Elgar’s Critical Critics
AIDAN J. THOMSON
On December 6, 1905, Edward Elgar delivered the fifth lecture in his first series as Peyton Professor of Music at the University of Birmingham. Titled “Critics,” it was concerned less with individual critics (although several were mentioned by name) than with their function. In Elgar’s opinion, music criticism should be educational as much as judgmental, both for the composer, to whose work a critic should give “the final polish” and “help us [the composers], guide us and lead us to higher things,” and for the listener, for whom the critic could provide musical analyses.1 Too often, however, critics seemed unaware of these responsibilities. In Elgar’s view, the journalist-critic was prone to write concert reviews too quickly, for an inappropriate medium (such as a general magazine with a nonmusical editor), and, above all, without sufficient time for reflection. For Elgar, the “real, lasting, educational good” was “gained from the mature slowly-wrought opinion.”2
Such hasty assessments thus had considerable potential to affect adversely the performance history of a work. Yet despite these concerns, Elgar was imaginative enough to envisage a role for criticism more familiar to musicologists a hundred years later than it would likely have been to his audience in Birmingham. Enlarging upon his topic, Elgar opined:
It is invariably interesting to read the opinions of various writers on the same work: I venture to suggest that such a collection might form a volume. If extracts from various criticisms on the same work, or on the same performance of a work, could be gathered together, it would form a valuable contribution to musical literature; not formed with any idea of playing off one critic against another, but to arrive at the result, which from a multitude of such counsellors should be wisdom.3
With these remarks, Elgar promotes “reception history” as a methodological approach decades before the term was coined, although it must be stressed that his conception of reception history—to find the essential “truth” that lay at the heart of a piece of music—is very different from that of musicologists today. The centrality to Elgar’s vision of what Lydia Goehr has called the “work-concept” reflects both the idealist philosophy that underpinned nineteenth-Century German music (particularly instrumental music) and the doctrine of “Art for Art’s sake,” whose prevalence in Britain had grown considerably since its original espousal in the 1860s by Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater.4 To an aesthetic that denied anything beyond the artistic Ding an sich, the idea that the “final arbiter” in reception histories should be not the work but, as Carl Dahlhaus has described it, the “‘moment in history,’ i.e. the forces that condition reception,” would have seemed utterly alien; to a composer as concerned as Elgar with his place in ahistorical, ideology-free posterity, it doubtless would have seemed a threat.5 Indeed, the only historical process that Elgar is willing to countenance in reception history is the “conversion” of a critic from a negative to a positive point of view about a particular composer, which he felt would be “seriously instructive.”6 But this process, revealingly, is concerned primarily with the uncovering of an objective artistic “truth” which, once reached, is set in stone for all time. There is no suggestion that a critic’s change of view might have any historically contingent or ideological stimulus behind it; rather, the “conversion” would appear to be a Damascene one.
Although Elgar’s views on art are theoretically underpinned by an objective value system, it is far from clear what aesthetic criteria he used in making critical judgments. Elgar was no philosopher, and if, as Brian Trowell has observed, he shared Ruskin’s “resolutely Platonic view of music as an art of great ethical power,” this was no more than most of his contemporaries did.7 If any ideological position is discernible in the Birmingham lectures, it is a bias for “absolute” music: Elgar praised Hanslick in his “Critics” lecture and would later describe the symphony without a program as the “highest development of art.”8 But, as Ernest Newman noted, this position was contradicted by virtually all of Elgar’s oeuvre to date, and though the First Symphony would come close to realizing the ideal of absolute music, the quotations at the beginning of both the Second Symphony and the Violin Concerto seem to indicate that Elgar’s view of art was not instinctively formalist.9 Rather, Elgar’s conception of music was that it “must be … a reflex, a picture, or elucidation of [an artist’s] own life,” a position that owed more to the early Romanticism of Elgar’s “ideal,” Schumann, than to either camp in the Brahms-Wagner debate.10 This reflex was a multifaceted one, where different genres called for different approaches, thereby obscuring any specific agenda. Thus Elgar’s large-scale instrumental works conform, more or less, to the criteria of absolute music (even if the “absolutism” is more honored in the breach); the mature oratorios adopt Wagnerian music-dramatic principles, at least externally; and the smaller vocal genres, marches, and occasional music reflect a functional approach that embodies Elgar’s comparison of the composer’s vocation to that of the “old troubadours and bards … [who] inspire the people with a song.”11 More to the point, however, a composer whose conception of music was as personal, even instinctive, as Elgar’s was hardly likely to apply rigorously objective standards when evaluating the works of others. Instead, these works would be measured by their artistic sincerity, a criterion that was intuitive and justifiable in terms of common sense.
But such a commonsensical approach merely conceals biases that are far from objective, and which certainly do not transcend history; instead, they are inextricably connected to the historical and critical concerns of early-twentieth-century British music. These biases are all too apparent in Elgar’s lectures, even, for example, in the critics of whom he approved and disapproved. It is clear that the composers most likely to suffer from the overhasty journalistic judgments that Elgar condemned would be young, unknown, and probably English—a particular concern for the composer given that, in his inaugural lecture, he had spoken of an “English School of Music” driven by a “younger generation [who] are true to themselves … and draw their inspiration from their own land.”12 So it is surely no coincidence that several of the contemporary critics he singled out for praise had all actively promoted English composers: Joseph Bennett (the chief music critic of the Daily Telegraph), Arthur Johnstone (of the Manchester Guardian, until his death in 1904), Ernest Newman (Johnstone’s successor at the Manchester Guardian), and George Bernard Shaw. Conversely, Elgar’s one example of the “shady side of music criticism” involved the disparagement of a British composer, namely the obituary of Arthur Sullivan in the Cornhill Magazine in 1900, written by J. A. Fuller-Maitland (although Elgar did not name him in the lecture). For Elgar, this was a “foul unforgettable episode”; Fuller-Maitland was simply wrong. But at no point did Elgar explain why Fuller-Maitland was wrong, let alone admit that his argument—that Sullivan was a composer capable of genius (notably in The Golden Legend and in his incidental music for The Tempest) who rarely fulfilled it because of his readiness to compromise his style to popular taste—might have some truth to it.13 Not surprisingly, Elgar’s comments attracted negative press coverage: Musical News, conscious of similar faux pas that Elgar had directed at Stanford in earlier lectures, observed that Elgar seemed unable to “open his mouth apparently without finding himself embroiled in some more or less lively controversy.”14
That Elgar should have condemned Fuller-Maitland perhaps reflects another instinctive bias on his part. Fuller-Maitland (1856–1936) was no ordinary journalist, but the chief music critic of the Times and a distinguished scholar—he was the author of an important recent monograph on English music and, at the time of the lecture, was editing the revised edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music.15 He was also a central figure in the English musical “renaissance” set of composers and critics, based around the Royal College of Music, where the group’s two most important composers, Parry and Stanford, were professors. As Meirion Hughes has pointed out, the members of this set were mostly from the university-educated, upper-middle classes and Fuller-Maitland was particularly keen to emphasize their social and intellectual elitism.16 He was less keen, however, to acknowledge the achievements of a lower-middle-class, self-taught, provincial Roman Catholic like Elgar. His reviews of Elgar premieres in the Times were frequently ambivalent and often hostile, as both Hughes and Jerrold Northrop Moore have noted. With the works that appeared before the Enigma Variations, Fuller-Maitland was often as concerned with Elgar’s provincial background as with the music; the Variations themselves were damned for their “obscure” program; The Dream of Gerontius was compared unfavorably with Stanford’s Eden and Parry’s Job; and the Concert Allegro for piano suffered because of an alleged lack of “organic connection between one part and another.”17 Fuller-Maitland’s attitude toward Elgar hardened with each of the composer’s successes. The critic was absent from the premiere of the First Symphony in 1908 and, after criticizing the composer for his overcolorful orchestration at the work’s London premiere, conducted an unsuccessful campaign against the piece in the Times.18 It is uncertain exactly how aware Elgar was of Fuller-Maitland’s later writing about him, given the composer’s claim that after 1900 he never read any (negative) criticism of his own work. But even if that claim were true, the mixed reception of Gerontius, to which Fuller-Maitland contributed, had hurt Elgar and one could understand it if his rebuke of the critic were a way, subconsciously, of settling scores.
The significance of Fuller-Maitland’s criticism of Elgar, however, is not the extent to which it was fueled by personal enmity, but that it provides any evidence of a negative view of the composer. Until recently, Elgar scholarship, perhaps understandably, has emphasized the many positive reviews of the composer’s work and concentrated less on the dissenters; the one significant exception among the latter is Edward J. Dent, to whose infamous assessment of Elgar in the 1920s we shall return below.19 But Fuller-Maitland and Dent are only the best known of a significant minority of critics who were skeptical of the popular and critical acclaim afforded to Elgar, particularly following the successful German performances of Gerontius in December 1901 and May 1902. For the most part, these critics differed from their pro-Elgarian counterparts in their social provenance and in their philosophical and aesthetic views, particularly in their attitude to Wagner. With the exception of the ultraconservative Bennett, whose enthusiasm for Elgar stemmed more from their shared autodidactic background than from purely musical reasons, the pro-Elgar critics were generally pro-Wagner and/or pro-Strauss.20 This group included not only Newman and Shaw, but two other pro-Wagnerians: Alfred Kalisch (1863–1933), from 1912 the critic of the Daily News, and Herbert Thompson (1856–1945), between 1886 and 1936 the critic of the Yorkshire Post.21 Moreover, all of these critics shared with Elgar the fact that they were outside the London establishment of the “renaissance” clique: Bennett and Newman were self-taught provincials; Shaw was Irish (and a socialist to boot); Thompson, Cambridge-educated but Leeds-born and based, was steeped in the conservative traditions of the English choral tradition (his father-in-law, Frederick Spark, was the secretary of the Leeds Music Festival in 1898 when Caractacus received its premiere); and Kalisch, though London-born, was of German-Jewish extraction. By contrast, the “critical critics” were mostly part of (or close to) renaissance circles, and shared the predominantly anti-Wagner views of Stanford and, especially, Parry, who disliked Wagner’s ideology and his late works—a consequence partly of the failure of his opera Guenever (1886) and partly of his puritanical sensibility.22 The significance of this particular bias is considerable. A key aim of the renaissance critics was, through their writing, to influence, rather than simply reflect, musical “good taste”: a concept that, in theory, was ideologically neutral but, in practice, often betrayed the critics’ anti-Wagnerian aesthetic agenda. The value of their discourse on Elgar is therefore not that they reveal the hidden “essence” of his music (insofar as that objective was ever possible), but that they reveal much about the forces that conditioned the reception of his works and those of his contemporaries. In doing so, they offer proof, if any were needed, that Elgar’s works, far from transcending the period in which they were written, are grounded in the historical, critical concerns of the early twentieth century.
The aim of this essay, then, is not to revisit the positive criticism of Bennett, Johnstone, Newman et al., which has been covered adequately elsewhere in Elgar scholarship. Instead, it is to show how Elgar’s detractors viewed him as an uncomfortably progressive addition to British musical life: first, by consciously (and negatively) distancing him from the “safe” figure of Parry; and second, by associating him with the ethically suspect school of Wagner and his followers. Elgar emerges from this criticism as a deeply politicized figure, the vessel through which particular critical critics directed their arguments about the future of British music.
One such critic is Dr. Charles Maclean (1843–1916). Maclean’s background was typical of the renaissance set: public school (Shrewsbury) and Oxford (where he was a classical scholar), further musical training under Ferdinand Hiller in Cologne, and then the musical directorship of Eton College between 1871 and 1875. His musical activities in Britain were curtailed somewhat during the twenty-two years in which he worked in the Indian civil service (as an inspector of schools, a magistrate, and a government translator), but they resumed on his retirement in 1893, whereupon he became active both as a critic and within the Musical Association (later the Royal Musical Association).23 In 1899 he was invited to join a committee, chaired by Parry and including Stanford, John Stainer, Fuller-Maitland, and Ebenezer Prout among others, whose aim was to “further the objectives … in England” of the Internationale Musikgesellschaft (hereafter IMG), which had recently been founded in Leipzig by the German musicologist Oskar Fleischer.24 In practice, this meant setting up a British national section, and Maclean, with his linguistic skills, was the obvious candidate to become group secretary and national group editor of the society’s monthly periodical, Zeitschrift der internationalen Musikgesellschaft. The Zeitschrift was one of two IMG publications, but whereas the content of the quarterly Sammelbände der internationalen Musikgesellschaft was essentially scholarly, that of the Zeitschrift aimed at a wider readership. It included concert and book reviews, lists of forthcoming lectures and performances of old music, a comprehensive list of recent literature in music periodicals of all countries, reports of papers given at local group meetings, and short articles on musical subjects, most of which were written in either German or English. Its function was thus similar to that of The Musical Times, but with one vital difference: its readership extended beyond Britain to a larger, international audience. Consequently, the role of the national group editors of the Zeitschrift went well beyond being their countries’ musical diarists. What they wrote about individual composers had the potential to shape the opinions of foreign readers who had little or no direct experience of those composers, as well as mold the scholarly discourse on their music. The columnists thus represented the music-critical voices of their respective nations. For Maclean this entailed the additional responsibility of making a case for British music to a readership that, by and large, still considered Britain to be das Land ohne Musik.25
At best, Maclean’s attitude to Elgar was ambivalent; at worst, it was downright hostile. Writing about the performance of Gerontius at the 1902 Three Choirs Festival, he described the composer as a “polemic modernist,” a comment that, given the generally negative tone of the article, was certainly not intended as a compliment.26 Maclean’s objections to Elgar can be classified as at least one of three forms: aesthetic (where Elgar’s compositional style is weighed in the balance, on its own merits, against Maclean’s preferred musical criteria, and generally found wanting); ad hominem (attacks on Elgar, as well as objections to composers who had clearly influenced him); and cultural (those where Elgar’s music is deemed unmanly, un-English, or both). In practice, these factors were interlaced, for Maclean’s aesthetic standpoint inevitably found its ideal in some composers more than in others, and given that his Zeitschrift column was frequently concerned with the future direction of English music, it is unsurprising that the composers whose works came closest to realizing his personal vision were lauded as models for emulation. Maclean’s vision was a conservative one, but it is by no means untypical (as will become clear when we consider other writing about Elgar in this period). Indeed, paradoxically, a critical view of Elgar such as Maclean’s actually serves to highlight the progressiveness of many of the composer’s scores composed at this time.27
Maclean’s influential position within the IMG and his consistent disparagement of Elgar make him a figure of more than marginal interest. Unaccountably relegated to a minor position in Elgar scholarship, Maclean assumes the role of a focal figure—perhaps the focal figure—in this essay due to his influential status and aspirations as an arbiter of musical taste. To use Maclean’s opinions as a lens through which to view the reception of Elgar’s music during this period brings into sharper focus the significance of several other critical critics, most notably Fuller-Maitland and W. H. (later Sir Henry) Hadow (1859–1937). Originally a classics don at Worcester College, Oxford, and later vice-chancellor of the University of Sheffield (where he was instrumental in establishing a professorial chair in music), Hadow was also the author of many significant books on music in the 1890s and 1900s, including two oft-reprinted volumes, Studies in Modern Music (which considered the careers of six leading nineteenth-Century composers); a number of contributions to Fuller-Maitland’s revised edition of Grove’s Dictionary; and, perhaps most notably, the fifth volume of the Oxford History of Music series of which he became editor in 1896.28 His interests also included British music. In 1921, he wrote a report on the history and prospects of British music for the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust and, in 1931, a monograph titled English Music, part of a series of books on English Heritage edited by Viscount Lee of Fareham and J. C. Squire.29 A protege of Fuller-Maitland, Hadow initially held views on Elgar mirroring those of his mentor, but, as will become apparent, Hadow’s espoused views in English Music are quite different from those he had embraced twenty-five years earlier.30
Before returning to English Music, two key musical relationships that the critical critics identified in their writings about Elgar must be considered: the musical debt he owed to Wagner and Wagnerites and, crucially, how he was compared to the composer at the heart of the renaissance establishment, Sir Hubert Hastings Parry.
Elgar and Parry
However else the critical critics might have disagreed with Elgar, they surely agreed with his high opinion of Parry. In his inaugural lecture at the University of Birmingham, Elgar drew attention to the fact that at the previous year’s “Musical Festivals … the honours have fallen, save with one exception to the younger men.” Identifying that exception, Elgar cited
a name which shall always be spoken in this University with the deepest respect, and I will add, the deepest affection—I mean Sir Hubert Parry, the head of our art in this country … : with him no cloud of formality can dim the healthy sympathy and broad influence he exerts and we hope may long continue to exert upon us.31
Elgar’s reservations about others associated with the Royal College of Music, notably Stanford, did not extend to Parry, for whom his admiration was genuine—and with good reason. Parry had been supportive in helping to secure Hans Richter’s services for the premiere of the Enigma Variations in 1899 and had proposed Elgar for membership in the Athenaeum Club in 1904. In the latter year, Elgar publicly acknowledged his indebtedness to Parry’s scholarship when he was interviewed by The Strand Magazine: “The articles [in Grove’s Dictionary] which have since helped me the most … are those of Hubert Parry.” Appropriately, Parry made the Latin oration when Elgar received his honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1905. Parry’s music impressed Elgar sufficiently for him to comment in a letter to August Jaeger of Novello, sent 8 October 1907 that A Vision of Life was “fine stuff & the poem [which Parry had written himself] was literature”—a far more positive endorsement than his barbed allusion to Stanford in the inaugural lecture that “to rhapsodise is one thing an Englishman cannot do.”32 With the exception of a (relatively early) complaint to Jaeger that Parry’s orchestration was “never more than an organ part arranged,” there is no hint that Elgar disagreed with prevailing critical opinion about Parry’s preeminence.33
Yet it was precisely this preeminence that led Elgar’s detractors to compare him unfavorably with Parry, as Fuller-Maitland’s assessments of both composers in English Music in the Nineteenth Century (1902) and the revised edition of Grove’s Dictionary (1904–7) exemplify clearly. It might seem unfair to include English Music here, given that it would have gone to press before the Düsseldorf performance of Gerontius in December 1901 and the burgeoning critical interest in Elgar that followed it; but, as perhaps the first monograph to advance the thesis that 1880 (the year when Parry’s Scenes from Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” was premiered) represented a peripeteia for British music, it is an important illustration of how in certain quarters Parry’s status was beyond dispute. Fuller-Maitland argued that the post–1880 renaissance was attributable to five “leaders” (Parry, Stanford, Mackenzie, Frederic Cowen, and Arthur Goring Thomas), who, in turn, had bred a generation of “followers” (essentially all other British composers born after 1850 and active in 1900). Not surprisingly, the five leaders are examined in considerable depth; conversely, the followers receive short shrift. Elgar, though the “most prominent among the older generation of the followers,” is summarized in just a single page, in which Froissart, The Light of Life, Caractacus, Dream of Gerontius [sic], and Cockaigne are mentioned only in passing, the Enigma Variations are described simply as “delightful,” and Sea Pictures is characterized tersely as “popular.” In all these works, Fuller-Maitland concludes, there were “evidences of a truly poetic gift, of imagination rightly held in control, and of great technical skill in the management of voices and instruments.”34 But that was all. Compared to these blandishments, Fuller-Maitland’s ten pages on Parry are positively effusive, for instance his comment that it was “Parry’s especial gift to ‘bring all heaven before our eyes’ by means of the mastery of his cumulative effect.”35
This disparity did not go unnoticed in early reviews of the book. Musical News felt that Fuller-Maitland had drawn “totally inadequate notice” to Elgar’s work; in Musical Opinion the pseudonymous columnist Common Time meanwhile declared that Fuller-Maitland’s “prejudices [were] strong and often unaccountable,” and proposed 1896 (the year of Stanford’s opera Shamus O’Brien) as an alternate starting date for an English musical renaissance.36 But Fuller-Maitland soon became more transparent in his prejudices, for his Grove entry for Elgar (1904) is laced with invective, particularly with regard to the composer’s large-scale choral works: “Praise to the Holiest” in Gerontius, for instance, suffered from a “want of the cumulative power which some other masters have attained, and which would have brought into the whole work a unity and a sublimity which it was not felt to possess.”37 No sense here, then, of Elgar managing to “bring all heaven before our eyes” like Parry; if anything, quite the opposite, for the success of Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1 was achieved “in spite of the objections of some musicians”—including Fuller-Maitland himself, presumably—“to it on the score of its immediate appeal to hearers of every class.” Meanwhile, The Apostles is portrayed as Elgar’s artifice-laden overreaction to these objections:
It is perhaps not to be wondered at that, after the compliments paid the composer by the most advanced of modern German composers, and the adverse opinion passed by some superior persons upon the “Pomp and Circumstance” tune, the composer should have adopted an ultra-modern style in this oratorio, and that it should be found so strange by some hearers as to call for censure.38
If Fuller-Maitland’s entry for Elgar was marked by trenchant criticism, his entry for Parry, published in 1907, was full of praise—and praise that seems almost deliberately to promote Parry at Elgar’s expense. Unlike Elgar’s highly colored orchestration, Parry’s symphonic works “laid more stress on the substance of the ideas and development, rather than on the manner of their presentment,” and as such “must always appeal strongly to the cultivated musician.” Compared with the “want of cumulative power” in “Praise to the Holiest,” Parry’s choral music was characterized by his “wonderful power” in “handling large masses with the utmost breadth and simplicity of effect, and of using the voices of the choir in obtaining climax after climax, until an overwhelming impression is created”: this was “felt not only by the educated hearer, but even by the untrained listener.” The implication is clear: without ever compromising his style, Parry wrote music whose authority was discernible to all; Elgar, by contrast, veered inconsistently between oversophistication (The Apostles) and vulgarity (the Pomp and Circumstance marches). Lest his readers be left in any doubt of Parry’s stature, Fuller-Maitland concludes the dictionary entry by stating that Parry’s “strong common sense” and the “purity of his artistic ideals” marked him “as the most important figure in English art since the days of Purcell.”39
Fuller-Maitland was not Parry’s sole apologist, however. In a Zeitschrift article from 1903, Maclean conflated Parry’s social and musical elitism in terms very similar to those that Fuller-Maitland would use in Grove. Maclean wrote that Parry’s art “stands above that of his fellows, as the Drachenfels above the Rhine; lofty, alone, perhaps even melancholy.” His music is “a direct counterblast to preciosity”:
In contour it is wholly broad. While in harmony it is free from decadent subtleties; indeed almost absolutely diatonic, a trait in common more or less with all British composers who are true to themselves, but carried in this beyond the practice of most of them. The amount of expression which Parry obtains with diatonic means is quite astonishing… . Nor does his art yield to emotional excesses; he is greatly subjective, but his introspection is steadied by reflection.40
Thus, not only did Parry’s solidity of form and emotional moderation offer proof of his naturally good musical taste, but his avoidance of chromaticism provided evidence of his echt-Englishness—certainly much more than was the case with Elgar, against whom Maclean ends his article with a damning broadside. Recalling Strauss’s toast to Elgar as the “first English progressivist” at the 1902 Lower Rhine Music Festival, Maclean pompously observed that with works of art, unlike with “physical and mathematical truths,” there is “at least as much chance of what is older being superior to what is younger, as vice-versa.” To prove his point, Maclean compared Elgar’s Coronation Ode with Parry’s symphonic ode of 1903, War and Peace. The latter work, in Maclean’s opinion, was “Parry purified from mannerism or blemish, pushing new discoveries in poly-tonism without relinquishing his own diatonic habit … showing depths of harmonious sensibility in the solo numbers with long resistless forces in the choral numbers.” The Coronation Ode, however,
consists musically of little else than this; first a decided mannerism of the composer in descending bass scale-passages and certain treble suspensions, secondly music based on quite the weakest form of the English part-song style, thirdly a march-tune imported from another composition which has no affinity whatever with this one and is in this place at least extra-ordinarily common.
“It seems next to impossible,” Maclean concluded, “that any musician could hear or read these two works side by side, and not realise that the work of the older man is on an immeasurably higher plane than that of the younger.”41
At least one periodical was moved to comment that Maclean’s choice of works was disingenuous. In a review of the article, Musical News dismissed Maclean’s claim that “composers must be judged by their latest productions,” observing that as the Coronation Ode was “not up to its composer’s highest standard” it was hardly the most appropriate piece to use for such a comparison.42 Quite what the periodical would have made of Maclean’s comments on the 1904 Gloucester Festival is debatable; for once again his praise for Parry is tempered by an implicit rebuke to Elgar. The main review of the festival for the Zeitschrift was written by the pro-Elgar critic Herbert Thompson, who dwelt chiefly on the performances of The Apostles (which was receiving its Three Choirs premiere) and Parry’s oratorio The Love that Casteth out Fear.43 Maclean added a postscript to Thompson’s report, in which he extols Parry in terms similar to his article of the previous year: The Love was the “master-work of the festival”; Parry’s diatonic language showed “capacities for still further budding and blossoming”; and “the effect … of this newest work of Parry’s on all right-minded musicians was prodigious.” In his closing comments comes the pointed gibe: “Such results achieved by a composer who never makes a bid for popularity might give cause to those who are on the crest of a wave to institute heart-searchings as to how much of the mountebank there may not be mixed up in their own art.”44 This reference is so transparent that Maclean hardly needed to invoke the composer’s name; the Elgar Festival at Covent Garden had taken place barely six months earlier and, as Thompson had noted, The Apostles attracted a larger audience at Gloucester than Elijah.
As it is Elgar’s popular appeal, once again, that damns him, it is worth putting Fuller-Maitland’s and Maclean’s objections into context, for their remarks are the ancestors of Edward J. Dent’s notorious critique of the composer in Guido Adler’s Handbuch der Musikgeschichte (1924, rev. 1930), in which Elgar’s music is described as “too emotional and not quite free from vulgarity.”45 That vulgarity was a concern for early-twentieth-Century British music critics should not be surprising. The development of mass consumer culture in cities, epitomized by the growth of urban popular song and the growing respectability of music hall, provided attractions for potential audiences that were far removed from the internationally respected Tonkunst the critics were seeking to establish. Admittedly, these new stimulations might ignite a creative spark; Elgar himself argued that vulgarity “often goes with inventiveness” and that “in the course of time [it] may be refined.”46 But his was a minority view. More typical was that of C. Fred Kenyon, who saw musical vulgarity not as a raw material from which works of art might be fashioned, but as an unwelcome by-product of success: vulgarity was “the most insidious, and most deadly, and yet most popular of all vices.” In Kenyon’s eyes, a composer who possessed genius (“the highest gifts that the gods can bestow”) had no business seeking worldly pleasures, which was simply greediness on his part.47
Elgar’s detractors do not accuse him of greed; indeed, if anything, the remarks above suggest that the resentment toward the composer from some within renaissance circles owed less to vulgarity per se, and more to Elgar’s post-Düsseldorf fame—hardly surprising, perhaps, given that Strauss’s toast had been dismissive of those who had spent the previous twenty years trying to advance the prospects of British music. Maclean’s defensive comment that “we have more than one composer” reveals just how sensitively the higher echelons of British musical opinion reacted to Strauss’s possibly tipsy reflections, but their attempts to promote other composers met with mixed success.48 Proposals to hold a National Festival of British Music in November 1903 at which “too much attention will not be given to the music and musicians who have been unduly prominent of late” came to nothing. Indeed, the prospect that this festival might be run on “Royal College lines” caused Musical Opinion’s columnist Common Time to remark that the Royal College had a reputation for self-advancement, and that “their idea of the best interests of the art [was] too limited by personal considerations.”49 By contrast, the Elgar Festival at Covent Garden in March 1904 was both artistically and financially successful—more so, indeed, than the Beethoven and Strauss festivals that had taken place in London the previous year.50
Ironically, this London success occurred within a year of another source of resentment toward Elgar among London critics: the composer’s pronouncement, in a public letter to Rev. Canon Charles Gorton prior to the 1903 Morecambe Festival, that “unknown to the sleepy London press … the living centre of music in Great Britain is not London, but somewhere farther North.”51 The letter was reprinted in the festival brochure, from where it was copied by the Musical Times. The heated response it generated from critics was considerable: as one Musical Standard editorial put it, London’s critics were “annually driven near crazy during the months of May, June and part of July in the process of deciding which of the forty (or more) concerts per week need their personal attention … [Elgar] should remember, at all events, that there is other music besides part-songs and oratorios.”52 Whether Fuller-Maitland, Maclean et al. took personally Elgar’s description of a “sleepy” London press, uninterested in provincial music making, is a moot point. But it is hard to imagine that it did not color their views of the composer. It is surely no accident that this period coincided with a hardening of Fuller-Maitland’s stance toward Elgar. It is likely, too, to have contributed to the often negative reaction to Elgar’s professorial lectures two years later, when the composer appeared at times to take a consciously anti-metropolitan stance, notably when he hinted that Leipzig (rather than London) might prove the most appropriate model for music making in Birmingham.53
A more profound reason for this resentment of Elgar’s popularity was his unsuitability as an exemplar. The future of British music was a major concern for many critics, who saw one of their functions as promoting the best British composers and their works to as wide an audience as possible in the hope that a younger generation, an elusive “School of British Composition,” might be inspired to follow in their wake. (Maclean’s articles in the Zeitschrift are one manifestation of this; Fuller-Maitland’s favorable comparison of his five renaissance “leaders” with the Russian Kuchka is another.)54 But the “School of British Composition” had to consist of the right kind of composer; not everyone was welcome to join this exclusive club. In the critical critics’ eyes, the aristocratic Parry qualified for membership, but Elgar, the tradesman’s son, did not. A comparison of the language used to describe the two composers is most revealing. Parry’s “loftiness” and “aloofness” hint at a social and artistic elitism from which Elgar’s “extra-ordinarily common” writing (and ordinary background) automatically excluded him. Parry’s music was described by Maclean as a “direct product of academic olive-groves.” Elgar, however, was not only uneducated but implicitly undisciplined, trusting “little if at all to intellect” and “rush[ing] wholly on impulse.”55 Parry’s diatonicism and his emphasis on musical ideas rather than color provided evidence for the “purity of his artistic ideals”; Elgar was overreliant on virtuosic orchestration and “ultra-modern” chromaticism that might mask a deficiency in technique elsewhere.56 Above all, Parry possessed a “power” and emotional control that had its roots in the manly self-restraint of “muscular Christianity,” the very embodiment of Victorian public school values. It is not without significance that Fuller-Maitland refers to the “purity” of Parry’s artistic ideals. That same self-restraint and, implicitly, purity was lacking in the more volatile, stylistically protean Elgar.
In short, the critical language used to describe the two composers forms part of a system of binary oppositions: Parry consistently embodies the positive, hegemonic values of the normative Self, Elgar the negative values of the Other. Given this construction of the two, there was no way that Elgar might have been held up as a model for younger composers to emulate because he was defined expressly in opposition to the one composer, Parry, who was regarded as a salutary—and characteristically British—influence for the young. Ironically, the discourse used by Fuller-Maitland and Maclean to describe Parry’s music is used by pro-Elgar critics to describe his work, as is illustrated by three comments about The Apostles: Alfred Kalisch wrote of the score’s “power and beauty and spiritual elevation”; Herbert Thompson referred to Elgar’s “masterful” weaving together of the score; and Robert Buckley, comparing the work to Gerontius, commented that it is “of more masculine fibre, and with all its passion, has greater reserve. And greater reserve means greater dignity.”57 The ideological values shared by these three writers were the same as those of the critical critics; even the vocabulary is virtually identical. The only difference is in the object of approbation.
The binary oppositions outlined above can perhaps be summed up by reference to an article by Henry Hadow, titled “Some Tendencies in Modern Music,” which appeared in the Edinburgh Review in October 1906. Once again, Parry is praised for his depth of purpose (“his prevalent mood is one of serious earnest[ness]”), his emotional restraint (Parry “minimis[ed] the appeal to the senses, concentrating his whole force on the intimate expression of religious or philosophic truth”), and his ability to depict “the awe and mystery which surround the confines of human life” in musically simple ways. Above all, Parry embodied the national character, and in a way that drew sustenance from his artistic forebears:
Throughout his work he employs an idiom of pure English as distinctly national as that of Purcell himself. He is the spokesman of all that is best in our age and country, its dignity, its manhood, its reverence; in his music the spirit of Milton and Wordsworth may find its counterpart.58
Conversely, Hadow’s criticisms of Elgar echo those of Fuller-Maitland and Maclean. Gerontius offered proof that Elgar’s music “invariably falters” before the “highest and noblest conceptions” and that his “extraordinary skill of orchestration covers … an occasional weakness of idea,” while in The Apostles, there is a “want of largeness and serenity” in Elgar’s handling of the music. This, Hadow claimed, was caused by Elgar’s leitmotif technique: the motifs were “all broken up into little anxious ‘motives,’ which are not blended together but laid like tesseræ in a mosaic, each with its own colour and its own shape. No work of equal ability has ever displayed so little mellowness of tone.” In general, Elgar’s style is “somewhat tentative and transitional; it often moves with uncertain step, it often seems to be striving with a thought which it cannot attain.” For these reasons Hadow likened Elgar to Berlioz, as the Frenchman possessed something of the same “wayward brilliance.”59
“Wayward brilliance,” however, was scarcely a sure foundation for an English school of composition. Elgar’s tentativeness, uncertainty, and mosaiclike orchestration seemed to offer a fragmented, even emasculated, future for English music, compared with the philosophical certainties and wholeness of Victorian manliness embodied in Parry’s music. Not surprisingly, it is Parry, the spiritual heir of English poets, rather than Elgar, the artistic heir of Berlioz, who emerges as the true musical voice of the nation: the Balakirev at the head of Britain’s Kuchka to Elgar’s Tchaikovsky.60
Elgar, Wagner, and Lyricism
Hadow’s concerns about Elgar’s use of leitmotifs were as much a matter of personal aesthetics as of technique. As noted above, opinion on Wagner in Britain was divided, with many leading figures within the renaissance set skeptical of the composer, at least as a compositional model and certainly as an ideologue. Hadow was less explicitly anti-Wagner than some, but his pronouncement in 1893 that it was “neither likely nor advisable that [Wagner] should exercise any permanent influence” on composers working in musical genres other than opera or music drama was somewhat ingenuous, to put it mildly.61 Yet this rejection of Wagner outside the theater was consistent with the idealism, derived largely from the critical writings of Hanslick, that pervaded contemporary British musical thinking. Such idealism found its perfect exemplar in the music of Hanslick’s hero, Johannes Brahms, who provided British composers with a “safe” compositional model that eschewed the extremes associated with Bayreuth.62 The Brahmsian model was realized most fully in Britain by Parry, whose emotional control and moderation in orchestration seems almost the antithesis to Wagner. For Elgar to make use of a Wagnerian orchestra, Wagnerian chromatic harmony, and an extensive network of leitmotifs in Gerontius and The Apostles was, to some extent, to state his allegiance to a composer against whom the leading faction in modern English music had defined itself. Moreover, despite Elgar’s plausible claim that his earliest acquaintanceship with reminiscence motifs had not been in Wagner but in Mendelssohn’s Elijah, the “thematic analyses” to Gerontius, The Apostles, and The Kingdom, which were written by Jaeger under the composer’s supervision, and which listed the works’ different motifs, were clearly based on Hans von Wolzogen’s Handbücher for audiences at Bayreuth.63 Comparisons with Wagner were thus inevitable.
These comparisons were often negative, notably with regard to The Apostles, where the composer’s leitmotif technique attracted unfavorable comments. For instance, J. H. G. Baughan of the Musical News felt that the piece lacked spontaneity and that Elgar’s use of leitmotifs elicited only boredom; the opening of Part II, indeed, was castigated as “bald, means absolutely nothing; and must surely have been written in a hurry.”64 This much we might expect from a critic who had previously claimed of Gerontius that it “lacked novelty and real inspiration,” that “the feminine whine and excessive love of minor harmonies” made “many of the score’s pages more painful than artistically impressive,” and that its “frequent faded feeling and morbidity” compared unfavorably with the “virility” and “robustness” of Elgar’s earlier (and more conservative) King Olaf.65 But criticism of this same passage in The Apostles also came from one of the most ardent advocates of Gerontius, Ernest Newman, for whom it had “no musical raison d’être. You could play the themes in any order you liked without any sense of discontinuity.” The problem with the oratorio, Newman argued, was that Elgar’s primary concern was to depict a literary narrative, which he achieved through juxtaposing motifs irrespective of musical sense. According to Newman, the music was incapable of developing “an organic life of its own… . In no modern work have leading motives been employed so woodenly and with such lack of variety.”66 This charge was echoed by a critic whose views of the composer generally fell between J. H. G. Baughan and Newman, namely Common Time:
His complex use of the leit motif system [in The Apostles] is too often only clever on paper. In performance the themes pass in the general hurly-burly without any particular significance; partly because many of them are not very distinctive in themselves and partly because the composer’s use of them is so fragmentary. He seems disinclined to develop his themes to any great extent; and their recurrence, in slightly changed form, does appear mechanical,—a charge often brought against Wagner, who could develop his themes.67
The observation that Elgar’s leitmotifs tended to fragment rather than coalesce—a point that echoes Hadow’s comments about unblended tesserae—is highly significant, for the notion of fragmentation lies at the root of much of the anti-Wagnerist criticism of Elgar. Musically, the concerns with fragmentation were twofold: first, the suspicion that Elgar’s use of leitmotifs compensated for a lack of skill in writing periodic, lyrical melodies; and second, that Elgar’s highly colored scoring masked an underlying formlessness. Both these suspicions were articulated, indeed fostered, by Maclean, for whom Elgar’s career seemed to be a long, mostly downward slide from the somewhat unlikely high point of Caractacus. According to Maclean, Caractacus was “a pleasure to listen to from start to finish” on account of its “good rhythm, … fair hold of tonality, judicious prevalence of the major key, broad long phrases, and … melody-line often beautiful.”68 With the Enigma Variations, however, the long phrases and beautiful melodies disappeared. Maclean opined that the melodies in that score were “downright ugly at their core,” largely because the melody was “scarcely lyric” and the minor-major alternation in the theme of “doubtful beauty.”69 Matters worsened for Maclean in the large-scale choral works, in which Elgar abandoned traditional melodic writing for a word painting, driven by leitmotifs, whose sensational immediacy was antithetical both to lyricism and to form. In a review of The Apostles, Maclean was moved to write: “To those who believe in the doctrine ‘follow the words,’ [there is] no example finer. To those who ask for backbone, [there is] little or none, though perhaps more than in Gerontius.” Similarly, in The Music Makers, the “extensive wordpainting” acted “to the detriment of the general jubilancy which is the tenor and purport of the poem.” Indeed, of Elgar’s mature works, only the First Symphony and the Crown of India Suite escaped Maclean’s vituperations.70
Maclean’s complaints about Elgar’s alleged lack of lyricism reflect a dislike less of Wagner than of his English disciples. Maclean certainly had grave reservations about the morality of Wagner’s mature stage works, but in his eyes moral lapses in plot did not necessarily taint the German composer’s music.71 On the other hand, he expressed contempt for Ethel Smyth, whose Der Wald he damned as “one of the dreariest specimens of pseudo-Wagner ever presented to an audience on a first-class occasion.”72 His objection to the work stemmed partly from the extent to which Smyth’s scenario mirrored passages in Siegfried and Tristan, but more from her use of what he considered an alien style of vocal writing. In his view, English opera (and, implicitly, English choral writing in general), “has remained to this day instinctively lyrical… . Italian examples, Weberian influences, Wagnerian temptations, have all left that main tendency much as it was.”73 The implication is that any English composer who wrote in an anti-lyrical manner was at the very least unpatriotic and, given the reference to “Wagnerian temptations,” quite possibly immoral.74 As one who had consistently yielded to such temptations, Elgar was thus guilty as charged in the court where Maclean served as both judge and jury.
Elgar, Orchestration, and Strauss
If the decline of English lyricism was primarily a concern of Maclean, the charge that Elgar’s highly colored scoring led to formlessness was made by several writers. Ernest Walker, in A History of Music in England (1907), felt that there was a “lack of sustained thematic inventiveness” to Elgar’s music: “Even when, in a way, quite original, the material sometimes consists of scraps of music, neither individually nor collectively of any particular interest beyond mere colour, joined together by methods not altogether convincing.”75 Walker was not alone. Common Time, for instance, wrote that for all its brilliance in orchestration, there was a “scrappiness of effect” in the Cockaigne Overture, and that Elgar had “worked from detail to detail”: “There does not seem any reason why the composition should come to an end when it does; simply because there is formality there is no real musical form or architecture.”76 Walter Bernhard, writing in Musical Opinion, noted the claim of the music critic of the Observer that the “‘magnificently modern’ orchestration” of the First Symphony had acted “as a dress efficiently disguising the skeleton.”77 One suspects, however, that those critics who valued Parry’s soberly delineated forms more highly than Elgar’s variegated orchestral kaleidoscope in such works as Cockaigne would have considered this orchestral dress to be less Savile Row and more the emperor’s new clothes.
The concern that English critics of this period had for formal coherence is well illustrated by a paper that Maclean presented to the Musical Association in 1896, in which the author argued that established forms, such as sonata or rondo, were essentially elaborate versions of simpler (and implicitly universal) formal procedures: the strophic, the episodic, and the balanced. Maclean concluded this paper by remarking that it would be more difficult to find a work that did not reflect these procedures than one that did.78 The only contemporary genre that might have been charged with formlessness was the symphonic poem, so it should come as no surprise that over the next two decades Maclean would frequently decry its shortcomings: overly chromatic harmony, excessively elaborate orchestration, and structures derived from nonmusical scenarios. While a handful of leading composers could compose in the genre, Maclean felt that “for the rank and file, and for our own times, the ‘symphonic poem,’ which is understood to be programme-music liberated from all troublesome forms, has proved the haven of the tuneless.”79 The immediate stimulus for the composition of symphonic poems in Britain was the growing popularity of Richard Strauss, whose status as the “world’s leading composer” was accepted by conservative and liberal critics alike by the early 1900s.80 In the eyes of some, however, Strauss’s popularity had developed into a virtual cult. “Ours is not the only country where concern is felt at the neglect of native composers,” ran a Musical News editorial. “This perhaps has arrived at a more advanced stage with us than the French. They only seem as yet to be involved in the Wagner cult. We have to reckon with the Straussians.”81
But with Straussians came an anti-Straussian backlash—and one which indirectly affected Elgar. As we have seen, Strauss’s toasting Elgar as the “first English progressivist” meant that a number of touchy British musicians had a personal reason to dislike the German composer, and it is interesting how certain critics managed to promote anti-Strauss sentiment without in any way questioning his preeminence. In Maclean’s case, this took a patriotic form that, given his criticism of Strauss’s Düsseldorf speech noted above, as well as his promotion of a leading renaissance composer, is a clear dig at Elgar:
It is to be hoped that the Nile will not inundate here with imitation-Strauss. Our younger composers will get little good from that, and had much better follow their own leaders (admirably typified by a new Stanford Irish Rhapsody at an extra Platt-Strauss concert) and develop the genius of their own country.82
More common, however, was the criticism that Strauss’s musical language emphasized realism rather than beauty. In a review of the English premiere of the Sinfonia Domestica, for instance, Fuller-Maitland, though admiring Strauss’s orchestration, questioned whether it could depict anything more than everyday banality: “We cannot enter into the question whether all this array of instruments … was worthwhile in order to enforce upon the hearers no idea of greater value than the facts that in Germany some couples fall out and agree again, while some babies are washed both morning and evening.”83 (Such a critical mind-set perhaps explains why E. A. Baughan had a few months earlier dismissed Elgar’s most conspicuous piece of Straussian realism, namely Judas’s glittering repudiation of the thirty pieces of silver in The Apostles, as “cheap.”)84 Fuller-Maitland’s flippant point is developed by Hadow, who, in his “Some Tendencies” essay, points out that “in the first place the function of music is to beautify and idealize; and not everything can be expressed in terms of beauty, but only those aspects of life and nature which are capable of idealization.” Strauss’s music could “excite,” “intoxicate,” and “dazzle us with coruscations of brilliance and set us tingling with a pleasure that is sometimes very near to pain, but it leaves out of account all the nobler side of human nature; the tenderness that is too deep for tears, the chivalry that is too high to threaten, the indwelling spiritual power with which all great music has held communion.” For Hadow, Strauss’s tone poems lacked the idealistic qualities and, above all, the moderation that was required to underpin a healthy aesthetic. “All this,” he concluded, “bears the clear impress of a decadent and sophisticated art.”85
Elgar, Decadence, and Debussy
Hadow’s comments about Strauss make for an interesting comparison with those of Herbert Thompson about the orchestration of The Apostles. Thompson, a critic disposed to favor Elgar, inadvertently revealed the difficulty many critics had with Elgar’s scoring when he remarked that “the magnificence and variety of the colouring are almost bewildering, and one only fears lest they should dazzle one’s critical faculties and make it difficult to judge dispassionately so striking a work.”86 The danger that aesthetic judgments might be made as a result of sensual rather than intellectual processes was one that unnerved many British critics, as their comments about Elgar’s music bear witness. A particularly striking example is C. L. Graves, the music critic of the Spectator, who described the effect of the “musical pandemonium” of Elgar’s concert overture In the South in almost pathological terms as “painfully stimulating.” He harbored similar doubts about the First Symphony, where the working out of themes “borders at times on feverishness.” Graves continued by asserting that the “human ear is only capable of absorbing a certain volume of sound at a single hearing, and the continuous sonority of this symphony, which eschews those pauses and silences which furnish some of the most eloquent and affecting moments in the works of Beethoven and Schubert, begets a sense of physical fatigue.”87 Such “unhealthiness” was also noted by Ernest Walker. A fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, Walker’s views typify some of the academic skepticism toward Elgar that we have already encountered with Fuller-Maitland and Hadow. Walker believed that Elgar’s music lacked the “bracing sternness that lies at the root of the supreme music of the world,” and instead relied upon “a rather hot-house type of emotionalism.” That Walker considered this emotionalism to be inherently unnatural is made clear by his remark that the eponymous protagonist’s confession of faith in The Dream of Gerontius, “though sincere, nevertheless suggest[s] an atmosphere of artificial flowers,” a choice of metaphor that hints at the work’s evident affinities with Parsifal.88
Walker’s juxtaposition of Elgar’s emotionalism with Parsifal is surely more than coincidence. As Byron Adams has noted, the so-called decadent aesthetic movement of 1890s Britain and France placed Wagner on a pedestal above all other composers, and Parsifal above his other works.89 Quoting Ellis Hansen, Adams observes that decadent aesthetics were pervaded by a connoisseurship of “failure and decay,” in art, language, or society, for decay itself was considered by the decadents as “seductive, mystical, or beautiful.” Parsifal, a work that celebrated the degeneration of a sick society at least as much as the regeneration which was the work’s notional raison d’être, was thus particularly attractive to the decadent movement.90 Consequently, when critics write about Elgar’s music in terms that suggest some sort of mental illness—or if they draw attention to excessive color, emotionalism, or sensuous beauty—they allude to decadent traits within his work. Perhaps no decadent signifier was more significant than fragmentation itself (whether motivic, thematic, or formal), as the following example from the review of The Apostles by Common Time illustrates:
Cleverness piled on cleverness, complexity making complexity more obscure is not great workmanship. You might as well admire the overornate designs of certain decadent periods of furniture designing, merely because all kinds of unexpected things are done in the thick plastering of decorations… . Many of the ingenious devices and well thought out complexities serve no end: they are mere scrolls and figures and gilding. You may admire each for itself, but you cannot pretend that each plays its part in the whole design.91
Alongside fragmentation, the most striking decadent signifier for Elgar (and certainly the most Wagnerian) was the composer’s harmony, then considered far more radical and colorful than perhaps it is today. Indeed, Maclean linked the names of Elgar and Debussy, labeling both as harmonic “extremists” in whose music it was difficult to recognize the “ordinary chords” of traditional harmony. (Maclean raised no such objections to Richard Strauss, whose harmonies “are not particularly strange and are in any case quite clear through all his orchestration and passing-notes.”)92 This view was echoed, though less pejoratively, by F. J. Sawyer, in a paper he delivered to the Incorporated Society of Musicians at their Lowestoft conference in January 1906, which subsequently appeared as an eight-part article in Musical Opinion titled “Modern Harmony: Exemplified in the Works of Elgar, Strauss and Debussy.” Almost three-quarters of Sawyer’s article was concerned with the “richness of harmonic invention” of Elgar’s most recent works, particularly Gerontius, The Apostles, and In the South. Compared with Elgar’s daring, Strauss’s harmony was “generally more normal and ordinary… . He does not seem so decidedly to have gone out of his way to invent fresh passages as Elgar has done; but, when we turn from these composers to the Frenchman Debussy, we seem to have left behind all former ideas and to be lost in a new world of sound.”93 For Sawyer, Elgar provided a link between Strauss and Debussy.
In his monograph on Elgar, Ernest Newman compares Debussy unfavorably to the English composer, describing the Frenchman’s music as “neurotic, wherein the intellect plays so little part, while the nerves are just whipped or soddened by floods of tone of which the main element is the merely sensuous.”94 This depiction of Debussy as anti-intellectual, sensational, possibly febrile, and certainly feminine, provided Newman with a Mediterranean Other against whom he could posit Elgar as a strong, intellectual, masculine, pan-Germanic Self. But if one turns to Hadow’s article a markedly different picture emerges. Hadow explicitly described Strauss as “decadent” while Debussy is “almost too fragile for daily life … never robust or vigorous”—and unable to “express the larger and broader aspects of humanity.”95 The similarity of Hadow’s comments about Elgar’s music—“Before the highest and noblest conceptions it invariably falters” and “want of largeness and serenity often appears in the handling of the music”—to his description of Debussy’s art is striking: both compose miniaturist musical material that compares unfavorably to Parry’s broad melodies and relies excessively on timbre. As post-Wagnerians, albeit of differing hues, Elgar, Debussy, and Strauss are all, to some extent, tarred with the same decadent brush.
Autres temps, autres moeurs
Elgar’s biographers have generally considered the reaction against the composer in the 1920s as evidence of a post-World War I generational and ideological shift. To some extent they are correct, but it is clear that even between 1899 and 1919 (and especially between 1902 and 1908), when Elgar was at his creative and popular peak, there was already a significant body of opinion that was consistently hostile to the composer, and for reasons that reflected a very particular aesthetic standpoint. Dent’s notorious condemnation of Elgar’s vulgarity is thus as much a continuation of this critical tradition as it is a curt dismissal by the president of the International Society for Contemporary Music of a composer who, by 1930, could be portrayed as a creatively inactive, late-Romantic musical dinosaur; the concerns of his article (vulgarity, emotionalism, brilliant orchestral timbre) are identical to those of Maclean and Fuller-Maitland.
But not to those of the Hadow who in 1931 published English Music. The structure of this volume is clearly modeled on Walker’s A History of Music in England: the Middle Ages provide a preparation to the musical heights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, before descending into the “Dark Age” of the eighteenth century, from which emerges the “Dawn and Progress of the English Renascence” and the music of the present day (whose leading exponent, Vaughan Williams, provides the book’s introduction). The “Renascence” chapter closes with an assessment of Elgar’s career that is far more appreciative than Hadow’s Edinburgh Review article a quarter of a century earlier. Gerontius, a work about which Hadow had previously commented that the orchestration sometimes concealed “an occasional weakness of idea,” receives particular praise; moreover, in writing that “there should have been no question, as there is none now, about the hymn ‘Praise to the Holiest,’ or the pathos of the death-scene, or the mystic beauty of the ascent toward the Throne,” Hadow distances himself from Fuller-Maitland, who had raised those very questions. Whereas in 1906 Hadow had written that Elgar and Berlioz possessed “something of … the same wayward brilliance,” in 1931 there was no parity between the two composers. Elgar, though having something of the Frenchman’s revolutionary spirit, was “a greater man than Berlioz, greater in sustained power of thought, in elevation of sentiment, in dignity and control of expression.” The “gaucherie” of his earlier works had given way to a “serenity of manner” and a “variety of utterance which will be a heritage for all our generations to come.” In short, Hadow concluded, Elgar had “remodelled the musical language of England: he [had] enlarged its style and enriched its vocabulary, and the monument of his work is not only a landmark in our present advance but a beacon of guidance for its future.”96
Thus did one septuagenarian member of the British establishment pay homage to another, in a period when British society was in crisis, threatened both economically (the aftermath of the Wall Street crash) and politically (the rise of socialism at home). How better to ameliorate such a situation than address an imagined national community—“a heritage for all our generations to come,” “a landmark in our present advance”—in praise of a figure now identified in the public mind with Englishness itself?97 If any proof were needed of the fundamentally historical and contextual nature of reception history, this would be it. But I suspect that Elgar, ever the idealist, might have regarded Hadow’s tribute to him as evidence of a “real, lasting educational good”—truth—“gained from the mature slowly-wrought opinion.” Indeed, he might even have considered it a belated “conversion.”
NOTES
1. Edward Elgar, A Future for English Music and Other Lectures, ed. Percy M. Young (London: Dobson, 1968), 163, 177, 167.
2. Ibid., 163.
3. Ibid., 183.
4. Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
5. Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations in Music History, trans. J. B. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 151.
6. Elgar, A Future for English Music, 167.
7. Brian Trowell, “Elgar’s Use of Literature,” in Edward Elgar: Music and Literature, ed. Raymond Monk (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 230, 280. Compare Rev. H. R. Haweis’s similarly Platonist Music and Morals (London: W. H. Allen, 1871), which was sufficiently celebrated to go through twenty editions; see Meirion Hughes, The English Musical Renaissance and the Press 1850–1914: Watchmen of Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 6–8.
8. Elgar, A Future for English Music, 167–73, 207.
9. Ibid., 105; Trowell, “Elgar’s Use of Literature,” 254–56. The extent of the “absolute” character of the First Symphony is also debateable; see Aidan J. Thomson, “Elgar and Chivalry,” 19th-Century Music 28, no. 3 (2005): 259–67.
10. Letter to Ernest Newman, 4 November 1908, quoted in Jerrold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 537.
11. The Strand Magazine (May 1904): 543–44, quoted in Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 339.
12. Elgar, A Future for English Music, 51, 53.
13. Ibid., 187. Fuller-Maitland intended his obituary to act as a rejoinder to the overthe-top (and sometimes inaccurate) articles that followed Sullivan’s death in 1900, but his description of these accounts as an example of “Jumboism” was somewhat crass. See J. A. Fuller Maitland [sic], “Sir Arthur Sullivan,” Cornhill Magazine 495 (1901): 300–309.
14. Musical News (9 December 1905), quoted in Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 480. In his inaugural lecture, for instance, Elgar criticized British composers who had written rhapsodies (“Could anything be more inconceivably inept. To rhapsodise is one thing Englishmen cannot do”). Stanford, the composer of several Irish rhapsodies, was almost certainly his target. Elgar, A Future for English Music, 51, 53.
15. J. A. Fuller-Maitland, English Music in the Nineteenth Century (London: Grant Richards, 1902).
16. Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 41; Hughes, Watchmen of Music, 29–38.
17. Hughes, Watchmen of Music, 164, 167–68, 172; Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 359.
18. Hughes, Watchmen of Music, 181–82; Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 549.
19. Moore, for instance, dismisses Fuller-Maitland as “a notorious reactionary,” ironically only a few lines after he refers, in far less loaded terms, to the even more conservative, but pro-Elgar, Joseph Bennett as an “old stager.” See Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 333.
20. Hughes, Watchmen of Music, 55–56.
21. Kalisch was a progressive critic who not only translated the libretti of both Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier, but “as secretary of the old Concert-goers’ Club and chairman of the later Music Club … was able by lectures and demonstrations to introduce a wide public to the new works as they were produced.” See Kalisch’s obituary in the Times (London), 18 May 1933, 16. Thompson was an enthusiastic Wagnerian, whose one music monograph was titled Wagner and Wagenseil: A Source of Wagner’s Opera “Die Meistersinger” (London: Oxford University Press, 1927). Both critics befriended Elgar.
22. Vaughan Williams recalled that Parry described the Prelude to Parsifal as “mere scene painting,” and that he was “always very insistent on the importance of form as opposed to colour,” and further, that he possessed an “almost moral abhorrence of mere luscious sound.” See Hughes and Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance, 31, 26; Jeremy Dibble, C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 243; and Ralph Vaughan Williams, National Music and Other Essays, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 182. For a fuller examination of British attitudes to Wagner in this period, see Anne Dzamba Sessa, Richard Wagner and the English (London: Associated University Presses, 1979); and Emma Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
23. H. C. Colles, “Maclean, Charles (Donald),” in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed., ed. Eric Blom (London: Macmillan, 1954), 5:480; Who’s Who on CD-ROM, 1897–1998. Oxford University Press.
24. Zeitschrift 1, no. 5 (February 1900): 120. According to Fleischer, the society aimed to be “a federation of the musicians and musical connoisseurs of all countries, for purposes of mutual information on matters of research or on more current matters.” Charles Maclean, “International Musical Society,” Grove 5th ed., 4:518.
25. My use of Oscar Schmitz’s famous denunciation of English music is intentional: as one might expect, given its Leipzig origins, the IMG had more members from Germany than from any other country between 1899 and 1914. German scholarly attitudes to English music at the time are perhaps best summed up by Wilibald Nagel’s Geschichte der Musik in England (Strasbourg: Trübner, 1894), which ended with the death of Purcell; see also “Two Histories of English Music,” Zeitschrift 12, no. 3 (December 1910): 72–75.
26. Charles Maclean, “Worcester,” “Notizien,” Zeitschrift 4, no. 1 (October 1902): 31.
27. My thanks to Julian Rushton for suggesting this argument.
28. W. H. Hadow, Studies in Modern Music: Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner (London: Seeley, 1893; hereafter Studies 1); Studies in Modern Music: Frederick Chopin, Antonin Dvořák, Johannes Brahms (London: Seeley, 1895; hereafter Studies 2); The Oxford History of Music, Vol. 5, The Viennese Period (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904).
29. W. H. Hadow, “British Music: A Report upon the History and Present Prospects of Music in the United Kingdom” (Dunfermline: Carnegie Trustees, 1921); English Music (London: Longmans, Green, 1931). The English Heritage series also included “Cricket” by Neville Cardus and “English Humour” by J. B. Priestley.
30. Hughes, Watchmen of Music, 37.
31. Elgar, A Future for English Music, 49.
32. Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 85, 259, 438; Jerrold Northrop Moore, ed., Elgar and His Publishers: Letters of a Creative Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 2:613, 677; Elgar, A Future for English Music, 51, 53; Jeremy Dibble, “Elgar and his British Contemporaries” in The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, ed. Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 20 (Elgar’s italics). Jaeger himself was not always uncritical of Parry’s work, describing the latter’s Magnificat privately to Elgar as “poor stuff” (28 February 1898; Moore, Elgar and His Publishers, 1:66), and commenting disparagingly of the Thanksgiving Te Deum, “[O]h. Parry!! very MUCH Parry!!! Toujours Parry!!!! Fiddles sawing all the time!!!!! DEAR old Parry!!!!!!” 12 July 1900; Moore, Elgar and His Publishers, 1:213.
33. Letter to Jaeger, 9 March 1898, quoted in Moore, Elgar and His Publishers, 1:69 (Elgar’s italics). Elgar’s views on Parry’s orchestration would change over time: many years later Elgar took Vaughan Williams to task for his criticism of Parry’s scoring in the Symphonic Variations; see Dibble, “Elgar and his British Contemporaries,” in Cambridge Companion to Elgar, 23.
34. J. A. Fuller-Maitland, English Music in the Nineteenth Century (London: Grant Richards, 1902), 252.
35. Ibid., 201. In addition to the ten pages on Parry, Fuller-Maitland devoted eight to Stanford and five to Mackenzie.
36. J.E.B., “Reviews: English Nineteenth Century Music,” Musical News 22 (19 April 1902): 378; Common Time, “Musical Gossip of the Month,” Musical Opinion 25 (April 1902): 510.
37. “Elgar, Sir Edward,” in J. A. Fuller-Maitland, ed., Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1904), 1:773–74.
38. Ibid., 774.
39. “Parry, Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Bart,” Grove 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1907), 3:625.
40. Charles Maclean, “Hubert Parry’s Latest Work,” Zeitschrift 4, no. 12 (September 1903): 676, 678.
41. Ibid.: 678–79.
42. “Parry and Elgar,” “Comments on Events,” Musical News 25 (26 September 1903): 255.
43. Herbert Thompson, “Gloucester,” “Notizien,” Zeitschrift 6, no. 1 (October 1904): 41–42. For a similar perspective see also E. A. Baughan, “The Gloucester Festival: The New Works,” Monthly Musical Record 34 (1904): 185–86.
44. C[harles] M[aclean], “Gloucester,” “Notizien,” Zeitschrift 6, no. 1 (October 1904): 43.
45. Quoted in Basil Maine, Elgar: His Life and Works (London: G. Bell, 1933), 2:278. While Dent’s comments seemingly passed unnoticed in the first edition of the Handbuch, they caused an outcry when the revised edition was published, even though, as Brian Trowell has pointed out, the two versions of the article were identical; see Trowell, “Elgar’s Use of Literature,” 183. An earlier accusation of vulgarity with a particularly Elgarian twist came from Francis Toye in an article entitled “Velgarity” [sic] that appeared in Vanity Fair shortly after the premiere of the Violin Concerto. Toye drew attention to the “torrents of snobbery, advertisement and flattery that now accompany the production of [Elgar’s] every new work,” and warned that “this untroubled enthusiasm is bound to produce a reaction sooner or later, and that the cause of Elgar is best served by a total abstention from ‘velgarity.’” Quoted in Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 594.
46. Elgar, A Future for English Music, 47.
47. C. Fred Kenyon, “The Destroyer of Genius,” Musical Opinion 24 (July 1901): 696. Kenyon wrote under the psuedonym “Gerald Cumberland.”
48. Maclean, “Hubert Parry’s Latest Work,” 680.
49. Common Time, “Musical Gossip of the Month,” Musical Opinion 26 (April 1903): 522–23. The author noted that the presence on the committee of Henry Hadow, and his closeness to the Royal College clique, raised questions about the committee’s professed impartiality.
50. “The Musical Season” in “Comments and Opinions,” The Musical Standard 65 (18 July 1903): 36.
51. Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life, 401; “‘Somewhere Farther North’: Echoes of the Morecambe Festival,” The Musical Times 44 (July 1903): 460.
52. “‘The Sleepy London Press’” in “Comments and Opinions,” The Musical Standard 65 (4 July 1903): 3.
53. See Hughes and Stradling, English Musical Renaissance, 66–74, and Elgar, A Future for English Music, 53, 284.
54. Fuller-Maitland, English Music in the Nineteenth Century, 185.
55. Maclean, “Gloucester,” 43; and “Hubert Parry’s Latest Work,” 679.
56. “There is an oddity at the core of Elgar’s music which does not lie in the line of beauty, but consummate skill in figuration and orchestration conceals this.” Charles Maclean, “Music in London,” Zeitschrift 2, no. 11 (August 1901): 401.
57. Alfred Kalisch, “Musikberichte: Birmingham,” Zeitschrift 5, no. 3 (December 1903): 132; Herbert Thompson, “The English Autumn Provincial Festivals,” Zeitschrift 5, no. 4 (January 1904): 176; R. J. Buckley, Sir Edward Elgar (London: John Lane, 1904), 80.
58. W. H. Hadow, “Some Tendencies in Modern Music,” The Edinburgh Review 204, no. 418 (1906): 397. Hadow is not identified as the author of the article in the Review itself but is in a review of the article by Charles Maclean in the Zeitschrift; see C[harles] M[aclean], “London,” “Notizien,” Zeitschrift 8, no. 3 (December 1906): 99.
59. Hadow, “Some Tendencies,” 398–99.
60. This allusion has some basis in fact. It was no accident that five “leaders” of the English musical renaissance were highlighted in English Music: Fuller-Maitland explicitly compared Parry and his colleagues favorably with the Moguchaya Kuchka (the Mighty Fire), claiming that there was “more stability in their aims” (186); similarly, Hadow saw the development of nationalism in Russian music as “the best of auguries for the further progress and development of our own”; see “Some Tendencies,” 396. The columnist Common Time of Musical Opinion argued that Elgar and Bantock were influenced by both Tchaikovsky and Wagner; see “Musical Gossip of the Month,” Musical Opinion 25 (December 1901): 190. Similarly, Charles L. Graves identified Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, and Wagner as influences on Elgar’s First Symphony; see Post-Victorian Music with Other Studies and Sketches (London: Macmillan, 1911), 39.
61. Hadow, Studies 1, 325.
62. This idealism prevailed outside the renaissance set, too. Ernest Newman, in his monograph of Elgar’s early works, Elgar (London: John Lane, 1906), ostentatiously avoids any discussion of nonmusical issues until the final chapter. Elgar’s admiration for Hanslick has been noted earlier.
63. Michael Kennedy, Portrait of Elgar, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 76.
64. J. H. G. B[aughan], “The Oratorio Musically Considered,” From the Concert Room, The Musical Standard 68 (18 February 1905): 100–101. The identity of this critic has caused some confusion. Jerrold Northrop Moore claims that J. H. G. B. was Percy Betts of the Daily News (a critic whom, like Baughan, Elgar described as a “pig”; see Moore, Elgar and His Publishers, 1:111), but this is incorrect: Percy Betts’s full name was Thomas Percival Milbourne, and he had died on August 27, 1904. See “Obituary: Mr. Percy Betts,” The Musical Times 45 (October 1904): 652. Rather, J. H. G. B. was J. H. G. Baughan (d. 1927), who succeeded his brother, the better-known E. A. Baughan, as editor of the Musical Standard in 1902, a post he held until June 1913. Baughan wrote regularly for other periodicals, and for the Daily Mail. See “Obituary: J. H. G. Baughan,” The Musical Times 69 (February 1928): 173.
65. J. H. G. B[aughan], “The Elgar Festival,” Some Events of the Week, The Musical Standard 66 (19 March 1904): 185; “Dr. Elgar’s ‘King Olaf,’” Some Events of the Week, The Musical Standard 66 (30 April 1904): 277.
66. “Ernest Newman on Elgar’s ‘The Apostles,’” Comments and Opinions, The Musical Standard 69 (23 September 1905): 192.
67. Common Time, “Musical Gossip of the Month,” Musical Opinion 27 (November 1903): 112.
68. Charles Maclean, London Notes, Zeitschrift 14, no. 3 (December 1912): 79.
69. Charles Maclean, “International Musical Supplement: Local,” Zeitschrift 10, no. 3 (December 1908): 64b. This was an editorial that though lacking any authorial attribution would have been written by Maclean. Charles Maclean, “Music in England,” Zeitschrift 1, no. 1–2 (October–November 1899): 16.
70. Charles Maclean, “Three Recent English Productions,” Zeitschrift 5, no. 9 (June 1904): 362; London Notes, Zeitschrift 14, no. 3 (December 1912): 79. The Crown of India Suite was “Elgar up to date, discarding early puerilities and uglinesses, and leaning on his own matured individuality.” “London Notes,” Zeitschrift 13, no. 7 (April 1912): 238. The praise for the First Symphony perhaps reflects that work’s apparently more conservative idiom (in comparison with, say, The Apostles): “At last. As on a surf-board coast a boat drifts backwards and forwards, then recoils, then suddenly on the crest of a high wave touches land, so with England in this case. In respect of the latest developments of highly charged emotional music her attitude has been indeterminate, baffling. Now at the hands of one of her own veritable sons, not those of an alien or a naturalized person, a work has been produced so absolutely up to date in every sense, of such commanding merit, and of such extraordinary and immediate success, that no one can doubt land has been touched, nay a definite territorial point in music-evolution has been annexed. All honour to Elgar, who has secured this for England.” “International Musical Supplement,” Local section, Zeitschrift 10, no. 3 (December 1908): 64a–64b. See also Thomson, “Elgar and Chivalry,” 266–67.
71. Maclean considered Parsifal to be blasphemous (“It is revolting to Christians, who know of but one Redeemer, to have a second mediaeval one staged”) and claimed that Tristan was “a glorification of that which all the rest of the world condemns; an offence against everyone who takes satisfaction in the fact that Aphrodite has no power over Athene goddess of the mind or Hestia goddess and guardian of the hearth.” But on another occasion he praised the music of Parsifal for “go[ing] on its majestic course in its own way, following the mood merely of the text, the words being fitted subsequently with consummate art into the stream of sound”. See C[harles] M[aclean], review of Ernest Newman, Wagner, “Music of the Masters” Series (London: Wellby, 1904); “Kritische Bücherschau,” Zeitschrift 6, no. 10 (July 1905): 443; Charles Maclean, “Music and Morals,” Zeitschrift 8, no. 12 (September 1907): 462; “London Notes,” Zeitschrift 13, no. 7: 238.
72. Charles Maclean, “‘La Princesse Osra’ and ‘Der Wald,’” Zeitschrift 3, no. 12 (September 1902): 487.
73. Charles Maclean, “London Notes,” Zeitschrift 15, no. 10–11 (July-August 1914): 295. Maclean advocated using ballad opera—a genre that was lyrical by its very nature—as the basis for developing a contemporary, consciously English operatic tradition. A composer whose work might be a model for this tradition, he suggested, was Mackenzie, as his style was “one of the most national … we have ever possessed” on account of its “fresh melody, complete individuality, and freedom from foreign models.” By “foreign” Maclean almost certainly meant German, since Mackenzie’s Colomba (1883), about which these remarks were made, owes much to Carmen in both its plot (which is based on a scenario by Merimee) and musical language. See Charles Maclean, “Mackenzie’s ‘Colomba,’” Zeitschrift 11, no. 5 (February 1910): 142–45.
74. For a further example of a critic who regarded Elgar’s approach to melody as unpatriotic, see George Lowe and Diogenes, “English Music: Two Views,” Musical Opinion 31 (December 1907): 179–81. According to the pseudonymous Diogenes, “In the place of clear straightforward understandable writing, we find vague heavy most un-English and uninspired phrases loosely and often incoherently strung together. ‘Musical mosaics’ never have been and never will be great music; and great music is what we want and what we must have if we are to be a musical nation” (180).
75. Ernest Walker, A History of Music in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 306.
76. Common Time, “Musical Gossip of the Month,” Musical Opinion 24 (July 1901): 683.
77. W[alter] B[ernhard], “My Note Book,” Musical Opinion 32 (February 1909): 245.
78. Charles Maclean, “On Some Tendencies of Form as Shown in the Most Modern Compositions,” Proceedings of the Musical Association 22 (1895–96): 153–81, 179.
79. C[harles] M[aclean], “London,” “Notizien,” Zeitschrift 7, no. 5 (February 1906): 204.
80. Maclean described him as the “greatest of living musicians” in “Music and Morals,” Zeitschrift 8, no. 12: 462. The more liberal Alfred Kalisch described him as “the greatest, if not the only great force in the music of to-day, and destined to have a permanent and prominent place in the history of music.” “Musikberichte,” London section, Zeitschrift 4, no. 10 (July 1903): 627.
81. “Teutonised France,” in “Comments on Events,” Musical News 24 (10 January 1903): 30.
82. “Musikberichte,” London section, Zeitschrift 4, no. 10 (July 1903): 631. Indeed, Maclean follows this quotation with a negative review of the London premiere of Gerontius at Westminster Cathedral on June 6, 1903.
83. Quoted in C[harles] M[aclean], “Musikberichte,” London section, Zeitschrift 6, no. 7 (April 1905): 294. See also “Richard Strauss’s Music,” in “Comments on Events,” Musical News 24 (18 April 1903): 363, for a report of a debate between the decadent poet Arthur Symons (in the Monthly Review) and Ernest Newman (in the Speaker) regarding the merits of Strauss’s orchestral music. Symons had argued that “Strauss has no fundamental musical ideas (ideas, that is, which are great as music apart from their significance to the understanding, their non-musical significance).” Newman defended the German composer.
84. E. A. Baughan, “The Gloucester Festival: The New Works,” 185. A similar point was made by E[dwin] E[vans, Sr.], “Comments and Opinions,” “The Elgar Festival: Second Evening,” The Musical Standard 66 (19 March 1904): 180.
85. Hadow, “Some Tendencies,” 393–94.
86. Thompson, “The English Autumn Provincial Festivals,” 176.
87. Quoted in “Notes on News,” Musical Opinion 28 (October 1904): 18; Charles L. Graves, “Elgar’s First Symphony” (2 January 1909), chap. 5 in Post-Victorian Music with Other Studies and Sketches, 38.
88. Walker, A History of Music in England, 306–7.
89. Byron Adams, “Elgar’s Later Oratorios,” in Cambridge Companion to Elgar, 81–105.
90. Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 2–5, quoted in Adams, “Elgar’s Later Oratorios,” 85.
91. Common Time, “Musical Gossip of the Month,” Musical Opinion 27 (November 1903): 112.
92. Charles Maclean, review of Hugo Riemann, Introduction to Playing from Score (London: Augener, 1905), “Kritische Bücherschau,” Zeitschrift 7, no. 7 (April 1906): 296.
93. F. J. Sawyer, “Modern Harmony: Exemplified in the Works of Elgar, Strauss and Debussy,” Musical Opinion 29 (August 1906): 816–17; Musical Opinion 30 (October 1906): 26.
94. Newman, Elgar, 80–81.
95. Hadow, “Some Tendencies,” 391–92.
96. Hadow, English Music, 158–59.
97. Italics added. The importance of “imagined communities” in modern nationalism has been identified by Benedict Anderson; see his Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso 1991).