ELGAR IN RETROSPECT
By MARTIN COOPER
AFTER more than a fortnight of concerts in which all Elgar's main works have been given, in generally excellent conditions thanks to the Henry Wood Concert Society, it is a tempta- tion to essay an objective summing-up of his achievement as a whole. The fact that Elgar's greatest and most typical music was written between 1899 and 1913 (only the 'cello concerto came later, in 1919) makes an objective appreciation very difficult. It is a common- place that his music, and indeed his whole personality, was typical of an era against whose atmosphere, moral and aesthetic, we are still reacting—suspicious and contemptuous of what seem to us the complacency and the facile emotions of the over-fed, jealous (it may well be) of the untroubled sense of ease and amplitude that we have never known. We have made virtues of the spareness, dryness and astringency which should perhaps properly be regarded—in the aesthetic as in the moral sphere—as means rather than ends ; and critics of an earlier age might well find traces of impotence in our preoccupation with the ascetic virtue. Certainly we tend to live at the aesthetic antipodes of Elgar's world.
Allowances being made for this natural, and indeed conventional, reaction, there remains the more serious question of the restricted, local appeal of Elgar's music. Beyond the Channel works which English music-lovers instinctively and unquestionably rank among the great accepted classics are regarded as academic essays in the typical post-Wagnerian manner or thinly disguised salon pieces appealing to the incorrigible sentimentality of the British public. We must remember that other composers have a similarly restricted appeal. In German-speaking countries Bruckner's symphonies are rated by many as at least the equal of Beethoven's, while some rate them even higher ; whereas in England we accord them an occasional respectful hearing and no more. Foreigners agree in finding some- thing specifically English in Elgar's music, as we may allow a specifically Teutonic something to Bruckner ; and perhaps it is the chief claim of both composers to have given expression to a peculiarly national complex of sentiments. Elgar's great technical gifts are recognised even by foreigners who find his music most unsym- pathetic, and to his countrymen he will always have the honour of being the first wholly professional British composer since Purcell technically able to compete with any of his European contemporaries. This was a great achievement which should never be forgotten, though it naturally constitutes no absolute claim for his music on the attention of foreigners. His idiom was already slightly old- fashioned by Continental standards when he wrote his best works, which are contemporary with the mature works of Debussy and Ravel in France, Strauss in Germany and Scriabin in Russia. But that again is no serious failing ; it merely provides an additional reason for the failure of his music to weather a Channel crossing.
Listening to these big choral and orchestral works I tried to hear with the ears of a foreigner, to forget or discount the associations of years, and I eagerly canvassed foreign opinion—French, Austrian and Greek. Of the strong personal quality of the best of Elgar's music neither I nor my miniature poll ever doubted. We even agreed on the basic qualities of that character, though we tended to give them slightly different names. What most irritated my French voter was a quality which I believe most endears Elgar's music to the mass of his own counrymen—his profound conventionality. Except perhaps in Gerontius there are no embarrassing emotional extremes in this music, no sensual ecstasies and certainly no intel- lectual conundrums. The tone is always, almost deliberately, gentlemanly ; the emotions might be both experienced and expressed without offence in the library, the drawing-room or the park of an English country-house in the reign of Edward VII. My Greek friend confirmed this impression when he suggested that Elgar's music was the aesthetic counterpart of another conception so English that the word to express it has been borrowed by many European languages—comfort. There is more than physical well-being in comfort ; there is a suggestion of an exclusiveness which we might call aristocratic and foreigners simply snobbish (a typically different emphasis), the suggestion of a carpet, cushion or baize door inter- posed between man and the cruder realities and small annoyances and indignities of every-day life. Elgar's music is all, I think, very much on this side of the baize door, even consciously and proudly so, as is natural in a man who started on the other side of that highly symbolic partition.
This atmosphere of comfort and conventionality in Elgar's music leads many younger Englishmen and almost all foreigners to doubt, or at least to misunderstand, its emotional quality. Sentimentality is often easy to recognise, but always difficult to define. All my foreign friends found Elgar sentimental, and even his greatest admirers will probably admit the charge, though with many reservations. The facile and deliberately lingering sentiment of the slow move- ment of the Serenade and the 'cello concerto or the second subject of the first movement of the violin concerto are at home in the late Victorian or Edwardian drawing-room. (A German conductor confronted with the Introduction and Allegro for Strings dismissed even this as Salonmusik.) Certainly the mild and unctuous banali- ties of The Kingdom bear the same relation to the earth-shaking and apocalyptic experiences of Pentecost as the average pictures in the-child's illustrated Bible. But even these are perfectly sincere, and the expression of a range of feeling which, if not particularly admirable, was very real in the England of Elgar's day. As with sentimentality, so with the strange blend of jingoistic patriotism and real idealism in the Crown Imperial and Pomp and Circumstance marches. These works are the highest expression of an emotion which was, and to a certain extent is, very widely felt in England, let alone whether it ought to be or no. Thus Elgar was, and has remained, a genuinely popular composer, just as Tchaikovsky has retained his popularity in Russia.
To combine this popular appeal with fine craftsmanship is a great achievement, for a fine artist who is also representative of the general run of his countrymen, who not only feels the things they feel but very much as they feel them, is a very rare creature. This, I believe, is Elgar's greatest claim to fame, but it is not his only claim. He would not be representative if he was unable to rise, on occasion, far beyond the average of his countrymen's emotional sphere. Even the most ordinary of us has his unexpectedly great moments. In Falstaff and the first movement of the 'cello concerto Elgar shows that he was capable of a different, less popular, approach to music, intellectual far above his average in the one case (hence Falstaff's unpopularity) and unusually chastened and restrained in the other. Falstaff, written in 1913, only became available to the European public at a time when symphonic poems with complicated literary programmes had just gone completely (and, as usual, violently) out of fashion.
The fact that a French 'cellist of international standing, Pierre Fournier, has played the 'cello concerto during the recent festival may mean that this work—English enough but less aggressively so— may be given a better chance than the more typical works of Elgar's prime. Be that as it may, the main body of Elgar's music will remain a primarily national heritage, probably always the subject of mild surprise and good-humoured bantering on the part of foreigners—like our weather and our cooking—but as intimately and inescapably ours as either of these.
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