A very parfit gentil knight of music
PAUL JOHNSON ne of the many things which makes me love Edward Elgar is that both the man and his music are so tremendously unfashionable. No wonder taxfunded quangos set up to 'promote culture', and run by New Labour bureaucrats, are refusing to mark his 150th birthday. He does not correspond with their criteria of approval at any point. He was white. He was English. He was middle class. He was a patriot, he loved his country and revered its monarchy: his second symphony was dedicated to Edward VII, who was kind to him and chose him as the first musician to receive the Order of Merit. He found the appalling losses we suffered in the first world war unbearably painful, and his agony is reflected in his music, notably the tragic cello concerto, to my mind his finest work. He identified himself wholeheartedly with the English people, their past, their nobility, their humour, their courage and resilience — yes, their follies and weaknesses too. For a summation of his Englishness one must turn to his great symphonic study Falstaff Opus 68. Donald Francis Tovey, in his superb article on the subject (Vol. IV in his Essays in Musical Analysis), points to the extraordinary fertility of musical invention in this work, an 'enormous mass of definitely different themes', which he compares to the richness of material in Beethoven's Eroica or even the Ninth Symphony. Elgar is describing a man but also a people and a country, even a concept. It is a greater piece of musical thought than Verdi's Falstaff, fine though that is, because in order to write an opera Verdi had to turn to The Meny Wives of Windsor, a piece d'occasion which Shakespeare wrote at the command of the Queen, taking little trouble over it and (I think) despising the result. The real Falstaff does not appear. By contrast, Elgar used exclusively the Hemy IV plays, plus the footnote at the beginning of Hemy V, where the entire parabola of Falstaff's life and career is described, from his beginning as a page in John of Gaunt's household to his death 'babbling o' green fields'.
Two points about Falstaff that Elgar was keen to make in particular. First, he was not a coward. He was, rather, a realist He saw it as his business to survive. Hotspur, by contrast, was not a realist and became `food for worms'. The astonishing subtlety with which Elgar conveys this process of thought is illustrative music at its most sophisticated, though, as Tovey says, the music is still great even if you take the story away, and can be enjoyed as an abstraction. The second point Elgar makes is that Falstaff was a gentleman.
Elgar could make this point powerfully as well as subtly because he was a gentleman himself not by birth like Falstaff but by fashioning his character into a noble monument of refined decency. His father was a humble musical craftsman who made his living by tuning pianos and eventually scraped enough together to open a music shop. He was also a good violinist and played the organ in the local Catholic church. Elgar inherited both these skills and tried his hand at all the instruments in the paternal shop, becoming, among other things, an accomplished performer on the bassoon, something no other major composer has mastered, I think. Elgar's schooling was insignificant and his musical training meagre. He was essentially an autodidact. His rise was slow and punctuated by endearingly modest achievements. His first break was to arrange music for, and conduct the band of, the county asylum. To my mind it is a wonderful compliment to late Victorian England, and the richness of its culture, that the local bin should have run to a band served by a genius. In his musical apprenticeship and rise to fame, Elgar performed a huge variety of tasks, and everything helped to make him sound, resourceful and ambitious. His familiarity with all the instruments was a prime factor in his wonderful skills as an orchestrator. His self-teaching made him a complete original. There is nothing derivative in his work, even in the positive sense of the word. He learned from everyone who was good enough, imitated nobody. None of his contemporaries, not even Sibelius (the only 20th-century composer to approach him in stature) is so completely sui generis.
Elgar's profound knowledge of instruments, and his experience of getting musicians to work together, beginning with bandsmen and choristers, made him a natural conductor in the sense that he knew how to induce people, even of limited skill, to make the sounds he himself saw on the page. And of course this applied particularly to his own works, with their many subtleties and density. Once, sitting next to Malcolm Sargent at the Beefsteak Club, I was given a lesson on the difficulties of conducting Elgar, which concluded, 'There is absolutely nothing about the old boy which is simple or obvious, especially when it looks simple and obvious. You have to work and think very hard.' He added that Elgar conducted his oeuvre as a whole better than anyone else did.
This is now generally admitted to be true.
Fortunately, Elgar made a great many recordings, using the early acoustic technology at the beginning of his fame and then the newer electrical methods up to his death in 1934. He took immense trouble over them, and had the benefit in many cases of patient and gifted experts. The results are generally excellent, and in this respect Elgar has been more fortunate than most of his contemporaries. We know how he wanted his music to sound. One of my earliest musical memories is 'The Wagon Passes' — a magical episode from Elgar's Nurser), Suite, written in 1931 after the birth of Princess Margaret Rose (as she was then called). This little movement, and another in the same work, is characteristic of Elgar's nuances and profundities when he seems so guileless. I can't remember whether I heard it on a record or whether my mother played it from an arrangement on the upright piano which enlivened our drawingroom, with its precious etchings by Whistler, James McBey, Muirhead Bone and my father himself. Looking back, it was an Edwardian room into which Elgar fitted well, though those particular sounds looked forward to the new Elizabethan age, in which we still live. The little Princess was a bit younger than me and held up to me by my mother and big sisters as a model child. 'Princess Margaret Rose keeps herself clean and tidy at all times', 'Princess Margaret Rose eats up her food without complaint', 'Princess Margaret Rose pronounces words beautifully'. Many years later, I asked her if she really was as good as I was told. 'Well, of course I was good then,' she replied, grimly and with a touch of bitterness, her face infinitely sad.
There was much sadness in Elgar's life too, culminating in the death of his beloved and supportive wife in 1920, after which he could or did compose little, so that the last phase of his life is empty of major creations, in that respect also resembling Sibelius.
From his letters one gathers that Elgar felt he had been badly treated by the musical powers. But he bore his grievances stoically and silently, as a gentleman should. He remained kind, considerate, courteous to all, helpful to other musicians, never seeking praise but modestly grateful when it came, loving God though puzzled about the whole business of eternity, as his masterpiece The Dream of Gerontius makes clear. He was a very parfit gentil knight of music. Too good for the present age, perhaps?
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