Edward Elgar and His World

This is already the vastest war in history. It is war not of nations, but of mankind. It is a war to exorcise a world madness and end an age.

While Elgar’s patriotism and sense of Empire have been treated with considerable insight in recent years, Elgar scholarship seems to have found it relatively difficult to explore objectively the religious and denominational contexts in which he lived, and their significance or otherwise for his music.¹ Indeed, in some cases emphasis on the former has obscured the latter, as with Jeffrey Richards’s suggestion that The Dream of Gerontius can be considered an imperialist work on the grounds of Elgar’s identification with “the idea of Christian heroism,” exemplified by General Gordon of Khartoum.² Where Elgar’s Catholicism has been broached in the literature, as Charles Edward McGuire discusses elsewhere in this volume, there has been a tendency to accept without much question two tropes that emerged shortly after Elgar’s death, which can be seen at least in part to have originated from remarks made by Elgar himself: the first of these, that a crisis of faith had rendered religion no longer of significance in his life (an identity McGuire refers to as the “Weak Faith” avatar); and the second, that as an English Catholic he had learned to appreciate and operate within the codes of Protestantism (the “Pan-Christian” avatar). Just as these avatars arguably offered Elgar himself a means of appeasing his Protestant countrymen and for dulling his often sharply felt sense of otherness within British society, they have also offered convenient strategies for his past biographers who perhaps either did not recognize the centrality of religious identity as a social dynamic in British society of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, reflecting the increasing secularization of subsequent generations, or whose view of their subject was filtered by a particular denominational position or personal belief.³

Scholars who have tackled the topic of Elgar’s Roman Catholicism directly have done so, understandably, in relation to his sacred and organ music.⁴ But Elgar’s Catholic identity can be seen to have a broader significance both for his art and for its place within English culture, as will be explored here in relation to one of his ostensibly secular vocal works, The Spirit of England, op. 80 (1915–17). This is a setting for tenor or soprano soloist, orchestra, and chorus of three poems from The Winnowing-Fan, a collection of verse published in the early months of the Great War by the poet, dramatist, and art scholar Laurence Binyon (1869–1943).

In his 1984 study of Elgar’s life and works, Jerrold Northrop Moore points to an interrelationship between the themes the composer worked with in his music and his religious beliefs:

The fortunes of Elgar’s faith can be traced in the subjects he chose for his major religious choral works, his treatment of those subjects, and how they intertwined with the more purely literary heroes for compositions, also of his own choosing.⁵

Yet Moore places The Spirit of England among Elgar’s imperialist works, reserving discussion of it for the chapter titled “Land of Hope and Glory” and denoting it “the other face of the Coronation Ode of 1902.”⁶ In this regard he echoes Donald Mitchell, who had remarked earlier on “Elgar’s convinced committal to what we may generally term ‘imperial’ topics (the Coronation Ode, Crown of India, Spirit of England and the rest).”⁷ Both writers are surely correct to highlight the overt nationalism of this score, which Moore emphasizes further by adopting its title for his book (Spirit of England: Edward Elgar in His World). At first glance Binyon’s poetry does not seem far removed from A. C. Benson and indeed many British poets writing in the autumn and winter of 1914. The opening stanzas revel in a version of Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden”—England’s mission to free those enslaved by ignorance and tyranny, to vanquish the forces of evil, and to spread the beacons of civilization—all couched in heady imperial imagery designed to stiffen the backbone in the face of mounting death tolls on the western front. Musically Elgar seems to respond in a like manner, with expansive, aspirational melodies built around upward leaps and rising sequences in full choir and orchestra, marked grandioso, nobilmente, and sonoramente.⁸ However, to accept unquestioningly this bracketing of The Spirit of England with Elgar’s imperialist works without further investigation would be to perpetuate the whiff of jingoism and propaganda that has lingered around the work, and which probably accounts for its neglect both in the concert hall and in the literature, despite the quality of the music and its significance within Elgar’s creative output.⁹ As will be seen, The Spirit of England can be interpreted as a specifically Catholic response to the outbreak of war in Europe, and understanding it as such can yield insights into Elgar’s changing attitudes to his faith—the faith in which he was immersed as a young child—and its relationship to his sense of heroic nationalism in the turbulent second decade of the new century.¹⁰ When taken out of context, Elgar’s words to Frank Schuster on hearing of the commencement of hostilities against Germany on August 4, 1914, can seem startlingly inhumane:

Concerning the war I say nothing—the only thing that wrings my heart & soul is the thought of the horses—oh! my beloved animals—the men—and women can go to hell—but my horses;—I walk round & round this room cursing God for allowing dumb brutes to be tortured—let Him kill his human beings but—how CAN HE? Oh, my horses.¹¹

Volunteers were flooding to join the British Expeditionary Force across the Channel, but the British army was still perceived as a body of professionals; conscription would not be instituted for two years and the full horrors of trench warfare had yet to become a reality. Like many of the aristocracy with whom he aligned himself, especially as an enthusiastic racegoer, Elgar’s concerns were thus for the noble beasts that as cavalry mounts and draught animals had been crucial to Britain’s pursuit of the Boer War, and which epitomized the ideal of unwavering service and loyalty until death, most poignantly when slaughtered in their hundreds to sustain the besieged citizens of Mafeking (1899–1900).¹² Frustrated that he was “too old to be a soldier,” Elgar signed up as a Special Constable within two weeks of the outbreak of war, and a few months later switched to the Hampstead Volunteer Reserve, involving himself in regular drills and rifle practice.¹³ He mobilized A. C. Benson into revising the words for “Land of Hope and Glory” and was soon devoting his creative energies to a range of small-scale compositions, including recitations with orchestral accompaniment of poetry by the Belgian patriot Émile Cammaerts (1878–1953): Carillon (op. 75, 1914), Une voix dans le désert (op. 77, 1915), and Le drapeau belge (op. 79, 1916).¹⁴

British poetic responses to the conflict began to flood the pages of newspapers and periodicals, and among the first were those published in the London Times by Elgar’s friend Laurence Binyon. By Christmas Binyon had gathered twelve of his poems into a single volume, The Winnowing-Fan: Poems on the Great War; from this collection, probably working from a copy given to him by the poet himself, Elgar took the following as the basis for a new cantata: I. “The Fourth of August” (referring to the day war was declared); X. “To Women”; and XI. “For the Fallen”; all of which are presented below.¹⁵ The elegy “For the Fallen” would become the most famous and lasting of Binyon’s poems, containing the prescient fourth stanza:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Over the decades to come this quatrain would be recited during countless Armistice and Remembrance Day services and carved on many of the cenotaphs and war memorials erected across the British Empire. After the war, at the behest of the League of Arts, Elgar would rearrange his setting of “For the Fallen” for “Military or Brass Band, or Organ or Pianoforte” (later replaced by full orchestra), omitting the solo part, cutting three stanzas, more than halving the movement in length, and reworking his treatment of the central quatrain into a more consoling, luminous, and sparsely accompanied passage in E major. Renamed With Proud Thanksgiving, this version was intended for performance at the dedication of Edwin Lutyens’s Whitehall Cenotaph and the entombment of the unknown warrior in Westminster Abbey in 1920, though in the end hymn singing would be preferred by the organizers.¹⁶ As the third movement of Elgar’s The Spirit of England, “For the Fallen” would become a stock item in the BBC’s Armistice Day broadcasts, sometimes conducted by the composer himself.¹⁷ Elgar considered it equal in merit to The Dream of Gerontius and The Kingdom, and by 1933, Basil Maine could confirm that “for many [The Spirit of England] has become a national memorial to which they instinctively turn each year on Remembrance Day.”¹⁸

The idea of setting poems from Binyon’s The Winnowing-Fan appears to have been triggered by Elgar’s friend Sir Sidney Colvin (1845–1927), who, until his retirement as Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings, had been a colleague of Binyon’s at the British Museum. It was widely believed by the Allies that the war would be over by Christmas, and so by the first weeks of New Year 1915 the need was keenly felt for something that could help to make sense of the escalating carnage and offer consolation to the growing mass of the bereaved.¹⁹ Colvin probably discussed this with Elgar, for after spending the day with him he jotted the following postscript to a letter dated 10 January 1915:

Why don’t you do a wonderful Requiem for the slain—something in the spirit of Binyon’s “For the Fallen,” or of that splendid homage of Ruskin’s which I quoted in the Times Supplement of Decr 31—or of both together? —SC.²⁰

That Elgar found Colvin’s citation of “For the Fallen” sufficiently appealing to set the text itself, along with others from the same collection, is perhaps not surprising. The verses are replete with musical references, which Binyon enhanced in an extra stanza he wrote for Elgar’s “Marziale” section (quoted below). As the son of an Anglican clergyman, Binyon also drew on a long familiarity with the language and imagery of the Bible in his poetry: for the famous quatrain in “For the Fallen” he later described how he had “wanted to get a rhythm something like ‘By the Waters of Babylon we sat down and wept’ or ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me’ … and having found the kind of rhythm I wanted, varied it in other stanzas according to the mood required.”²¹ His disillusionment with institutionalized religion, however, and fascination with Eastern art and cultures (the main focus of his scholarship in adult life) brought to his poetry both an emphasis on humanism and a broad frame of reference, giving it an appeal that crossed denominational boundaries. His studies of William Blake’s apocalyptic visions might also have helped him to find a voice with which he could speak of the harrowing events of the war; and in “Louvain,” the sixth poem from The Winnowing-Fan, he expressed both a deep love for Flanders and his personal pain at the sacking of this ancient university town. (He did not at this stage know of the murder of his close friend Olivier Georges Destree, who had entered a Benedictine monastery there.)²² The extent to which in early 1915 “For the Fallen” seemed to capture the mood particularly of the nation’s noncombatants, and would do so increasingly over the course of the war, is underlined by Binyon’s biographer, John Hatcher:

“For the Fallen” is one of the few great war poems to include in its tragedy those “that are left.” It takes Henry’s St. Crispin’s Day speech from [Shakespeare’s] Henry V IV. iii, the key text of English chivalric patriotism, and turns it inside out, seeing the war and its aftermath from the point of view of those at home, the older generation too old to fight, including those who found their jingoistic platitudes stilled in their throat by the surreal nightmare the war had become.²³

Colvin, Binyon, and Elgar all belonged to this “older generation”—“Do you realize that nearly half my life belongs to Victoria’s days?” Binyon quizzed T. S. Eliot in 1940—and of the three, only Binyon had direct experience of the fighting.²⁴

The second text to which Colvin referred Elgar came from the final chapter in volume 3 of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters—this was an important, indeed crucial, book for Colvin, who had idolized Ruskin all his life.²⁵ Writing during the Crimean War (1853–56), Ruskin takes as his theme “righteous” warfare, which he argues is essentially a better, more ennobling state for England than peace, referencing ancient codes of Christian chivalry:

I ask their witness, to whom the war has changed the aspect of earth, and imagery of heaven, whose hopes it has cut off like a spider’s web, whose treasure it has placed, in a moment, under the seals of clay. Those who can never more see sunrise, nor watch the climbing light gild the Eastern clouds without thinking what graves it has gilded, first, far down beneath the dark earth-line—who never more shall see the crocus bloom in spring without thinking what dust it is that feeds the wild flowers of Balaclava. Ask their witness, and see if they will not reply that it is well with them and with theirs; that they would have it no otherwise; would not, if they might, receive back their gifts of love and life, nor take again the purple of their blood out of the cross on the breastplate of England… . They know now the strength of sacrifice, and that its flames can illumine as well as consume; they are bound by new fidelities to all that they have saved—by new love to all for whom they have suffered; every affection which seemed to sink with those dim life-storms into the dust, has been delegated, by those who need it no more, to the cause for which they expired; and every mouldering arm, which will never more embrace the beloved ones, has bequeathed to them its strength and its faithfulness.²⁶

Elgar’s own affection for Ruskin is apparent in his quotation of a passage from Sesame and Lilies on the last page of his score of The Dream of Gerontius. That he considered working directly with the text Colvin highlighted for him seems unlikely—it is, after all, prose rather than poetry—but in its message and atmosphere of heroic idealism it comes close to the poem he would choose for the opening movement of The Spirit of England, Binyon’s “The Fourth of August” (text quoted below). By 1915 most Englishmen believed their country was engaged in a just war, necessary to honor treaties and avenge the “rape of Belgium” by going to the aid of the smaller, weaker country overwhelmed by a foreign aggressor. In this manner, the war engaged highly developed notions of chivalric honor, manliness, patriotic duty, and, as David Cannadine has observed, an increased confidence that death, when it came, would come naturally and in old age, encouraged by the lengthening of life expectancy and decline in infant mortality in Britain since the 1880s. Combined with growing international tensions (including a concern that colonial youths were outstripping their home-grown counterparts in prowess and vigor) and the increasing appeal of social Darwinism in the 1900s, these factors had created the “strident athletic ethos of the late-Victorian and Edwardian public school … in which soldiering and games were equated, in which death was seen as unlikely, but where, if it happened, it could not fail to be glorious.”²⁷ Such conditioning determined the conduct not only of the officers drawn from the public-school elite, but also those from the lower social ranks who emulated them, and can be seen to have been effected through music as much as through the literature and imagery of the 1900s (see, for example, figure 1).

Figure 1. Ezra Read, The Victoria Cross: A Descriptive Fantasia for the Pianoforte (London: London Music Publishing Stores, c. 1899). Note the detailed program.

The most striking aspect of Colvin’s proposal is that he should have prompted his Catholic friend Elgar to compose a “requiem for the slain,” a phrase that may owe something to Binyon’s habit of referring in private to “For the Fallen” as his “requiem-verses.”²⁸ To someone with a Protestant background, like Colvin, the word requiem could be bandied quite lightly. Over the 1890s and 1900s English audiences had shown a greater willingness to accept choral works based on Roman Catholic liturgy; and in his discussion of Stanford’s decision to compose a requiem for the 1897 Birmingham Festival, Paul Rodmell cites freedom from librettists and potential copyright entanglements among the attractions of setting such a text.²⁹ Yet to Elgar, raised as a Roman Catholic, requiem was inseparable from a particular view of the afterlife, especially the doctrine of purgatory—a process that allowed for the purification of the souls of repentant sinners in a slow agony and which could be hastened and even curtailed by the prayers of the living. By contrast, Protestant theology on the afterlife during the Victorian era was far more rigid: God’s judgment determined whether a soul ascended to heaven or was cast into the fires of hell for eternity, and the doctrine of purgatory was excoriated in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church.³⁰

Byron Adams has described Elgar’s faith as never more than “a flickering light” and in a compelling narrative tracks the faltering of that faith through a downward spiral of physical and psychological corrosion as the composer struggled to complete his massive trilogy of oratorios, especially the final work The Last Judgement.³¹ Such was the extent of this apparent spiritual decline that the doctor who diagnosed Elgar’s terminal cancer remembered the composer telling him that “he had no faith whatever in an afterlife: ‘I believe there is nothing but complete oblivion.’”³² This must have seemed an astonishing remark to hear from the man who had composed The Dream of Gerontius over thirty years earlier. Similarly, in his last weeks Elgar’s friends and daughter were unsettled by his request to have his body cremated and his ashes scattered at the confluence of the rivers Severn and Teme; and although he reportedly received the “last rites,” it was only after he had slipped into morphine-induced unconsciousness. Elgar’s daughter Carice finally persuaded him to be buried alongside his wife, Alice, at St. Wulstan’s Roman Catholic Church, Little Malvern, and though a requiem mass was celebrated in his memory, it was a low mass without music.³³

Whether one can fully accept Adams’s narrative of a crushing loss of faith, or set Elgar’s apparent ambivalence toward his Catholicism down to the obfuscation necessary for acceptance in Protestant British society, two considerations are fundamental to any discussion of Elgar’s spirituality. First, whatever his experience in late adulthood, and whatever the strength or otherwise of his faith, Elgar’s outlook and personal history were steeped in Catholicism: culturally, he always remained a Catholic. Until his departure from Worcester to London in his early thirties, he lived life in a Catholic context dominated by his mother, a fervent convert to the faith; he had attended Catholic schools and a Catholic church, had socialized with Catholics, and was organist at St. George’s Catholic Church in Worcester, which provided him with many of his earliest musical experiences including exposure to repertoire from the continental Catholic traditions. Catholicism would remain a strong influence on the women in his life—his wife would convert to Catholicism, and his sister became a senior nun at a Dominican convent near Stroud. Memories of boyhood would forever be inseparable from this “Catholic ethos,” to borrow John Butt’s phrase, as when Elgar reminisced about priests he had known as a child, for example, in conversation with the Leicester family on June 2, 1914.³⁴

Second, in the sphere of religious music Elgar had to become adept at negotiating Protestant sensibilities. In his early career, before 1898, he composed a great deal of Latin sacred music, including a short hymn tune for the Marian devotion “Stabat Mater Dolorosa” and a number of individual mass movements, though he never attempted a complete setting of the Ordinary.³⁵ In the years before the Great War, Elgar turned his attention to the composition of Anglican liturgical music, to the extent that John Butt describes him as “an Anglican manqué,” but his interest in Catholic music continued unabated.³⁶ While on a trip to Italy in 1907–8, Elgar planned to obtain a copy of Giovanni Sgambati’s Messa di Requiem, which had been sung at Italian royal funerals and had been heard twice to great acclaim in Germany; perhaps he hoped this might reignite his inspiration as he struggled to complete his oratorio The Last Judgement.³⁷ He suggested to Ivor Atkins, organist of Worcester Cathedral, that Sgambati’s Requiem might be suitable for a Worcester Festival Choral Society concert, or even the Worcester Festival of 1908, and laid plans to meet the composer personally while in Rome to discuss the loan of orchestral parts. In the end, however, the festival committee chose Stanford’s Stabat Mater (1906), a setting of a Catholic text by a safely Anglican composer.³⁸

The most eloquent evidence of Elgar’s willingness to appease his Protestant countrymen remains his approach to the setting of Cardinal Newman’s “The Dream of Gerontius.” Newman’s poem required considerable truncation and simplification in order to render it suitable as a libretto. Elgar also seems to have wanted to shift the focus of attention away from Newman’s conception of the afterlife, toward Gerontius as a universalized suffering human figure, which, as McGuire observes, was characteristic of his approach in his later oratorios.³⁹ Among the cuts Elgar was prepared to make were several passages of Catholic doctrine. The Guardian Angel’s words on leaving Gerontius in the care of the Angels of Purgatory were left out, for example, although the remaining text still clearly described a purging of the soul hastened by masses said by the living.⁴⁰ Passages from Newman such as these caused Dean Spence-Jones of Gloucester to ban the work from performance in the cathedral there in 1901 and the Anglican authorities to stipulate textual alterations before Gerontius could be heard in Worcester Cathedral the following year.⁴¹ As Elgar outlined in a letter to Jaeger, on May 9, 1902, the problematic sections were the Litany of Saints recited at the dying man’s bedside, Gerontius’s beseeching of the Virgin Mary to intercede for him, and the references to the doctrine of purgatory in the final scene:

What is proposed is to omit the litany of the saints—to substitute other words for Mary & Joseph—& to put “Souls” only over the chorus at the end instead of “Souls in Purgatory” & to put “prayers” instead of Masses in the Angel’s Farewell… . So far I have only said I have no objection to the alterations or that I concur—permission I cannot give.⁴²

For that permission the approval of Newman’s executor, Father Neville, had to be sought. In the end Neville concurred with Elgar on a bowdlerized version of the work designed for performance in an Anglican church; Elgar was sufficiently content to conduct this version himself at Worcester in 1902 and finally at Gloucester in 1910.⁴³ Clearly, Elgar learned from these experiences: he took the precaution of having the text of The Apostles vetted by two Anglican clergymen before committing himself to the final version.⁴⁴

In view of Elgar’s cultural roots in Catholicism, the faltering of his inspiration for The Last Judgement, his preparedness to make compromises for his Protestant audiences and patrons, and the fervency of his nationalism, we can speculate that Colvin’s invitation to write a requiem for the slain in the early months of the Great War would have been a powerful stimulus to the composer’s creative imagination. Having suffered Anglican censure of The Dream of Gerontius, however, Elgar would surely have been reluctant to court controversy again by composing a setting of the Latin Mass for the Dead. A requiem from his pen, as opposed to those of his Protestant countrymen, would need to take a less overtly Roman Catholic (and therefore less provocative) form; Binyon’s poetry would prove ideal for the composer’s purpose.

The verses Elgar selected from Binyon’s The Winnowing-Fan had been published in the Times at the outset of the conflict on August 11, August 20, and September 21, 1914. Elgar emphasized their local significance in an inscription on the completed score: “My portion of the work I humbly dedicate to the memory of our glorious men, with a special thought for the Worcesters,” and at the end, “For the Fallen & especially my own Worcestershires.” The text is as follows:

Movement I (Moderato e maestoso)
I. The Fourth of August⁴⁵
Now in thy splendour go before us,
Spirit of England, ardent-eyed,
Enkindle this dear earth that bore us,
In the hour of peril purified.⁴⁶

The cares we hugged drop out of vision.
Our hearts with deeper thoughts dilate.
We step from days of sour division
Into the grandeur of our fate.

For us the glorious dead have striven,
They battled that we might be free.
We to their living cause are given;
We arm for men that are to be.

Among the nations nobliest chartered,
England recalls her heritage.
In her is that which is not bartered,
Which force can neither quell nor cage.

For her immortal stars are burning
With her the hope that’s never done,
The seed that’s in the Spring’s returning,
The very flower that seeks the sun.

She fights the fraud that feeds desire on
Lies, in a lust to enslave or kill,
The barren creed of blood and iron,
Vampire of Europe’s wasted will …

Endure, O Earth! and thou, awaken,
Purged by this dreadful winnowing-fan,
O wronged, untameable, unshaken
Soul of divinely suffering man.

Movement II (Moderato)
X. To Women
Your hearts are lifted up, your hearts
That have foreknown the utter price.
Your hearts burn upward like a flame
Of splendour and of sacrifice.

For you, you too, to battle go,
Not with the marching drums and cheers
But in the watch of solitude
And through the boundless night of fears.

Swift, swifter than those hawks of war,
Those threatening wings that pulse the air,⁴⁷
Far as the vanward ranks are set,
You are gone before them, you are there!

And not a shot comes blind with death
And not a stab of steel is pressed
Home, but invisibly it tore
And entered first a woman’s breast.

Amid the thunder of the guns,
The lightnings of the lance and sword Your hope,
your dread, your throbbing pride,
Your infinite passion is outpoured

From hearts that are as one high heart
Withholding naught from doom and bale
Burningly offered up,—to bleed,
To bear, to break, but not to fail!

Movement III (Solenne)
XI. For the Fallen ⁴⁸
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.⁴⁹

[Stanza written by Binyon especially for Elgar:]
They fought, they were terrible, nought could tame them,
Hunger, nor legions, nor shattering cannonade.
They laughed, they sang their melodies of England,
They fell open-eyed and unafraid.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:⁵⁰
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England’s foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

Elgar took his title for The Spirit of England from the opening stanza of “The Fourth of August,” the first of the three poems he selected from Binyon’s book. In this he was probably influenced by the publication of The Spirit of Man, a popular anthology of poetry and philosophy compiled by Robert Bridges (1844–1930), who had been made poet laureate in 1913 following Kipling’s refusal of the post. In his preface, Bridges stated the intention of his volume—to uphold and nourish spirituality among the Allies in the face of “the miseries, the insensate and interminable slaughter, the hate and filth” brought on by the “evil” of Prussian materialism, militarism, and conscious criminality.⁵¹ In “The Fourth of August” Binyon associates the “Spirit of England” with qualities such as mettle, courage, ardor, and steadfastness, which, he implies, define the English as individuals, as an army, and as a nation with a noble destiny. Other meanings are also brought into play, however, which remove the poem from its immediate time and place to the realms of the metaphysical and the eschatological: among those who make up the “Spirit of England” are the “glorious dead” who in the battle for freedom have already “gone before” (in both senses of the phrase). Here, as in the Ruskin extract Colvin cited for Elgar, war is presented not only as a fight for good against evil, but as a purgation of the spirit of the English, from whom self-sacrifice is required to secure the cleansing, revivification, and salvation of Europe. Binyon encapsulates this in his image of the winnowing-fan, a tool from which crops are thrown up into the air as the fertile grain is sorted from the lightweight chaff. That this was an attractive metaphor for Elgar is evident in his decision to reprise the opening stanza at the end of the first movement, thereby bringing purged (seventh stanza) and purified (first stanza) into a direct relationship with each other through juxtaposition and reinforcing the interpretation of spirit as soul, that is, along eschatological lines. At its first appearance the word purified falls on a weak beat but is accented, and in its final iteration is given musical expression with a movement sharpwards in the harmonies.

Example 1a. “Novissima hora est” motif, The Dream of Gerontius, Part I, rehearsal no. 66.

Example 1b. “Endure, O Earth!” The Spirit of England, first movement, “The Fourth of August,” rehearsal no. 13.

More significant are the motivic links Elgar establishes between this movement and The Dream of Gerontius, connections that confirm a bond between these two works in his imagination. For the phrase “Endure, O Earth!” (seventh stanza), Elgar quotes his setting of the phrase “Novissima hora est” (“This is the final hour”) from Gerontius (compare Examples 1a and 1b), probably prompted by the phrase “hour of peril” in the fourth line of the first stanza, but again focusing attention on the afterlife: this poignant phrase is sung by Gerontius in the final agonies of corporeal death (Part I, rehearsal no. 66), on encountering God (Part II, at “Take me away,” two measures after rehearsal no. 120), and by the Angel of the Agony pleading with Christ for deliverance of the Souls in Purgatory (Part II, at “that glorious home,” five measures before rehearsal no. 113—“Hasten, Lord, their hour, and bid them come to Thee, / To that glorious Home, where they shall ever gaze on Thee”).⁵² Elgar’s reuse of this distinctive motif here also gives musical utterance to Binyon’s implied parallel between the “Spirit of England” and the figure of Christ in the lines that follow (“O wronged, untameable, unshaken / Soul of divinely suffering man”), for in Gerontius, as Moore points out, the “novissima hora est” motif takes its shape from those associated both with Christ’s peace (“Thou art calling me”) and with the agony of the crucifixion (“in Thine own agony”) (compare Example 1a with 2a and 2b).⁵³ For the closing lines of the seventh stanza, as he did in the opening of Part II of The Dream of Gerontius, Elgar seems to suspend time, delivering the direct address in a hushed, unaccompanied chorale, markedpiú lento and espressivo:

Example 2a. “Christ’s Peace” motif, The Dream of Gerontius, Part I, five measures after rehearsal no. 22.

Example 2b. “Christ’s Agony” motif, The Dream of Gerontius, five measures after rehearsal no. 62.

Example 3. The Spirit of England, first movement, “The Fourth of August,” rehearsal no. 14.

The “Novissima hora est” motif also resurfaces in the second movement, “To Women,” where it is heard (over the “Spirit of England” theme from the first movement) in the solo part and taken up by the chorus at “but not to fail!” (Example 4).54 For added emphasis, the melody used for “this dreadful winnowing-fan” in the previous movement is alluded to in the violins in the measure before rehearsal no. 11, where the chorus reenters with “to bleed, to bear, to break.” Once again the connections with Christ are significant, emphasizing both divine sacrifice and endurance, for the text of this movement can be interpreted as a latter-day Stabat Mater Dolorosa. As mothers, but also wives and lovers, women of England witness in spirit the corporeal suffering and death of their men on the battlefield, just as Mary stood weeping for her Son at the foot of the Cross on Golgotha. Binyon’s choice of language seems to echo the opening verses of the thirteenth-Century Latin hymn, particularly in his fifth and sixth stanzas that refer to the “infinite passion,” seemingly anachronistically to “lance and sword,” and to the scourging of Christ with the phrase “to bleed, to bear, to break.” (Here Elgar links the motif of endurance with immortality by anticipating in the orchestra the climax of the third movement, the ghostly legion “moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,” as well as “Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit” and “There is music in the midst of desolation.”)⁵⁵ The connection is lost for us, however, in his association of “passion” with “throbbing pride.” Elgar’s biographer Basil Maine heard further echoes of The Dream of Gerontius in this movement:

At more than one point in this deeply moving music but especially in the brief orchestral passage at the end, the spirit that pervaded the “Angel of the Agony” episode in “Gerontius” is perceptibly at work.⁵⁶

Example 4. The Spirit of England, second movement, “To Women,” rehearsal no. 10.

The chromaticism and the repeated rhythm (short-long) forge this link, which again transports us to Calvary and an invocation to the crucified Christ; for as Gerontius is told just before the appearance of this heavenly being, the Angel of the Agony is “the same who strengthened Him, what time He knelt / Lone in the garden shade, bedewed with blood. / That Angel best can plead with Him for all / Tormented souls, the dying and the dead.”

A further motivic link with Gerontius is established in the first movement for the sixth stanza (rehearsal nos. 9–13), which culminates in the line “Vampire of Europe’s wasted will.” At this point Elgar quotes the Demons’ Chorus from the second part of the oratorio, thus connecting implicitly the architects of the Prussian war machine with the depraved beings who howl and snatch at the soul of Gerontius as it passes on its way to Judgment. On June 17, 1917, after completing The Spirit of England, Elgar sent an explanation of this decision to Ernest Newman, who was to write an account of this movement for the Musical Times:

Do not dwell upon the Demons part:—two years ago I held over that section hoping that some trace of manly spirit would shew itself in the direction of German affairs: that hope is gone forever & the Hun is branded as less than a beast for very many generations: so I wd. not invent anything low & bestial enough to illustrate the one stanza; the Cardinal invented (invented as far as I know) the particular hell in Gerontius where the great intellects gibber & snarl knowing they have fallen:

This is exactly the case with the Germans now;—the music was to hand & I have sparingly used it. A lunatic asylum is, after the first shock, not entirely sad; so few of the patients are aware of the strangeness of their situation; most of them are placid and foolishly calm; but the horror of the fallen intellect—knowing what it once was & knowing what it has become—is beyond words frightful.⁵⁷

The words “held over” in this letter have often been interpreted to mean that Elgar had difficulty composing this passage—that with his style so firmly rooted in the Austro-German tradition, he struggled to position the Hun musically as the “Other,” in a way he had not in his depiction of the “otherness” of the Mogul emperors for the Crown of India three years earlier—and that it had taken him well over a year to arrive at this solution.⁵⁸ If this was indeed a troublesome passage that held up the completion of the work for so long, however, it seems odd that among the sketches so few are devoted to this particular section.⁵⁹ A more plausible explanation is that Elgar arrived at his solution early on, and held this particular movement back—the first performances (from May 3, 1916, until the premiere of the completed trilogy on October 4, 1917) were of the second and third movements. His reasons for this decision were probably twofold. First, he would have wanted to avoid offending certain friends, most notably Edgar Speyer, the wealthy patron of London’s transport system, hospitals, and concert life. Despite having English nationality, the Speyer family had rapidly become the target of anti-German harassment in the early months of the war: Edgar Speyer was ostracized by former associates, accused of collusion with the enemy, and pressured to relinquish his baronetcy and membership in the Privy Council. Ultimately, on May 26, 1915, Speyer and his family left England for the United States. Elgar had been supportive under these difficult circumstances and might well have remained reluctant to place “The Fourth of August” before the public until the Speyers had settled abroad.⁶⁰ Elgar’s great German musical ally, the conductor Hans Richter, was dead by the end of December 1916.

From Alice Elgar’s diaries we know that German forces were frequently described as demonic and brutal in the Elgar household during the early stages of the Binyon project. On December 31, 1914, she wrote, “Year ends in great anxieties but with invaluable consciousness that England has a great, holy Cause—May God keep her,” and from Severn House the following month she recorded outright condemnation of the latest Zeppelin activity:

[19 January 1915:] Seemingly tranquil but at night a German air raid on Yarmouth & that part of East Coast. They damaged houses & caused some loss of life, engulfing themselves more deeply in crime than ever. Brutes—

[20 January 1915:] Long accounts of air raid. Hope it has shown the U.S.A. what lengths uncivilised fiends will go

[27 January 1915:] Splendid accounts of naval action. Must have immense moral effect—No truth in the elaborate German lies. Almost impossible to conceive that their airships dropped bombs on the sailors while they were trying to save German drowning men—Demons might have acted better.⁶¹

This intemperate language resurfaced twelve months into the war, when Alice, who had ambitions as a versifier, tried her hand at a war sonnet after Binyon for publication in The Bookman. The Handel scholar R. A. Streatfeild, acting as go-between for the editor, advised her that he would “(probably) suggest another adjective in the place of ‘devilish,’” but the original word was retained when the poem went into print.

Holding her reign in kindly state and might,
Still deeming honour trod in knightly ways,
Half armed, lay England, through the summer days;
Her rule, outspeeding dawn, outchecking night,
Welded the sphere in wide, majestic flight.
When lo! a foe appears who neither stays
Nor warns, but sweeps the Belgian plains and sways
Grim hosts and arrogates a devilish right. ‘
England still sleeps,’ he said ‘and dreams of gain,
She will not stir, who once was battle’s lord,
Or risk the clash of squadrons on the main;
Her treaties may be torn, while ‘gainst the horde
These lesser folk may plea[d]e for help in vain …’

Such rhetoric is a reflection of the propaganda that was disseminated widely in the early months of 1915, particularly concerning alleged German atrocities in Belgium, which were detailed in the Bryce report, published in May 1915.⁶³ Characterization of the German army as a demonic horde was encouraged in response to the use of poison gas and flame throwers against Allied combatants, air raids that resulted in civilian casualties, and incidents such as the torpedoing of the British passenger liner Lusitania and the “martyrdom” of nurse Edith Cavell, all of which were dwelt on at length by the British press in horror and outrage (see figure 2).⁶⁴

For Elgar, however, setting the sixth stanza of “The Fourth of August” to the music he had hitherto used for Newman’s demons was not an exercise in cheap propaganda, but part of his conception of the war as a metaphysical struggle between hell and heaven, of darkness and light, for the soul of humanity. Concern that he should not be seen to be peddling anti-German propaganda, fueling popular hatred, and endorsing simplistic views of the war as a conflict between English knights and German devils, might well have been a second factor in his decision to suppress the first movement for so long. And on this point Elgar’s dialogue with the critics is revealing.

Figure 2. “The Murder of Nurse Cavell,” The War Illustrated: A Picture-Record of Events by Land, Sea and Air (30 October 1915). Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

In April 1916, Ernest Newman wrote an article on The Spirit of England for The Musical Times in anticipation of the premiere of the second and third movements, which was scheduled for the following month (described in greater detail below). In his essay, Newman extemporized on material Elgar had supplied for that purpose in a personal letter, but the critic also indulged in explicit anti-German sentiments couched in “holy war” rhetoric:⁶⁵

We gladly leave the writing of Hymns of Hate to the race that has shown us in too many other respects also how near its instincts are to those of the barbarian. An older and better civilisation looks to its leading artists for something different from the German froth and foam, bellowing and swagger. We are not “too proud to fight,” but we are too proud to abase our emotions about the war to the level of those of our bestial foe; to do that would be disloyalty to the memory of our holy dead.⁶⁶

These references to “Hymns of Hate,” which incensed Newman so deeply, allude to settings of a poem penned in 1914 by a German-Jewish writer, Ernst Lissauer, which had been used to whip up a fury of Anglophobia throughout Germany in the early months of the war. It was from this that the German army derived the slogan “Gott strafe England” (God punish England), for, as Stefan Zweig recalled, Lissauer’s poem had “exploded like a bomb in a munitions factory”:

The Kaiser was enraptured and bestowed the Order of the Red Eagle upon Lissauer, the poem was reprinted in all the newspapers, teachers read it out loud to the children in school, officers at the front read it to their soldiers, until everyone knew the litany of hate by heart. As if that were not enough, the little poem was set to music and, arranged for chorus, was sung in the theatres.⁶⁷

Copies reaching England were seized upon by the press, the text appearing in the Times on October 29, 1914 (in a translation prepared by Barbara Henderson for the New York Times), and a musical setting (attributed to Franz Mayerhoff) in the Weekly Dispatch of March 7, 1915. This stoked anti-German hatred in turn, triggering a series of musical retorts, particularly from the music halls: Whit Cunliffe, for example, popularized Robert IP Weston and Bert Lee’s Strafe’emf; Thomas Case Sterndale Bennett produced My Hymn of Hate; and a lesser-known composer, Harold Whitehall, composed a Tyneside Hymn of Hate.⁶⁸ A satirical rendition of Lissauer’s “Hymn” in its musical raiment was given on March 15, 1915, at the Royal College of Music by Hubert Parry, Walter Parratt, and an impromptu choir: “Sir Walter asked them to sing the hymn with plenty of snarl, to express honestly the intentions of the composer … but they laughed too much to snarl.” Later burlesque performances included those by Major Mackenzie Rogan and the band of the Coldstream Guards in morale-building concerts behind the lines in France and Flanders, on ships, and in munitions factories, with “a second verse punctuated by snatches of British melodies, patriotic and profane, expressing Tommy’s reply from the trenches to the comminatory bitterness of Prussianism.”⁶⁹

It was probably reluctance to be seen participating in this venomous exchange that prompted Elgar’s exhortation to Newman not to “dwell upon the Demons part” when writing his introductory article about the first movement for the Musical Times a year later.⁷⁰ Although Newman took care to distinguish Elgar’s Spirit of England from “the strut and swagger of the commoner ‘patriotic’ verse and music” in this essay, “the foul thing” that Germany had become was still to be roundly denounced: “For the first time in the lives of many of us we find ourselves indulging in a national hatred and not seeing any reason to be ashamed of it,” he declared, for “even Fafner, Wagner’s last word in brutishness, would not have decorated himself with a Lusitania medal.”⁷¹ Despite Elgar’s instruction, Newman emphasized the “Demons part,” predicting:

We shall henceforth listen to the Demons’ Chorus with a new imagery flashing across our minds… . We shall have a new appreciation of the “con derisione” that Elgar, with a prophetic intuition, has written in the score of “Gerontius” over the reiterated “gods” [musical example inserted here]—And at the end of it all the Demons’ theme, as in the oratorio, goes panting and growling into the depths of hell.⁷²

Other critics observed a heightened sense of violence in Elgar’s own performances of the “Demon’s Chorus” from Gerontius around this time. Herbert Thompson, reviewing for the Yorkshire Post a Leeds Choral Union performance of The Dream of Gerontius (programmed alongside The Spirit of England, complete) under Elgar’s baton on October 31, 1917, noted, “The only thing that jarred was the nasal tone in the Demons’ chorus, which was so exaggerated that it ceased to be impressive, and was merely grotesque”; moreover, the critic records that he had begun to notice an increasing cynicism in Elgar’s delivery of this passage at least six months earlier.⁷³ In his response to The Spirit of England, however, Thompson made a point of trying to rescue “The Fourth of August” from the taint of anti-German propaganda, as his comments on the premiere of the complete work, conducted in Birmingham by Appleby Matthews, suggest:

The general character of the poems by Lawrence Benyon [sic], which Sir Edward Elgar has chosen to set, is that of patriotism, which rings true, the more so since it is utterly devoid of vulgar bluster, and is dignified and restrained in sentiment… . There is a touch of indignation in an outburst concerning the barren creed of blood and iron, but there is no indication of any futile and childish “Hymn of Hate,” either in the verse or in the music, which never loses control or degenerates into mere abuse.⁷⁴

Elgar’s own words on the subject in his June 1917 letter to Newman, give us a sense of how his thinking on the war had changed over the three years since his 1914 comment to Schuster (yet another of Elgar’s friends with German origins), quoted above, and a year after the catastrophe of the Somme. It is the imagery of the madhouse that now seems most eloquent to him, of which he had had firsthand experience as a young man, providing musical distractions to inmates of Powick Lunatic Asylum. The careful distinctions he draws between the innocent, the obliviously mad, and the knowingly corrupt and depraved is a telling one, as is the image of the remnants of noble souls overtaken by demons who, by implication, respect no national boundaries. In this the composer echoed sentiments expressed on the debasement of German culture in another of Binyon’s poems from The Winnowing-Fan, the seventh, titled “To Goethe.”⁷⁵ But Elgar also mirrors the thoughts of another writer with whom he is not so readily associated—H. G. Wells (1866–1946), who had delivered the following statement in his pamphlet The War That Will End War, issued in August 1914:⁷⁶

We are fighting Germany. But we are fighting without any hatred of the German people. We do not intend to destroy either their freedom or their unity. But we have to destroy an evil system of government and the mental and material corruption that has got hold of the German imagination and taken possession of German life… . This is already the vastest war in history. It is war not of nations, but of mankind. It is a war to exorcise a world madness and end an age.⁷⁷

That Elgar shared Wells’s vision of an impending Armageddon brought on by the materialism and corruption of those who would cast themselves as gods, and requiring the sacrifice of heroes, is further suggested by his song “Fight for Right” (London, Elkin, 1916)—a setting of Brynhild’s words on sending Sigurd off to deeds of glory in William Morris’s epic poem The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876), which was based on the same sources as Wagner’s Gbtterdammerung.⁷⁸

Elgar had The Dream of Gerontius almost constantly in mind through the early years of the war. On September 8, 1914, Alice wrote in her diary, “It wd. have been ‘Gerontius’ tonight at Worcester Fest[ival]—but for Hun Kaiser”; and on November 19, Charles Mott sang the “Proficiscere” from Gerontius during an organ recital at Worcester in memory of Lord Roberts, colonel in chief of the empire troops in France, who had succumbed to pneumonia while visiting Indian soldiers at St. Omer. Elgar could not attend the recital, but approved organist Ivor Atkins’s “excellent choice.”⁷⁹ In February the following year, just after Elgar had begun work on the Binyon settings, Alice noted that he met with Clara Butt “to go through Gerontius” in preparation for her first performance of it at the Royal Albert Hall on the twenty-seventh of that month, in the role of the Guardian Angel.⁸⁰ In March 1916, he and Alice met again with Clara Butt, this time to plan what would become one of the most extraordinary musical events of the war.⁸¹ At a time when “music-making on a large scale had almost completely ceased,” as Basil Maine recalled, and nocturnal transportation around London was restricted and hazardous due to the blackout, Butt’s plan was to present a week of six consecutive oratorio performances at the Queen’s Hall (preceded by two performances in Leeds and Bradford respectively) of The Dream of Gerontius and the second and third movements of The Spirit of England (their initial performances) to raise funds for the Red Cross and Order of St. John of Jerusalem in England.⁸² The London performances took place in the week of May 8–13, 1916, with John Booth and Agnes Nicholls taking the solo parts in “To Women” and “For the Fallen” respectively, and Clara Butt herself taking the Guardian Angel in Gerontius.

The success of these performances was remarkable. King George V, Queen Mary, and Queen Alexandra attended twice, and in total the week of performances netted the then considerable sum of £2,707.⁸³ In a letter to Lady Elgar, R. A. Streatfeild described the Thursday night performance as “wonderful & unforgettable … I still feel as if I were vibrating all over.”⁸⁴ For Elgar, this must have been an overwhelming experience. His Dream of Gerontius was almost certainly given in its original form (that is, not the bowdlerized version produced for performance in a consecrated Anglican space) at these concerts. With the first movement of The Spirit of England, “The Fourth of August,” still unfinished, he must have been greatly encouraged by the reception accorded his interpretations of the Binyon poems, not least by the publicity put out by Clara Butt for these performances, the main points of which were summarized as follows by her authorized biographer:

She had other motives in mind in this unusual enterprise besides the obvious ones of raising money for a patriotic cause. She had a religious motive as well. She felt it was time that the people who were passing through the sorrows and anxieties of war should hear music that was definitely spiritual, and that English art should try to express the attitude of the English mind to the life after death.

She determined to challenge London with something really beautiful and mystic. “We are a nation in mourning,” she said, discussing the project. “In this tremendous upheaval, when youth is dying for us, I want to give the people a week of beautiful thoughts, for I am convinced that no nation can be great that is not truly religious. I believe that the War has given us a new attitude towards death, that many who had no faith before are now hungering to believe that after death there is life.”⁸⁵

Though the first movement of The Spirit of England—the most explicit in its connections with The Dream of Gerontius—was not heard at these performances, the combination of Gerontius, “To Women,” and “For the Fallen” was a powerful one, as a letter written to Elgar by Sidney Colvin’s wife, Frances, after the Monday afternoon performance confirms:

How can I ever tell you dear Edward what we felt today or how deeply moved we both were—it is all quite wonderful & just what one wants at this time—& at all times—it will live always—“For the Fallen” especially will always be the one great inspiration of the War. My heart is full of warm gratitude to you—but my eyes are sore with tears and I can’t write—but we both send you our heartfelt love and congratulations—Bless you… . How lovely the choir was! Sidney has a bad cold but nothing would have kept him from going.⁸⁶

These Red Cross concerts fused The Spirit of England with Gerontius in the public imagination, forming the two works into a diptych that provided a communal focus for grief and prayer and assumed a quasi-liturgical function. As Maine relates:

The music of “Gerontius,” during that week in the spring of 1916, shone with a new significance and became a symbol of intercession; while in “The Spirit of England” was seen, transfigured, the face of human suffering, and there was as yet no sign of disillusion in that face—not yet had the broken songs of the soldier-poets been heard.⁸⁷

Clara Butt’s claim that death and the future life were among the most pressing issues thrown up by the war matched the perceptions of Anglican clergy, of whom “Is it well with the fallen?” had become one of the most frequently asked theological questions both by laity on the home front and among the troops at the western front.⁸⁸ For many, the attempts by the national Church to meet the complex spiritual needs of the people were found wanting. Despite individual acts of extraordinary heroism, Anglican chaplains were deemed to be less than fully prepared for their ministry at the front: it was the Roman Catholic padres who earned a reputation for supreme courage, risking their lives to administer extreme unction to the dying while the Anglican clergy, initially at least, were commanded to stay behind the lines and generally did as they were told, without demur. For at least one soldier, confession and absolution meant that “the Church of Rome sent a man into action mentally and spiritually cleansed,” and thus prepared for death, whereas “the Church of England could only offer you a cigarette.”⁸⁹ In almost two years of war, the violent and premature deaths of so many young men overseas, whose bodies and personal effects were often irrecoverable by their grieving families, rendered traditional mourning practices and rituals irrelevant, inadequate, or impossible. At home, ostentatious expressions of grief by relatives were discouraged as unpatriotic, as was the placing of memorial plaques in churches until after the war for fear of lowering morale. The result was widespread, chronic, and unresolved grief among those “left behind,” for which release was craved no matter how temporary or what conventional or unconventional guise it might take.⁹⁰ In these extreme, highly charged times, the harder lines of British Protestantism gradually softened in a variety of directions—toward Catholicism, spiritualism, and an evolving ecumenism.⁹¹ Public prayer for the departed, for example, still stigmatized by the abuses of the medieval chantry system, had not commonly been a part of Anglican worship in 1914, but by 1917 the demand for such orisons had persuaded the Archbishop of Canterbury to produce a new Form of Prayers, including a discretionary prayer for the dead; even then, one or two of his bishops protested that such prayers were contrary to scripture and Anglican teachings.⁹² Anglo-Catholics welcomed this shift in the Church’s position, openly offering requiems and issuing cards that bore the portraits of soldiers for whom the requiem was to be given.⁹³ In this context the early discussion of plans for a temporary monument to the dead in Whitehall is revealing: initially Lloyd George’s idea was to build a “catafalque … past which the troops would march and salute the dead”; Lord Curzon, however, considered this “more essentially suitable to the Latin temperament.” Lutyens was finally instructed to produce a nondenominational structure, and it was his suggestion that the name be changed from catafalque to cenotaph, meaning “empty tomb” and implying resurrection, but pointedly avoiding association with the Latin mass for the dead.⁹⁴

For musically aware listeners of the time, references to the motifs from Gerontius associated with “Christ’s Peace” and “Christ’s Agony” that run through The Spirit of England articulated a further meaningful theme for those at the front and at home. A British soldier was called upon to sacrifice himself for the greater good (to be willing to kill and be killed), but also, for some, to atone for a sense of national sin—the selfish materialism, disunity, and moral dissipation of the older generations. Binyon hints at this in the second stanza, line 3, of “The Fourth of August.” Similarly, the protagonist of H. G. Wells’s wartime novel, Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916), is haunted by the notion of “redemption by the shedding of blood” once war becomes a reality.⁹⁵ Wells describes Mr. Britling musing on a few such home truths—among them the complacency of the British government before the war—in the opening scenes of this semiautobiographical novel:

Not only was [Mr. Britling] a pampered, undisciplined sort of human being; he was living in a pampered, undisciplined sort of community. The two things went together… . This confounded Irish business, one could laugh at it in the daylight, but was it indeed a thing to laugh at? We were drifting lazily towards a real disaster. We had a government that seemed guided by the principles of Mr. Micawber, and adopted for its watchword “Wait and see.” For months now this trouble had grown more threatening. Suppose presently that civil war broke out in Ireland! Suppose presently that these irritated, mishandled suffragettes did some desperate irreconcilable thing, assassinated for example! That bomb in Westminster Abbey the other day might have killed a dozen people… . Suppose the smouldering criticism of British rule in India and Egypt were fanned by administrative indiscretions into a flame.⁹⁶

If the mass shedding of blood was a catharsis by which the nation would be united and cleansed, individual redemption and collective redemption were thus intertwined, inviting parallels between the heroism of the most low-born Tommy in the trenches and the atonement vouchsafed to Christians through the Blood of Christ. At the front British Protestants were brought into a relationship with Catholic imagery and culture such as most had probably never known. Fighting in a Catholic country and often alongside Catholic comrades, they came across roadside shrines in every village—crucifixes, calvaries, madonnas, and saints—that would sometimes assume a symbolic value according to the extent to which they had been spared or suffered shell damage.⁹⁷ Amid the carnage and desolation of the trenches, such symbolism encouraged a powerful identification with the sufferings of Christ, both for the soldier at the front—as a fellow sufferer probably more than as a savior—and for his relatives at home looking for consolation. The poetry of the trenches is full of references to Christ, as in “The Redeemer” from Siegfried Sassoon’s The Old Huntsman and Other Poems. In the rain-sodden night, the speaker struggles along a ditch with his company; in the burst of a shell he looks back at his comrade and sees a vision of Christ laboring under the cross. The merging of the two images implies a connection of pain, endurance, and unprotesting self-sacrifice suffered by one extraordinary but ordinary man for the redemption of others: “But to the end, unjudging, he’ll endure / Horror and pain, not uncontent to die / That Lancaster on Lune may stand secure.”⁹⁸ After the war, this idea would also find expression in Stanley Spencer’s canvas The Resurrection of the Soldiers at the Oratory of All Souls, Sandham Memorial Chapel (Burghclere, Hampshire), which drew on the artist’s own experiences of action at Salonica. Here the viewer is literally overwhelmed by images of the cross, as soldiers emerge from the ground, dusting themselves down and shaking hands with resurrected comrades, and present their crosses to the figure of Jesus in the middle distance. Lying on the side of a collapsed wagon, a single soldier ponders the figure of Christ on a crucifix.⁹⁹

Relatives of combatants found comfort in images of Christ on the battlefield, which not only seemed to confirm the nobility and holiness of the cause, but also, if death was to be the fate of their loved ones, the promise of redemption by self-sacrifice. One of the most popular images of consolation, one with strong Catholic overtones, was a colored print taken from an oil painting commissioned for the Christmas 1914 edition of The Graphic, titled Duty or The Great Sacrifice (see figure 3). The artist, James Clark, depicts a young soldier lying dead from a head wound on the battlefield (“sacrificed on the altar of duty to country”), his hand touching the feet of a spectral Christ, haloed by the sun, who seems to gaze down in recognition from the cross. This print was circulated across the country, endorsed by at least five of the nation’s bishops, and further copies of this, dubbed the “most inspired Picture of the War,” were offered for sale in The Graphic of February 6, 1915.¹⁰⁰ It could be found hanging in churches, Sunday Schools, soldiers’ institutes, public halls, classrooms, and private houses, and after the war it was used in several places as a design for stained-glass memorial windows.¹⁰¹ The print was so ubiquitous it is difficult to imagine that Elgar and his associates were unaware of it, just as the mass rallies and jingoistic speeches of the charismatic Anglican bishop of London, Arthur Foley Winnington-Ingram (1858–1946)—born in Worcestershire, like Elgar—must also have entered their consciousness at some level. Christ was often in the bishop’s sights, and he often spoke of the war as a struggle between “Christ and Odin,” “Berlin against Bethlehem,” or of “the Nailed Hand and the Iron Fist.”¹⁰² Sometimes delivered in his uniform as chaplain to the London rifle brigade, and from a truck swathed in Union Jacks or an altar of drums, his fervent, imperialist sermons did much to alienate his countrymen, particularly in the months following the Somme; but throughout the war years his message was simple and unswerving, as in this example, speaking of bereaved parents who had visited him for succor in Advent 1916:

Figure 3. James Clark, Duty, also known as The Great Sacrifice, oil on canvas, 1914. Donated by Clark to the Royal Academy’s War Relief Exhibition on January 8, 1915, it was bought by Queen Mary, who gave it to Princess Beatrice in memory of her son Prince Maurice Battenberg who had died at Ypres in 1914. Beatrice presented it to St. Mildred’s Church, Whippingham, Isle of Wight, where it now hangs in the Battenberg Chapel. Photo Rachel Cowgill.

The precious blood of their dearest boy mingles with the Precious Blood which flowed in Calvary; again the world is being redeemed by precious blood. “CHRIST did what my boy did; my boy imitated what CHRIST did” they say.¹⁰³

The presence of the motifs associated with Christ from The Dream of Gerontius in The Spirit of England does not imply that Elgar shared the bishop’s starry-eyed jingoism. Daniel M. Grimley has noted how Elgar repeatedly undercuts even his most powerful and assertive moments of uplifting nobility in The Spirit of England, particularly in the final movement, “For the Fallen.” The resulting atmosphere of uncertainty, melancholy reflection, and vulnerability is intensified by several striking features: the return to the opening material of “For the Fallen” in the closing moments; the movement’s harmonic circularity, the putatively aspiring semitonal ascent in the overall tonal scheme of the trilogy (G, A-flat major/minor, and A minor); and particularly by the pensive rocking between A major and A minor in the final bars, marked morendo. With a passing reference to Catholic doctrine concerning the afterlife, Grimley observes:

Elgar’s music therefore suggests a state of musical, as well as spiritual purgatory. In Elgar’s setting, Binyon’s words “At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them” become an anguished expression of longing for closure or death, and not merely a patriotic act of remembrance. Far from being a moment of consolation, it is the most troubled music in the whole work.¹⁰⁴

It was this profound emotional complexity that made The Spirit of England such a powerful work expressing a righteous idealism tempered by grief and attrition as the war dragged on. H. G. Wells concludes his 1916 novel with an ambiguity that echoes Elgar’s final measures. Adopting the persona of Mr. Britling, whose only son is killed in action, the author works through his emotional and rational responses to the war toward a declaration of faith in “our sons who have shown us God”; but the seemingly serene pastoral sunrise with which the novel concludes is tainted by the inevitability of further bloodshed, especially in the chilling final line (“From away towards the church came the sound of an early worker whetting a scythe”).¹⁰⁵

Elgar conducted the completed Spirit of England on October 31, 1917, (the eve of All Saints’ Day), along with The Dream of Gerontius, in a Choral Union concert at Leeds Town Hall, and again on November 24 at a Royal Choral Society Concert at the Royal Albert Hall. For twenty years or so afterward, the composer continued to direct cathedral performances of “For the Fallen” at the Three Choirs Festival and, as previously noted, for Armistice Day services and concerts broadcast by the BBC.¹⁰⁶ In The Spirit of England Elgar reengaged with eschatological themes familiar from The Dream of Gerontius and his fraught oratorio project that culminated in the abandonment of The Last Judgement—namely, afterlife, purgatory, and redemption. This vein of Roman Catholic doctrine was combined with a reflective and consoling, though ultimately inconclusive message to his fellow countrymen and women tested to extremes in the worst excesses of the war that theirs was a divine cause, and their physical and spiritual suffering necessary for the emergence of a newly purified Europe: “redemption by the shedding of blood.”¹⁰⁷ The Catholic elements discussed here are discernible but never brought conspicuously into the foreground, Elgar demonstrating again his ability to explore aspects of his own spirituality in music without disturbing Protestant sensibilities. Indeed, The Spirit of England seems in many ways to anticipate the more ecumenical and internationalist outlook that emerged among Anglicans in the years after the war—a step on the way to John Foulds’s World Requiem (1919–21), dedicated to “the memory of the Dead—a message of consolation to the bereaved of all countries.”¹⁰⁸ With its eclectic text, combining passages from the Latin Mass for the Dead, John Bunyan, and the fifteenth-Century Hindu mystic Kabir among others, Foulds’s score was certainly far removed from the traditions of English oratorio prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in which England, through metaphor, is depicted as a Protestant bastion in a sea of decadent and minatory Catholicism.

The contexts in which The Spirit of England were heard over the airwaves in the years after 1918 also seem to point to the future, although it is not always clear how far programming decisions were influenced by Elgar himself. On November 11, 1924, in a BBC concert broadcast from Birmingham, the cantata was heard in the midst of a miscellaneous sequence apparently assembled to create a narrative from mourning to jubilation: the hymn “O God Our Help in Ages Past”; Sullivan’s Overture In Memoriam; Elgar’s The Spirit of England; a “dramatic recital” of poetry by Rupert Brooke; “I Know that My Redeemer Liveth” from Handel’s Messiah; Elgar’s “The Immortal Legions” from his recent Pageant of Empire music; as well as the first Pomp and Circumstance march.¹⁰⁹ In 1925 Elgar conducted the London Wireless Orchestra in the introspective third movement of his First Symphony and the “Meditation” from his Lux Christi (an instrumental interlude from Elgar’s first oratorio that is saturated with themes associated with Christ in that work) as a prelude to the commemoration service at Canterbury Cathedral; this was followed immediately by the complete Spirit of England, and later in the evening by the first and second Pomp and Circumstance marches.¹¹⁰ And Elgar’s Enigma Variations, op. 36, and “For the Fallen” concluded the radio program In Memoriam 1914–1918: A Chronicle, compiled by E. A. Harding and Val Gielgud, and broadcast from all BBC stations on Armistice Day evening in 1932. Poetry reading formed the main part of this program, which combined the voices of soldier and noncombatant poets alike, in a selection drawn from John Masefield, Rupert Brooke, Herbert Asquith, Laurence Binyon, Julian Grenfell, Alan Seeger, Wilfrid Gibson, William Noel Hodgson, Edward Shanks, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Richard Aldington, Lord Dunsany, and Thomas Hardy.¹¹¹ One can only wonder what sort of impact these events might have had on the young Benjamin Britten—then a schoolboy—and how much, if anything, he may have later recalled of such broadcasts as he began to interleave texts drawn from the requiem mass with poems by Wilfred Owen, preparing to commemorate the dead of another war in his War Requiem of 1961 for Coventry Cathedral.¹¹²

My thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (United Kingdom) for supporting part of this research, and to the staffs of the Elgar Birthplace Museum; Brotherton Library Special Collections (University of Leeds); British Library; BBC Written Archives; and St. Mildred’s Church, Whippingham, Isle of Wight for their assistance. I am grateful to Byron Adams, Charles Edward McGuire, Derek Scott, and Aidan J. Thomson for generous suggestions and comments on an early version of this essay read as a paper at the Second Biennial Conference of the North American British Music Studies Association, August 2006, as well as to Julian Rushton for his thoughts at various stages of the project.

1. Epigraph: H. G. Wells, The War That Will End War (London: Frank & Cecil Palmer, 1914), repr. in W. Warren Wagar, ed., H. G. Wells: Journalism and Prophecy, 1893–1946 (London: Bodley Head, 1965), 57.

2. Richards argues that The Dream of Gerontius “may not be a directly imperial work, but it contains something of the spirit of Elgar’s Empire, the idea of Empire as a vehicle for struggle and sacrifice.” Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and Music: Britain, 1876–1953 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), 60–61.

3. W. H. Reed completely ruled out discussion of Elgar’s faith in his memoir, Elgar as I Knew Him (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936). Though acknowledging the “very strong trait” of “mysticism” that “came out in all [Elgar] did, and of course found its way into his music,” Reed declared this “is no place to discuss creeds or religions, or what he believed and what he did not.” Citing the third movement of Spirit of England and a secular partsong of 1909, he continued, “[Elgar] has more of that quality which we call—for want of a better word—spirituality than perhaps any other composer. One can open the pages of almost any of his works—oratorios, symphonies, or short works like “For the Fallen” or “Go, Song of Mine” [op. 57]—to find this quality evident and unmistakable” (138–39).

4. See Byron Adams, “Elgar’s Later Oratorios: Roman Catholicism, Decadence and the Wagnerian Dialectic of Shame and Grace,” and John Butt, “Roman Catholicism and Being Musically English: Elgar’s Church and Organ Music,” in The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, ed. Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 81–105; 106–19.

5. Jerrold Northrop Moore, Spirit of England: Edward Elgar in His World (London: Heinemann, 1984), 56.

7. Donald Mitchell, “Some Thoughts on Elgar,” An Elgar Companion, ed. Christopher Redwood (Ashbourne: Sequoia Publishing, 1982), 284. Mitchell’s perception has been reinforced through the recording history of the work: The Spirit of England is often paired with Elgar’s Coronation Ode and packaged with cover art based on images of the British monarchy, billowing Union Jacks, etc. See, for example, the 1985 Chandos recording (CHAN 8430) that reproduces an image of “The King as He Will Appear in Coronation Robes” from a Colman’s Starch trade card issued just before the coronation of Edward VII in 1902 (Mary Evans Picture Library, ref. 10083782).

8. See also Basil Maine’s description of this section, in Elgar: His Life and Works, 2 vols. (London: G. Bell, 1933), 2:239. Maine makes a clear distinction, however, between the tone of The Spirit of England and that of other, imperialist Elgar works: “The conception is grandiose, but not as the ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ Marches are. It moves along with no less splendour, but with a more austere deliberation.”

9. See, for example, Bernard Porter’s summary dismissal of The Spirit of England in “Elgar and Empire: Music, Nationalism and the War,” in Oh, My Horses! Elgar and the Great War, ed. Lewis Foreman (Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 2001), 148–49. Porter does concede that the third movement (“For the Fallen,”) “may be thought to compensate for the bitterness (but not the jingoism, still) of the rest.” Porter, “Elgar and Empire: Music Nationalism and the War,” 149.

10. For a detailed discussion of Elgar’s early training as a Catholic, see Charles Edward McGuire’s essay in this volume.

11. Letter from Elgar to Frank Schuster, 25 August 1914, in Edward Elgar: Letters of a Lifetime, ed. Jerrold Northrop Moore, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 276–77.

12. On the fate of the horses at Mafeking, see Robert Baden-Powell, Lessons from the ‘Varsity’ of Life (London: C. A. Pearson, 1933), 207–9. Robert Anderson also reads Elgar’s remark in the light of the mass mustering of horsepower undertaken by Britain, Russia, Germany, and Austria in the first weeks of August; see Robert Anderson, Elgar and Chivalry (Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 2002), 341.

13. Elgar to Schuster, 25 August 1914, Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 276. Declaring his age (fifty-seven) on a “Householder’s Return” for a Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, Elgar stated, “There is no person in this house qualified to enlist: I will do so if permitted”; quoted in Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 283.

14. Cammaerts was a geographer by training (via the University of Brussels and Université Nouvelle) and something of “un homme de lettres.” Though Belgian by birth, he was a devout Anglican, and was deeply committed to the Anglo-Belgian Union. He had moved to England in 1908, married the Shakespearean actress Tita Brand, and in 1931 would become professor of Belgian Studies and Institutions at the University of London. Carillon was Elgar’s contribution to an anthology assembled by the novelist Hall Caine to raise funds for the citizens of occupied Belgium, King Albert’s Book: A Tribute to the Belgian King and People from Representative Men and Women Throughout the World (London: Daily Telegraph, Christmas 1914), 84–89. For a summary of Elgar’s activities during the war years, including the periods in which he was working on The Spirit of England, see Andrew Neill, “Elgar’s War: From the Diaries of Lady Elgar, 1914–1918”; and Martin Bird, “An Elgarian Wartime Chronology,” in Foreman, Elgar and the Great War, 3–69; 389–455. On the revision of “Land of Hope and Glory,” see Moore, Letters of a Lifetime (London: Elkin Matthews, 1914), 277–83.

15. According to Robert Anderson, the copy of Binyon’s The Winnowing-Fan: Poems on the Great War (London: Elkin Matthews, 1914) which Elgar worked from and annotated is held at the library of the Elgar Birthplace Museum (hereafter EBM); see Robert Anderson, Elgar in Manuscript (London: British Library, 1990), 197. At present the copy cannot be traced. Elgar’s work on The Spirit of England began in early February: Alice Elgar records an afternoon visit from Binyon and several other friends on February 7, 1915, two days after which she notes in her diary, “E. put off going to Tree’s Dejeune [sic] & composed violently.” Bird, “An Elgarian Wartime Chronology,” 397.

16. See Lewis Foreman, “The Winnowing-Fan: British Music in Wartime,” in Elgar and the Great War, 125; and David Cannadine, “War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain,” in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (London: Europa, 1981), 223–24. On With Proud Thanksgiving, see Robert Anderson and Jerrold Northrop Moore, foreword to Elgar Complete Edition 10:x-xi. This commission may have been prompted by Kipling’s recommendation that the Whitehall Cenotaph be inscribed with Binyon’s quatrain: Kipling had been deeply moved by the poem, which was sent to him by a soldier at the front on hearing that the author’s only son, John, was missing in action (in fact, killed) at Loos in 1915; see John Hatcher, Laurence Binyon: Poet, Scholar of East and West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 210–11. Elgar produced the orchestral version of With Proud Thanksgiving for the jubilee of the Royal Choral Society and the Royal Albert Hall on May 7, 1921.

17. Ronald Taylor lists six live broadcast performances of The Spirit of England (and four partial performances, presumably of “For the Fallen” as a self-standing item) between 1922 and 1934; see his “Music in the Air: Elgar and the BBC,” in Edward Elgar: Music and Literature, ed. Raymond Monk (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 336. See also Jenny Doctor, “Broadcasting’s Ally: Elgar and the BBC,” in Cambridge Companion to Elgar, 202–3.

18. Letter from Elgar to Alice Stuart-Wortley, 12 September 1923, in Edward Elgar: The Windflower Letters. Correspondence with Alice Caroline Stuart Wortley and Her Family, ed. Jerrold Northrop Moore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 284. See also Maine, Elgar 2:240. Ultimately it would be “Nimrod” from the Enigma Variations that would be established as Elgar’s contribution to the rites of war remembrance. On the music of Armistice Day and Remembrance Day, see Richards, Imperialism and Music, 152–64.

19. See James Morgan Read, Atrocity Propaganda 1914–1919 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), 7.

21. Quoted in S. Levy, letter to the editor, ‘“For the Fallen,”’ Times Literary Supplement, 23 November 1946, 577.

22. Hatcher, Laurence Binyon, 190–91. On Binyon’s own religious beliefs, see 129–34 passim.

23. Ibid., 195. For Binyon’s published work, including his studies of Eastern art, Blake, and later studies of Christopher Smart, Dante, and others, see 299–310. Other composers were also drawn to “For the Fallen,” including Cyril Rootham, whose setting slightly predated Elgar’s and from whom Elgar encountered considerable obstruction during the composition of The Spirit of England; see John Norris, “The Spirit of Elgar: Crucible of Remembrance,” in Foreman, Elgar and the Great War, 241–44. The composer and war poet Ivor Gurney toyed with setting the poem for baritone and piano while at the front; see letters from Gurney to Mrs. Voyrich, 16 September 1916, and to Marion Scott, 11 January 1917, in Ivor Gurney: Collected Letters, ed. R. K. R. Thornton (Ashington and Manchester: Mid-Northumberland Arts Group and Carcanet, 1991), 148–49,184.

24. Quoted in Hatcher, Laurence Binyon, 1. In their experiences of the war, David Cannadine stresses the difference between “those at the front, who saw and purveyed death, and those at home, who saw no death, no carnage and no corpses, but experienced bereavement.” Cannadine, “War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain,” 213. On this important distinction, see also Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), passim. From 1915 Binyon used his annual leave from the British Museum to work as a volunteer ambulance driver, hospital orderly, and medical reporter in France; see Hatcher, Laurence Binyon, 198–210. It is worth noting here that Binyon’s long dramatic poem, The Madness of Merlin (London: Macmillan, 1947), based on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s tale of a twelfth-Century Welsh prince who waged war on the Picts but was horrified by the slaughter and fled the battlefield to roam the forests, had been offered by him to Elgar as the basis for an opera several years before work began on The Spirit of England; see letter from Binyon to Elgar, 11 July [1904/9], EBM L2312.

25. Sidney Colvin considered Ruskin the “idol of my boyhood”: “I used to devour my Scott and Shakespeare, and Faery Queene and Modern Painters and Stones of Venice … and learn long screeds of them, both verse and prose, by heart.” As a student at Cambridge he sought out and was befriended by the Ruskins, and aspired to become “something like a Ruskin and a Matthew Arnold rolled into one.” Sidney Colvin, Memories and Notes of Persons and Places, 1852–1912 (London: Edward Arnold, 1921); and retirement speech (1912), quoted in E. V. Lucas, The Colvins and Their Friends (London: Methuen, 1928), 5, 8.

26. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 3, last chapter, quoted in Sidney Colvin, letter to the editor, “1855 and 1915,” Times Literary Supplement, 31 December 1914, 590.

28. Hatcher, Laurence Binyon, 192. Colvin was not the only one to push Elgar to write a “requiem.” Later that year, on November 25, Percy Scholes wrote an “Appeal to Elgar” in the pages of the Evening Standard and St. James’s Gazette, in which he lamented the overreliance on Brahms’s German Requiem at military funerals and called for Elgar to write a “British Requiem”: “In ‘Gerontius,’ Elgar was able to take us into the chamber of death, and the places that lay beyond, to show us death and judgment, to stir us with dread and sooth us with comfort, to move us to sorrow and to final joy. In ‘Carillon,’ by certain means of the utmost simplicity, he has expressed the feelings of a nation mourning the woes of the present and rejoicing in the hopes of the happiness to come again, and has done so in a way that has given his work an appeal to audiences in this country such as no other work at present before us enjoys. Elgar is a sincere Catholic, as ‘Gerontius’ testifies; but he is a Briton, too. Cannot he write a choral piece which shall be wide enough in its verbal utterance to express the feelings of us all, whatever our faith, something vocally not too difficult for our choral societies … ? Something we would have that can be sung in Westminster Abbey and [the Roman Catholic] Westminster Cathedral, in church, in chapel and in concert-room, which can be sung here and in Canada and Australia and South Africa.”

29. Paul Rodmell, Charles Villiers Stanford (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2002), 192–93. For Scholes, Stanford’s “fine” Requiem did not meet the criteria for a “national death song” (see preceding note), because it represented “a ritual not understood by a majority of our countrymen” and the text was in Latin. Stanford had played through the whole of his new Requiem for Elgar while on a visit to Malvern. It is not known how Elgar responded to this performance. Jeremy Dibble, “Elgar and His British Contemporaries,” in Cambridge Companion to Elgar, 20–21. On earlier attitudes to musical settings of Roman Catholic texts in England, see Rachel Cowgill, “‘Hence, Base Intruder, Hence’: Rejection and Assimilation in the Early English Reception of Mozart’s Requiem,” in Europe, Empire, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century British Music, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Julian Rushton (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2006), 9–27. On other British “requiems” from the war years, see Foreman, “The Winnowing-Fan: British Music in Wartime,” 113–14.

30. For extensive investigation of the deep-seated divisions between Catholics and Protestants in nineteenth-Century English culture, see D. G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), John Wolffe, God & Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland 1843–1945 (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); and Michael Wheeler, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). These divisions also extended to matters of musical style, as is apparent in Herbert Thompson’s review of a Hull Harmonic Society performance of Gounod’s Messe solonnelle, Yorkshire Post (23 March 1918): “One can understand its popularity as a concert piece, for it is highly attractive music, tuneful and effective, and expressive, in a rather superficial way, of its theme. But that it should have been accepted so much as it has been in the service of the English Church is more remarkable, for one would think its perfumed exotic quality strangely at variance with the Anglo-Saxon temperament, at least in matters of religious observance.” Anglican music should be dignified and sober in comparison, he explains, but not dry or overly erudite. See press-cuttings collection, dated and annotated by Thompson himself, Leeds University, Brotherton Library Special Collections, MS 164.

32. Transcribed by Jerrold Northrop Moore from a conversation with Elgar’s doctor, Arthur Thomson, in Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 818.

33. From conversations between Moore and members of the Leicester family in Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life,823. See also Charles Edward McGuire’s essay in this volume. Though legalized in 1902, cremation remained a controversial choice in British society until well after the First World War, mainly because of widespread belief in the resurrection of the material body. The Church of England officially accepted cremation in 1944, but it was not until 1965 that the Vatican Council reversed its 1886 ban on cremation for Catholics. See Death in England: An Illustrated History, ed. Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 249–51, 264–66.

34. Butt, “Roman Catholicism and Being Musically English,” 107; Philip Leicester, manuscript account of Elgar’s visit, 2 June 1914, in Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 269–74. For more on the Leicester family, see Charles Edward McGuire’s essay in this volume, as well as that of Matthew Riley.

35. For accounts of Elgar’s sacred music composition, see Butt, “Roman Catholicism and Being Musically English”; and John Allison, Edward Elgar: Sacred Music (Bridgend: Seren, 1994). Elgar turned down an invitation to compose a mass for the Leeds Festival in 1903–1904 in order to continue his work on the First Symphony and The Apostles; see letter from Frederick Spark to Elgar, cited in Cecil Bloom, “Elgar—The Leeds Connection, Part I,” Elgar Society Journal 9 (1995): 75.

36. Quotation from Butt, “Roman Catholicism and Being Musically English,” 117.

37. From 1906 Elgar’s interest in The Last Judgement fluctuated, but the project was on his mind in the early years of the war: Atkins offered him a commission if he finished the trilogy for the Three Choirs Festival in 1914, and in 1915 Elgar told Henry Embleton of the Leeds Festival Committee that he might complete the projected oratorio after the war. He would continue to gather relevant reading matter until around 1923, including R. H. Charles, Lectures on the Apocalypse (1922) and other material on the Antichrist. See Charles Edward McGuire, Elgar’s Oratorios: The Creation of an Epic Narrative (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2002), 293–301.

38. E. Wulstan Atkins, The Elgar-Atkins Friendship (Newton Abbot, London, and North Pomfret, Vt.: David & Charles, 1984), 165, 169–70.

39. Charles Edward McGuire, “One Story, Two Visions: Textual Differences between Elgar’s and Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius,” in The Best of Me: A Gerontius Centenary Companion, ed. Geoffrey Hodgkins (Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 1999), 84–101.

40. The excised passage reads: “Now let the golden prison ope its gates, / Making sweet music, as each fold revolves / Upon its ready hinge. And ye great powers, / Angels of Purgatory, receive from me / My charge, a precious soul, until the day, / When, from all bond and forfeiture released, / I shall reclaim it for the courts of light.” Elgar’s deletions in Newman’s poem are detailed in Hodgkins, Best of Me, 41–55.

41. Lewis Foreman, “Elgar and Gerontius: The Early Performances,” in Hodgkins, Best of Me, 211–13.

42. Jerrold Northrop Moore, ed., Elgar and His Publishers: Letters of a Creative Life, Vol. I, 1885–1903 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 351–52, 354–55. See also Atkins, Elgar-Atkins Friendship, 70–73.

43. Anthony Boden, Gloucester, Hereford, Worcester—Three Choirs: A History of the Festival (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992), 142–43, 148. At the 1910 Three Choirs performance of Gerontius in Gloucester Cathedral, Elgar’s oratorio was preceded by the premiere of Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, which may have been an attempt to create a Protestant cordon sanitaire around the Roman Catholic oratorio. See Charles Edward McGuire, “Vaughan Williams and the English Music Festival,” in Vaughan Williams Essays, ed. Byron Adams and Robin Wells (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2003), 260–61.

45. Elgar may have intended to call this movement “England”; see “Performances of ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ and New Choral Work by Sir Edward Elgar: A Remarkable Scheme,” The Musical Times, 1 April 1916.

47. A sketch of this passage carries the note “aeroplanes stanza III.” See British Library Add. MS 47908, fol. 142.

48. Stanzas three, four, and six here were omitted when Elgar reworked “For the Fallen” two years after the war for the dedication of the Cenotaph in Whitehall, giving this the title With Proud Thanksgiving. See Robert Anderson, Elgar (New York: Schirmer, 1993), 205–6.

49. This and the following stanza formed part of the section marked Marziale in the manuscript vocal score (British Library, Add MS. 58040), described by Elgar in a letter to Ernest Newman of 15 April 1916, as “a sort of idealised (perhaps) Quick March,—the sort of thing which ran in my mind when the dear lads were swinging past so many, many times.” See Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 297.

51. Robert Bridges, Preface, The Spirit of Man: An Anthology in English & French from the Philosophers & Poets Made by the Poet Laureate in 1915 (London: Longmans Green, 1916); the month of publication is given in Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War (London: SPCK), 171. The Binyon settings are not referred to as “The Spirit of England” in the Elgars’ journals and correspondence until the later stages of composition: The Musical Times announced the projected title on April 1, 1916. Bridges’ “preface” conveys much the same message as Binyon’s “The Fourth of August,” condemning Prussian aggression unequivocally, stating: “Common diversions divert us no longer; our habits and thoughts are searched by the glare of the conviction that man’s life is not the ease that a peace-loving generation has found it or thought to make it; and it is in their abundant testimony to the good and beautiful that we find support for our faith, and distraction from a grief that is intolerable constantly to face, nay impossible to without that trust in God which makes all things possible. We may see that our national follies and sins have deserved punishment; and if in this revelation of rottenness we cannot ourselves appear wholly sound, we are still free and true at heart, and can take hope in contrition, and in the brave endurance of sufferings that should chasten our intention and conduct; we can even be grateful for the discipline: but beyond this it is offered us to take joy in the thought that our country is called of God to stand for the truth of man’s hope, and that it has not shrunk from the call. Here we stand upright, and above reproach: and to show ourselves worthy will be more than consolation; for truly it is the hope of man’s great desire, the desire for brotherhood and universal peace to men of good-will, that is at stake in this struggle. Britons have ever fought well for their country, and their country’s Cause is the high Cause of Freedom and Honour. That fairest earthly fame, the fame of Freedom, is inseparable from the names of Albion, Britain, England: it has gone out to America and the Antipodes, hallowing the names of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; it has found a new home in Africa: and this heritage is our glory and happiness. We can therefore be happy in our sorrows, happy even in the death of our beloved who fall in the fight; for they die nobly, as heroes and saints die, with hearts and hands unstained by hatred or wrong.” Another prompt may have been the publication in 1915 of the R. Hon. George William Erskine Russell’s The Spirit of England, in which Russell discussed the conduct of a nation in wartime: “I have often been accused of being unjust to the military spirit. In reply, I point to the spirit which animates the present conduct of Germany, and if that is the military spirit, I am perfectly just to it, for it is, and I have called it, damnable. It has absolutely nothing in common with the spirit which fights for freedom and national existence, or sacrifices itself for the salvation of the weak.” George William Erskine Russell, The Spirit of England (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1915), 84–85, quoted in The Bookman 48 (August 1915): 142–43. As this was the same issue in which a wartime sonnet by Alice Elgar appeared, her husband may well have read the review that contained this quotation. See note 62 below.

52. Figures cited here are the rehearsal numbers printed in Novello’s vocal scores and the full scores of these works in the Elgar Complete Edition. For discussion of the “Novissima hora est” motif and its significance for interpretations of The Dream of Gerontius, see Aidan Thomson, “Rereading Elgar: Hermeneutics, Criticism and Reception in England and Germany, 1900–1914,” Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 2002, 182–247, esp. 193. It should be noted that the tags for these motifs were supplied by Elgar’s friend August Jaeger, with the composer’s acquiescence. See Hodgkins, Best of Me, 86–87.

54. Elgar points out this reuse of the passage from “The Fourth of August” in a letter to Ernest Newman, 17 June 1917, quoted in Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 307.

55. Elgar drew Newman’s attention to this thematic link between the movements, admitting to feeling “a certain connection in the spirit of the words ‘BUT not to fail’ and ‘To the end they remain.’” See letter from Elgar to Newman, 15 April 1916, Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 296–97. Newman communicated this in his article “‘The Spirit of England’: Edward Elgar’s New Choral Work,” The Musical Times (1 May 1916): 235–39.

57. Moore, Letters of a Lifetime, 307. Elgar wrote to Binyon on April 17 to tell him that he had completed The Spirit of England, see EBM L3738.

58. See, for example, Andrew Neill, “Elgar’s War,” 45; John Norris, “Spirit of Elgar,” 249; Anderson, Elgar in Manuscript, 149.

59. See British Library, Add. MS 47908, fols. 132–35; Anderson, “Sources,” Elgar Complete Edition 10:xxi.

60. Theo Barker, “Speyer, Sir Edgar, Baronet,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, accessed August 28, 2006. Binyon had met Elgar on at least one occasion courtesy of the Speyer household. See letter from Binyon to Elgar, 4 June 1909, EBM L2300 (“I hope you will not have forgotten, though it is a good long time ago now, meeting me at Mrs Speyer’s”). See also Sophie Fuller’s essay in this volume, 231.

62. Letter from Streatfeild to Lady Elgar, enclosing a copy of her typewritten sonnet, 9 July 1915, EBM L6362; the sonnet was published in The Bookman 48 (August 1915): 121.

63. According to Trevor Wilson, this was “a special time of hate in Britain”; see his The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), 182. On the Bryce Report and its impact on the home front, see esp. 182–91; also Read, Atrocity Propaganda.

64. See also William Thompson Hill, The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell: The Life Story of the Victim of Germany’s Most Barbarous Crime (London: Hutchinson, 1915).

67. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography, trans. Cedar and Eden Paul (London: Cassell, 1987), 180. Ernst Lissauer, Worte in die Zeit: Flugblätter 1914, Blatt I (Göttingen, 1914). Exemplars of the following German editions of musical settings are held at the British Library: “Gott strafe England” (Munich: Simplicissimus Verlag, [n.d.]); and Guido Hassl, “Gott strafe England!” Militär- und andere Humoresken (Regensburg: Pustei, 1915). The third stanza was considered the most extreme, concluding with “Sie lieben vereint, sie hassen vereint, / Sie haben aller nur einen Feind. / England.” A passage from Lissauer’s poem is read aloud in English to Mr. Britling, who listens in utter bewilderment, in H. G. Wells, Mr. Britling Sees It Through (London and New York: Cassell, 1916), 271–72.

68. Exemplars of these songs are held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the British Library, and date from 1916 and 1917.

69. See the Times, 10 February 1917, for a report on the Royal College event; for the quoted passage concerning the military band burlesque, see the Times, 19 January 1918. I am grateful to Duncan Boutwood for drawing my attention to the Parry rendition.

72. Ibid., 296. The text here is of course “Low-born clods / of brute earth, / They aspire / to become gods.”

73. Herbert Thompson, review of The Dream of Gerontius and The Spirit of England (complete), Yorkshire Post, 1 November 1917; and review of The Dream of Gerontius, Yorkshire Post, 5 March 1917. These observations were based on a long familiarity with Gerontius: by Thompson’s own reckoning, the latter was the thirty-ninth performance he had attended. See Leeds University, Brotherton Library Special Collections, Diary of Herbert Thompson MS 80, and press cuttings collection MS 164.

74. Thompson, Yorkshire Post, 5 October 1917; press cuttings collection MS 164.

A world revealed
New-springing from its ashes old
On Valmy field,

When Prussia’s sullen hosts retired
Before the advance
Of ragged, starved, but freedom-fired
Soldiers of France;

If still those clear, Olympian eyes
Through smoke and rage
Your ancient Europe scrutinize,
What think you, Sage?

Are these the armies of the Light
That seek to drown
The light of lands where freedom’s fight
Has won renown?

Will they blot also out your name
Because you praise
All works of men that shrine the flame
Of beauty’s ways,

Wherever men have proved them great,
Nor, drunk with pride,
Saw but a single swollen State
And naught beside,

Nor dreamed of drilling Europe’s mind
With threat and blow
The way professors have designed
Genius should go?

Or shall a people rise at length
And see and shake
The fetters from its giant strength,
And grandly break

This pedantry of feud and force
To man untrue
Thundering and blundering on its course
To death and rue?”

Hubert Parry, director of the Royal College of Music, shared Binyon’s view and likened Germany’s actions to the fall of Lucifer; see his speech to Royal College of Music students, September 1914, in College Addresses, ed. H. C. Colles (London: Macmillan Publishing, 1920), 215–29. Bridges also wrote of the willing connivance of German intellectuals “at the contradictory falsehoods officially imposed upon their assent” in his preface to The Spirit of Man.

76. See Matthew Riley’s chapter in this volume for further connections between H. G. Wells’s writings and Elgar.

77. Wells, Journalism and Prophecy, 56–57. In Wells’s God and the Invisible King (London: Cassell, 1917) insanity is associated with extreme sin and disharmony arising from man’s dark evolutionary past; see chapter on “Modern Ideas of Sin and Damnation.” On Wells’s religious beliefs, see Willis B. Glover, “Religious Orientations of H. G. Wells: A Case Study in Scientific Humanism,” Harvard Theological Review, 65 (January 1972): 117–35.

78. The chorus comprises an alla marcia setting of the lines “Then loosen thy sword in the scabbard / and settle the helm on thine head. / For men betrayèd are mighty, / and great are the wrongfully dead.” Elgar dedicated this score to Francis Edward Younghusband’s Fight for Right movement, the foundation of which moved Robert Bridges to commission Parry’s Jerusalem in March of the same year; see Jeremy Dibble, C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 483. Moore notes that Elgar’s song was requested by the tenor Gervase Elwes; see Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 700.

79. Elgar Diaries, EBM; Atkins, The Elgar-Atkins Friendship, 267; Charles Mott would later be killed at the front; see Charles A. Hooey, “An Elgarian Tragedy: Remembering Charles Mott,” in Foreman, Elgar and the Great War, 313.

81. Alice Elgar’s diary, quoted in Bird, “An Elgarian Wartime Chronology,” 411.

82. For Basil Maine’s recollection of the impact of the war on musical life, see Elgar, 1:205. Choral performances were hampered by the scarcity of male voices. Other forms of concert life appear to have continued, however; see Foreman, “The Winnowing-Fan: British Music in Wartime,” 91–92, 94–95. See also Christopher Fifield, Ibbs and Tillett: The Rise and Fall of a Musical Empire (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2005), 92–105.

83. The Musical Times (1 June 1916): 296, quoted in Hodgkins, Best of Me, 247–50. A program for this oratorio series is held at the Centre for Performance History, Royal College of Music.

85. Winifred Ponder, Clara Butt, Her Life-Story […] with a Foreword by Dame Clara Butt (London: George G. Harrap, 1928), 167–68.

86. Frances Colvin to Elgar, [8 May 1916], EBM L3460. On May 14, 1916, R. A. Streatfeild wrote to Lady Elgar calling for the first movement to be brought out at last: “I feel very strongly, & I wonder if you do too, that we ought to have ‘The Fourth of August’ as soon as possible. ‘To Women,’ divinely beautiful as it is, is not in its place as a beginning. It is perfect as the slow movement of the trilogy, but is too intimate & personal in feeling to be the start of the whole. We want something dealing with broader and more generalized emotions for that, & then ‘To Women’ will gain enormously by coming as a contrast”; see EBM L3732.

88. Wilkinson, The Church of England in the First World War (London: SPCK, 1978), 178.

89. Guy Chapman, A Passionate Prodigality: Fragments of an Autobiography (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1933), quoted in Wilkinson, Church of England in the First World War, 111. Wilkinson describes it as “tragic” that the chaplain-general from 1901 to 1925 was Bishop John Taylor Smith, “a pietistic Evangelical with no university theological training” (124). Furthermore, there were complaints that under Bishop Smith’s jurisdiction Anglo-Catholics were discriminated against in the appointment of chaplains; see Wilkinson (126).

90. Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 358–81.

91. George W. E. Russell had anticipated that this would be the case: in his book The Spirit of England of 1915, he observed that “to several generations of Englishmen, a hatred of Roman Catholicism seemed a national virtue. They were apparently unable to discern even a trace of Christianity in the form of religion which we encounter when we travel in France or Italy or cross the Irish Channel. We long vaunted our resolve to ‘knit the hearts of the Empire into one harmonious concord,’ but (until the other day) we declined to let Irish Catholics have the schools or universities suited to them, because their religion was, as we gracefully put it, ‘a lie and a heathenish superstition.’ If the war has done nothing else for us, it has shown us scenes in France and Belgium before which this particular prejudice must, I should think, give way.” Russell, Spirit of England, 282.

92. The explicit prayers for the dead contained in the 1549 Prayer Book had been almost entirely excised in the 1552 and 1662 revisions; see William Keiling, Liturgiae Britannicae, or the Several Editions of the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England, From Its Compilation to the Last Revision [...] Arranged to Show their Respective Variations, 2nd ed. (London: William Pickering; Cambridge: J. Deighton, 1851). Wilkinson, Church of England, 176–77.

93. See, for example, Paul B. Bull’s powerful sermon “Beyond the Veil,” in Peace and War: Notes of Sermons and Addresses (London: Longmans, 1917), 86–92. Anglican support for the erection of street shrines (both to those serving and those lost in action overseas) can be seen as a similar moment of accommodation. Some Anglicans opposed the shrines because of their Catholic connotations—that is, their imagery, especially the use of the cross or crucifix and religious acts associated with them—but at least one clergyman who spoke out against them suffered physical assault, seemingly the reverse of the popular anti-Catholic violence seen during the mid-Victorian period. See Alex King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, Ltd., 1998), 47–60.

94. See Cannadine, “War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain,” 219–21, citing National Archives: Public Record Office (Kew), CAB 23/11, 1 July 1919.

95. For the phrase “redemption by the shedding of blood” see Wells, Mr. Britling Sees It Through, pp.283–84.

96. Ibid., 114–15, 284. See also Bridges, preface to The Spirit of Man, quoted in n. 51 above.

97. Wilkinson, Church of England, 190–91. This found an echo in the activities of the Society for Raising Wayside Crosses, which were probably encouraged by photographs and letters sent home from the front. On this organization, founded in 1916 with the Earl of Shaftesbury as its president, see King, Memorials of the Great War, 73–74; Rev. Sidney F. Smith, Wayside Crosses and Holy Images (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1917), 1–24; and Rev. E. Hermitage Day, “Wayside Crosses and War Shrines,” in The Crucifix: An Outline Sketch of Its History, ed. Katherine Kennedy (London: A. R. Mowbray, 1917), 77–84.

98. Siegfried Sassoon, The Old Huntsman and Other Poems, (London: William Heineman, 1917). The final stanza reads as follows: “He faced me, reeling in his weariness, / Shouldering his load of planks, so hard to bear. / I say that he was Christ, who wrought to bless / All groping things with freedom bright as air, / And with His mercy washed and made them fair. / Then the flame sank, and all grew black as pitch, / While we began to struggle along the ditch; / And someone flung his burden in the muck / Mumbling: ‘O Christ Almighty, now I’m stuck!’”

99. Reproduced in Roy Strong, The Spirit of Britain: A Narrative History of the Arts (London: Pimlico, 1999), 603. See also Art of the First World War, item 104, http://www.artww1.com. The saturation of imagery associated with Christ helps to explain why rumors of German soldiers crucifying a Canadian officer with bayonets against a barn door at Ypres in 1915 aroused such a hysterical response across all levels of British society; see Read, Atrocity Propaganda, 41–42. For how this legend and others arose among the troops at the front, see also Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 115–25. Due to centuries of Protestant suspicion of idolatry, the cross had only recently begun to be rehabilitated as a religious symbol and funerary monument in late nineteenth-Century England (though it was often expressed in Celtic form to avoid Roman Catholic associations); see King, Memorials of the Great War, 129. On the battlefields, however, it was the preferred form for the hastily constructed markers of the graves of dead comrades, and after the war, there would be considerable popular resistance to the decision by the Imperial War Graves Commission not to use the cross as the template for the official war cemetery headstone. Cyril Winterbotham, who was killed in action on August 27, 1916, ended his poem “The Cross of Wood” with the words “Rest you content; more honourable far / Than all the Orders is the Cross of Wood, / The symbol of self-sacrifice that stood / Bearing the God whose brethren you are.” E. B. Osborn, ed., The Muse in Arms: A Collection of War Poems, for the Most Part Written in the Field of Action, by Seamen, Soldiers, and Flying Men Who Are Serving, or Have Served, in the Great War (London: John Murray, 1917), 159–60. It falls beyond the scope of this current study to discuss The Spirit of England in relation to the images of the resurrection and Passion of Christ that recur in literary and artistic responses to the Great War elsewhere in Europe; for a relevant study, though one that mostly overlooks music, see Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. For more general insights into the relationship between religio-military identity and the story of Christ’s Passion, see Jon Davies, “The Martial Uses of the Mass: War Remembrance as an Elementary Form of Religious Life,” in Ritual and Remembrance: Responses to Death in Human Societies, ed. Jon Davies (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 152–64.

100. See reviews submitted to and published in The Graphic, 2 January 1915, by the Bishops of Bath & Wells, London, Hull, Stepney, Lichfield and Wakefield. The picture also inspired a range of poetic interpretations that appeared in subsequent issues of The Graphic.

101. See, for example, St. Mary Magdalene Church, Windmill Hill, Enfield, and St. John’s Church, Windermere. St. John’s was recently converted into assisted housing and the memorial window has been placed in storage by the Diocese of Carlisle. On the art and design of British war memorials in general, see the United Kingdom Inventory of War Memorials, http://www.uknim.org.uk.

102. Arthur Foley Winnington-Ingram, A Day of God, Being Five Addresses on the Subject of the Present War (London: Wells, Gardner, 1914), 10, 41, 42, 58; Times Recruiting Supplement, 3 November 1915; Arthur Foley Winnington-Ingram, The Potter and the Clay (London: Wells, Gardner, Darton, 1917), 11, 36.

103. Arthur Foley Winnington-Ingram, Rays of Dawn (London: Wells, Gardner, 1918), 66. On Winnington-Ingram’s conduct during the war years, including his notorious sermon of hate in which he advocated the killing of Germans from the pulpit of Westminster Abbey, see Wilkinson, Church of England, 217–18, 251–54.

104. Daniel M. Grimley, “‘Music in the Midst of Desolation’: Structures of Mourning in Elgar’s The Spirit of England,” in Elgar Studies, ed. J. P. E. Harper-Scott and Julian Rushton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). I am grateful to Daniel M. Grimley for making a draft of his essay available to me prior to publication. Ivor Atkins records how Elgar was “deeply moved” when he conducted a performance of “For the Fallen” followed immediately by the sounding of “The Last Post” from the Lady Chapel of Worcester Cathedral during a memorial service (“Recital of Solemn Music”) given by the Worcester Festival Choral Society on March 15, 1917. The full “programme” was: Psalm 23 “The Lord Is My Shepherd”; “For the Fallen”; “The Last Post”; Russian Contakion of the Departed; Prelude, The Dream of Gerontius; J. S. Bach, Chorale Jesu Meine Freude”; Handel, “I Know that My Redeemer Liveth,” Messiah; hymn, “O God Our Help in Ages Past”; and the national anthem, “God Save the King.” See Atkins, Elgar-Atkins Friendship, 281–84.

105. Wells, Mr. Britling Sees It Through, 432–33. Wells had three sons, the last of whom was born in 1914; none were lost in the First World War.

106. See Herbert Thompson’s review in the Yorkshire Post, 1 November 1917; Charles A. Hooey, “Spirit Insights,” Elgar Society Journal 9 (November 1996): 296–302. “The Fourth of August” had been premiered by Elgar three days earlier on October 28, 1917; see Atkins, Elgar-Atkins Friendship, 286. On the BBC broadcasts, see n. 17 above.

107. It is worth noting the extraordinary pressure placed on Elgar by Binyon, among others, when Elgar temporarily halted work on The Spirit of England over his dispute with Rootham (see n. 23 above): “Think of England, of the English-speaking peoples, in whom the common blood stirs now as it never did before; think of the awful casualty lists that are coming, & the losses in more & more homes; think of the thousands who will be craving to have this grief glorified & lifted up & transformed by an art like yours—and though I have little understanding of music, as you know, I understand that craving when words alone seem all too insufficient & inexpressive—think of what you are witholding [sic] from your countrymen & women. Surely it would be wrong to let them lose this help and consolation.” Letter from Binyon to Elgar, 27 March 1915, EBM L6350.

108. John Foulds, A World Requiem, op. 60 (London: Paxton, 1923). Foulds’s World Requiem was recommended for national performance by the British Music Society and adopted by the British Legion for its Festivals of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall, Armistice Days from 1923 to 1926. See Lewis Foreman, From Parry to Britten: British Music in Letters, 1900–1945 (London: Batsford, 1987), 166–67 and Malcolm MacDonald, John Foulds: His Life and Music (Rickmansworth: Triad Press, 1975), 26–31. Inserted in the copy of the score housed in Special Collections at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, is a program for the first of these performances, featuring a white cross on a red background and pronouncing the requiem “A Cenotaph in Sound” (see Music E–2 FOU).

111. BBC, Programme-as-Broadcast, National Programme, 11 November 1932, BBC Written Archives.

112. Writing of “For the Fallen” in the 1969 Aldeburgh Festival program book, Britten recalled that Elgar’s score “has always seemed to me to have in its opening bars a personal tenderness and grief, in the grotesque march an agony of distortion, and in the final sequences a ring of genuine splendour”; quoted in Michael Kennedy, A Portrait of Elgar, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1982), 181.