Gustav Holst takes a cycling holiday in Algeria; Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, opens a grocery store in Pennsylvania; György Ligeti considers a move to Reigate; Edward Elgar takes a trip down the Amazon River. All true, if hard to believe, but the last of these is perhaps the strangest.
Elgar’s life is copiously documented, both in his correspondence and by his biographers, but his seemingly impromptu decision to sail to Brazil in the late autumn of 1923 is (or was, until the publication of Gerontius) little known, and features nowhere in his surviving letters. His friend W. H. Reed recalled in Elgar as I Knew Him that
he came back very full of his experiences; but the Amazon impressed him less than the fact that in South America … the opera house was the handsomest and most important building in the town … it was after this trip that he began to talk to me of opera and the possibility of his composing one.
The opera that he eventually began to work on intermittently in the 1930s, but never completed, was The Spanish Lady, after Ben Jonson. But it was an exception to the rule: Elgar had largely turned his back on the musical world after the death of his wife in 1920, and seemed to have little focus to his life. His daughter wrote that it was characteristic of him that he ‘could cheerfully spend hours over some perfectly unnecessary and entirely unremunerative undertaking’. The Amazon venture was probably no more than a way of passing the time.
In seizing on this lacuna in Elgar’s biography, James Hamilton-Paterson presents a convincing picture of a world-weary composer who professes no interest in music, either his own or anyone else’s. He is at pains, often to the point of rudeness, to disassociate himself from his fame; abhorring small talk, he has very little in common with his fellow passengers, and his main preoccupation during the voyage is the analysis of sea water through the microscopes he has brought with him. This bemuses the steward, Pyce, whose job it is to throw a bucket over the side of the ship to provide samples. ‘I think he’s mad,’ says Pyce to the Captain, one of the few on board with whom Elgar strikes up some kind of relationship; to his delight he is allowed to steer the ship for a few moments.
He does make some friends: a young artist, Molly Air (picking up on the pun, Elgar immediately offers to pass the marmalade imaginaire), is planning to stay in Brazil to paint tropical landscapes, and she has some success in penetrating the carapace that Elgar has built around himself: ‘I’m just bored beyond bearing that wherever I go people feel they’ve got to talk about music, music, music. Damn all music!’ To this outburst she replies, ‘That is probably the most childish thing I ever heard a grown man say,’ and sweeps off. Elgar grudgingly accepts that he has gone too far, and they are soon reconciled; their circle expands to include a young airman, Fortescue, who is hoping to make a career out of surveying the Amazon jungle. Other passengers come and go; two respectable, middle-aged ladies are revealed as professional card sharps; the eccentric ship’s doctor jumps overboard.
The unexpected coup de theâtre of the book takes place when the ship reaches its final destination, Manaos. James Hamilton-Paterson offers a hint of what he has contrived in his introduction, but it would not be fair to give away anything more. It is pure invention, and has no basis in fact. Yet it allows the author to dig more deeply into Elgar’s character than anywhere else in the book. We may think we have come to learn something of the gruff, bluff composer, but we know only the half of it. Elgar’s self-protective shell is punctured, and he finds it far from comfortable.
How true to life is this imagined picture of the composer? By the time that Gerontius first appeared, the long-held opinion of Elgar as old-fashioned, nationalistic and pompous, a much-decorated friend of royalty, had largely been dispelled. A closer reading of the music, and of the life, revealed instead a depressive, hypersensitive composer, something of a hypochondriac, aware of his worth but with a perpetual chip on his shoulder. He had married above himself – his wife Alice was a general’s daughter, whereas he came from ‘trade’ (his father was a piano tuner). As a Catholic he was an outsider twice over. He certainly accepted honours – they elevated his status, but it is unlikely that they meant anything much beyond that. In the journal which James Hamilton-Paterson invents for him, Elgar writes of ‘all those dratted honours of mine – those meaningless bits of gold and ribbon I pretended to covet for Alice’s sake’.
The imaginary journal feels completely authentic. Here he is complaining about his most famous tune:
curse every one of its bars … How I’ve come to detest the thing! You can’t joke with the public: they know nothing but what they do know is always enough to hang you. All my music has now shrunk to that single tune … [it has] become a perennial excuse for a national bellow.
Elgar was all his life prone to such negativity, even – perhaps especially so – at times of greatest success. In a letter written immediately after the completion of The Music Makers in 1912, at a time when he was at the height of his powers, his mood is one of utter despair:
I sent the last page to the printer … I wandered alone on to the heath – it was bitterly cold – I wrapped myself in a thick overcoat & sat for two minutes, tears streaming out of my cold eyes and loathed the world.
In the Gerontius journal, he picks up on the lack of success of this favourite among his own works, the most personal music that he ever wrote:
It’s better than anyone knows about the apartness of the artist but all they can find to say is that it is a pot-pourri of self-quotations, as if I’d run out of inspiration & concocted a potboiler from the scattered corpses of previous works … Oh bitter, bitter.
Bitterness surfaces from time to time in these pages, but mostly the mood is one of gentle melancholy – just like so much of the music, in fact. But there are moments when he rouses himself, and finds enjoyment in this unexpected trip. And all the while he reflects on his life, his achievements (or, in his eyes, the lack of them) and on the futility of music as a profession. In spite of which the sea inspires him to take out a sketchbook.
The music that Elgar sketches on the voyage is related to a strange dream that he has on the train journey to Liverpool, his port of embarkation. It is a dream of the desert and the hermit Simyun (better known to us as Simeon Stylites, the fifth century saint who lived for nearly forty years on a platform on top of a pillar). This enigmatic dream is fleetingly recalled throughout the book but never explained. And although Elgar is pleased with his sketch it will lead nowhere: the sketchbook accidentally accompanies his journal when he throws it into the sea on the way back home.
*
The lives of composers who have, to all intents and purposes, retired from composing make for disturbing reading. Biographies that have detailed the successes and failures of a flourishing career understandably run out of steam when there is so little to write about, and ten or more years may be compressed into a handful of pages where previously they would have occupied several chapters. So it is with Elgar, and also with his contemporary Sibelius.
The parallel with Sibelius’s last decades – he stopped composing not long after Elgar, but lived on until 1957 – and Elgar’s fading years is a striking one. Although their music has little in common – they were each probably only barely aware of the other’s achievements* – both had the same tendency to rail neurotically against fate and to rue the circumstances that had made them national figures, unable to play the roles expected of them. Both men retreated from the world; both worked fitfully on a final unachieved symphony; but whereas Sibelius destroyed his, Elgar only talked of doing so.
A novelist would find it difficult to make a narrative out of the bleak uneventfulness of Sibelius’s final thirty years. The life has turned into something akin to a black hole from which nothing of interest can emerge. Who would have imagined that anything could be made out of Elgar’s decline? Or that such an unpromising subject could reveal so much truth, and allow a story to be told with such insight and understanding?
Colin Matthews 2017
* They avoided each other when The Music Makers and the Fourth Symphony shared the same programme in Birmingham in 1912.