination is stirred, can get away from
this conventional vacuity, even without departing materially from
its general idiom, may as well be shown at once, for the sake of the
illuminating contrast, by the quotation of a bit of genuine Elgar--the
"Nimrod" in the "Enigma" Variations, opus 36 (1899).
[Illustration: =FIGURE XI.
"Nimrod," from the "Enigma Variations."=]
This touching tribute to a friend of the composer, Mr. A. J. Jaeger
(the English equivalent of whose name, hunter, suggested the title),
has all the serious thoughtfulness, the tenderness coupled with
aspiration, the noble plainness, that belong to Elgar at his best.
And it is a striking fact that the originality of the passage (for
no one but Elgar could have written it) is due to subtle, almost
unanalyzable qualities in the mode of composition rather than to any
unusual features of style. The harmonic style, indeed, is quite the
same simple diatonic one as that of "The Black Knight" chorus, showing
that, in music as in literature, noble poetry can be made from the same
materials as doggerel. There is the same predominance of simple triads
and seventh chords, especially the more rugged sevenths, for which
Elgar has a noticeable fondness; the same frequent use of suspensions,
though here it is dictated by emotion rather than by custom; the same
restless motion of the bass, one of the hall-marks of Elgar's style.
The melody, however, shows a tendency to large leaps, often of a
seventh, in alternating directions, giving its line a sharply serrated
profile. This, it may be noted, is also one of the outstanding features
of his more personal thought. But above all should be observed the
rhythmic flexibility that here takes the place of sing-song--the free
sweep of the line, scorning to rest on the accents, soaring through its
long continuous flight like a bird in a favoring gale.
We have here, then, the vein of expression at once plain, serious,
and noble, which makes Elgar at his best both English and universal.
It recurs frequently throughout the whole body of his work: in the
"Go forth" chorus in "Gerontius," so finely used in the prelude; in
the theme of the Variations; in the fundamental theme of the first
Symphony, which dominates the entire work and in which Elgar reaches
perhaps his most exalted utterance; in the themes of the slow movement
of the same symphony; and in another way in the Prince Hal theme
of "Falstaff." Some may feel that this is the essential Elgar. Yet
there is also in this quiet Englishman a passionate mysticism, a
sense of subtle spiritual experience, which has urged him to develop
progressively quite another mode of musical speech. On this side he is
related to Wagner and to César Franck. Like them he has realized that
there is a whole range of feeling, inaccessible to the diatonic system
of harmony, that can be suggested by harmony based on the chromatic
scale, and even more vividly and subtly by a harmonic system that
opens up a path between all the keys, that makes them all available
together--by what we may call, in short, "polytonal" harmony. This
polytonal harmonic system is common to "Tristan und Isolde," to
Franck's "Les Béatitudes," to much of Chopin, and to many parts of "The
Dream of Gerontius," however much they may differ in other respects.
Elgar began early to experiment in this direction. Even in "The Black
Knight," for example, at the word "rock" in the lines
When he rode into the lists
The castle 'gan to rock,
we have the following progression, equally striking from the musical
and the dramatic point of view:
[Illustration: =FIGURE XII.
From "The Black Knight."=]
This is what Mr. Carl W. Grimm has well named a "modulating sequence";
that is, each unit group of harmony (in this case a measure in length)
is the sequential repetition of the preceding, yet the chromatic
texture is so managed that each begins in a new key; the total effect
is thus much more novel and exciting than is that of the traditional
monotonal sequence. Yet, as Mr. Stillman-Kelley has pointed out in a
closely reasoned essay,[20] however ingenious may be the arrangement
of the modulating sequence on the harmonic side, it is liable to the
same fault that besets the monotonal sequence--that is, rhythmic
monotony. Once we have the pattern, we know what to expect; and if the
composer gives us exactly what we expect the effect is too obvious,
and we are bored. It is precisely by his avoidance of this literal
repetition, says Mr. Kelley, that Wagner, in such a modulating sequence
as that of the Pilgrims' Chorus, maintains both the rhythmic and the
harmonic vitality of the music.
Judged by the standard thus suggested, the sequence on the word "rock"
is seen to be too literally carried out. The pattern is applied with
the mechanical regularity of a stencil, necessarily with an equally
mechanical result. It must be said in the interest of just criticism
that Elgar frequently falls into this fault. Even Gerontius' cry of
despair, so magnificently developed by the orchestra, contains less of
subtle variety than is given to that curiously similar cry of Amfortas
in "Parsifal" by the "inversion" of the parts, while the priest's
adjuration to his departing soul[21] and the chorus afterward based
on it, become irritatingly monotonous through the literal repetition
of a pattern admirable in itself. At the beginning of the Development
in the first movement of the second Symphony there is a passage
illustrating the same fault. The tonal and harmonic coloring here are
singularly impressive, and quite original; as Mr. Ernest Newman remarks
in his analysis:[22] "A new and less sunny cast has come over the old
themes.... The harmonies have grown more mysterious; the scoring is
more veiled; the dynamics are all on a lower scale." Everything favors,
in fact, a most impressive effect except the structure; but that,
through its over-literal application of the modulating sequence, almost
jeopardizes the whole.
[Illustration: =FIGURE XIII.
In the Mountain,--Night. From "The Apostles."=]
Fortunately, however, happier applications of this harmonically so
fruitful device are not far to seek in Elgar's scores, especially the
later ones. The following theme from "The Apostles," appropriately
marked "mistico," is a fine example of the kind of mysticism that is
not unmindful of the needs of the body and of the intelligence as well
as of the soul. The principle is still that of the modulating sequence,
but the application is here not mechanical but freely imaginative.
Two of the one-measure units are in each phrase balanced by a unit
twice as long, so that the rhythm is as a whole far more organic than
in our earlier examples of sequences. Furthermore the purely harmonic
treatment makes use of unforeseeable relations, so that the effect of
stereotype is successfully evaded. Finally, here is a theme from the
second symphony in which the sequential principle is still further
veiled, so far as harmony is concerned. The harmonic progressions seem
here to "shoot," so to speak, with complete spontaneity; we cannot
anticipate whither the next move will take us, and we get constantly
to interesting new places; yet the unity of the whole, beginning and
ending in E-flat[23], prevents any sense of aimless wandering.
[Illustration: =FIGURE XIV.
Theme from Symphony No. 2.=]
The alert student will probably still feel, nevertheless, perhaps
without being able to account in any way for his impression, that
even in these last excerpts there is an unsatisfactory element, a
something that keeps them on a lower level of art, for all their
opaline color, than that of the forthright and transparent "Nimrod."
This something, perhaps on the whole Elgar's most ineradicable fault,
is rhythmical "short breath." He gets away from it, to be sure, in all
his finest pages; but except when his imagination is deeply stirred
his melodic line shows the dangerous tendency to fall into short
segments, a measure or two in length, into a configuration of scallops,
so to speak, rather than wide sweeps, exemplified in the three last
illustrations. Instead of flying, it hops. Examples will be found
right through his works, from the second theme of the early overture
"Froissart" to that of the first movement of the Violin Concerto, opus
61.
[Illustration:
=FIGURE XV. Second theme from "Froissart."=]
[Illustration:
=Second theme of first movement of Violin Concerto.=]
This kind of sing-songiness is as fatal to noble rhythm in music as it
is in poetry--in much of Longfellow, for example; and the frequency
with which Elgar relapses into it suggests that he has some of the
same fatal facility, the tendency to talk without thinking, which so
often kept the American poet below his best. The parallel might be
carried out, if it were worth while, in some detail. Both men wrote
too much, and both are "popular" in the bad sense as well as the good.
The "Pomp and Circumstance" Marches are saved, despite the frequent
triteness of their melody, by their buoyant high spirits; but of the
vapid and sentimental "Salut d'Amour," which has sold in the thousands
and been arranged for all possible combinations of instruments,
including two mandolins and a guitar, the less said the better. Yet it
is noteworthy that the very tendency to an over-obvious, monotonous
rhythmic scheme which works for the popularity of a small piece with
the thoughtless and trivial-minded, works against it in the case of a
larger composition which appeals to the musically serious, and wins its
way gradually at best. Thus Elgar's second symphony, which suffers much
more from this besetting fault than the first, has been less popular
for that very reason. Statistics are significant in such cases. The
second symphony was played twenty-seven times before it was three years
old, a considerable number for so serious a work[24]; but the first,
called by Nikisch "Brahms's Fifth," a compliment which could be paid
to few other modern symphonies without absurdity, achieved the almost
incredible record of eighty-two performances in its first year, in such
widely scattered places as London, Vienna, Berlin, Leipsic, Bonn, St.
Petersburg, Buda-Pest, Toronto, Sydney, and the United States.[25]
Of course it is not intended to account for the wide favor accorded
this symphony by adducing so technical a matter, from one point of
view, as its comparative freedom from a rhythmic weakness to which
its composer is unfortunately peculiarly subject. What is meant is
simply that sing-song balance of short phrases is often a symptom of
superficial feeling, and that, _per contra_, elastic, vigorous, and
imaginative rhythms are a constant result, and therefore a reliable
evidence, of the emotional ardor that makes a piece of music live.
The A-flat Symphony is a work intensely felt by the composer, a work
that, coming from his heart, finds its way to the hearts of others.
And in this respect, in its emotional sincerity, earnestness, and
subjectivity, it differs from his other works more in degree than
in kind. For in everything Elgar writes there is the preoccupation
with inner feeling which we find in such a composer as Schumann, but
from which most of our contemporaries have turned away. Elgar is an
introspective musician, not an externally observant tone-painter like
Strauss. It is noteworthy how completely his treatment of death, for
example, in "The Dream of Gerontius," differs from that of Strauss
in "Tod und Verklärung." By no means accidental is it, but highly
significant of the opposed attitudes of the two artists, that while
Strauss emphasizes the external picture--the panting breath, the
choking cries--Elgar penetrates to the inward emotional state. He has
written surprisingly little program music. Aside from a few realistic
touches scattered through the choral works, and the delicate little
vignette of the friend at sea in the "Enigma" Variations, there is only
"Falstaff"--and that deals more with character than with picture. In
this respect Elgar deserves well of his contemporaries for standing
against a popular but dangerous tendency to externalize the most
inward of the arts, and for showing that even in the twentieth century
the spiritual drama set forth in a work of pure music, like his
first symphony, can be as thrilling as those that have made immortal
Beethoven's later quartets and sonatas.
That this attitude indicates a preference rather than a limitation is
proved by the felicity of the external characterization in passages
scattered all through the choral works, as for instance the setting
of the line "The castle 'gan to rock," cited above, from the "Black
Knight," the music of the devils in "Gerontius," or the scene in "The
Apostles" where Peter walks upon the water, and even more strikingly
in "Falstaff," the composer's single contribution to program music.
Here he frankly takes the Straussian attitude, and skilfully uses the
Straussian methods. Leading themes, as he tells us in his analysis,[26]
depict the fat knight, one "in a green old age, mellow, frank,
gay, easy, corpulent, loose, unprincipled, and luxurious" (_a_);
another "cajoling and persuasive" (_b_); and a third in his mood of
"boastfulness and colossal mendacity" (_c_).
[Illustration: =FIGURE XVI.
Three of the "Falstaff" themes.=]
[Illustration: =(_b_)=]
[Illustration:=(_c_) Grandioso e largamente=]
These portraits evidently belong to the same gallery as Strauss's Don
Quixote, Sancho Panza (_cf._ the first quotation), Till Eulenspiegel,
and others; they are sketched in the same suggestive and telling lines;
in the third there is even the same touch of caricature. The picture
of Eastcheap, too, where, "among ostlers and carriers, and drawers,
and merchants, and pilgrims and loud robustious women, Falstaff has
freedom and frolic," has something of the German composer's brilliant
externality. It should, as Elgar says in his notes, and it does,
"chatter, blaze, glitter, and coruscate." Yet, vivid as all this
is, even here from time to time, notably in the two "interludes,"
the composer characteristically withdraws from the turbulent outer
world he has conjured up, to brood upon its spiritual meaning; and
it is noteworthy that after stating in his analysis that "some lines
quoted from the plays are occasionally placed under the themes to
indicate the feeling to be conveyed by the music," he immediately
adds, "but it is not intended that the meaning of the music, often
varied and intensified, shall be narrowed to a corollary of these
quotations only." This intensification arises, of course, through the
universalizing of all the particulars by the power of music to express
pure emotion.