17/06/2024
The Importance of Elgar
Reflecting on all the musical aspects of Elgar for me, one factor is the sheer emotional impact of his music; not only what it means to me but its affect and effect on so very many listeners and the country in general.
That he touched the hearts of the Nation with Pomp and Circumstance and Ni**od is more than enough to demonstrate his importance for he gave us a release for deep feeling and emotion; a sense of occasion and security that we know. Ni**od is about a deep friendship that can only be expressed in crafted notes. I often say to players to play his pp for your own ear and your own emotion for it is not only a public expression but a personal connection with your inner self.
Elgar, like Berlioz, was largely self -taught. This seems to me to give him a freedom away from the academia of the Victorian ‘straight-jacket’, frankly rather obvious in his predecessors. He was not taught to uphold the principles of composition or even more importantly orchestration. He soaked up all he could by himself over years of experience in the ‘galley,’ learning a craft unique to him; informed, playable and totally practical which in itself gives joy to orchestral members and conductors. I feel in all the music of the World, there has never been someone so good at writing what to actually play and conduct. He was a genius. That is enough for me to extol his importance! I might add also to give that kick start in technique to all the composers who followed him in this country; Bax, Vaughan Williams, Holst etc. It gave them bravery in the use of voices and the orchestra.
We might perhaps overlook the importance of the climb from the background he had. To achieve what he did not least with a great lady’s support, Alice. Struggling 1898; Knighthood 1903! Having produced music the public loved and the establishment admired. That social and financial restriction in his musical apprenticeship in itself is an example now to ALL proving that you can come from no-where with certainly God given gifts, and achieve the heights of inspiration. A back ground in ‘social trade’; he found himself composing music with a love for the orchestra and the players and gave the lowest of the low second violins something far superior to play and enjoy compared to the previous fifty years!! As a conductor rarely do I depart from a marking or a dynamic; the violins never have to ‘cheat!
I believe a certain Austrian conductor called Elgar ‘third rate Brahms’. Contempt prior to investigation! For his use of form is important and trail blazing even if the works of 1900 and 1910 do not have the discord or growing rhythmic complexity although from 1912 onwards there is a melodic chromaticism that pervades the scores as if Debussy had crossed the channel in a boat with Schoenberg. Yes, the sound is rich and grand in the symphonies but in the Second itself he is expressing the passing of a golden age never to return after the cruel sparsity of the War. The works during and after the conflict see the texture paired down to the barest minimum for instance in the Cello Concerto. Perhaps we have come to realise, unlike those critics in the 40’s to the 60’s, that this ‘old fashioned’ form and deep feeling is something much more important for us to nurture and come to love.
But it is important to recognise that the form of the music is, for all it being symphony and concerto, original. Space is limited here to celebrate this but the form of the A Flat symphony with the use of its motto carefully crafted and not contrived is astonishing. The two middle movements, linked as they are in material where the quickest quixotic notes become the most eloquent Adagio is totally beautiful and original. The fact that a cadenza in a violin concerto is not a display cabinet in the first movement but becomes a most moving rumination of all the themes emotionally sorting ‘himself out’ as the quiet climax to the work.
The Second Symphony that has four movements in such different metres; the first movement’s swinging energy is like a finale; a four-square march’ a triple time double scherzo with pastoral interludes and a natural transition to the foreboding first heard in movement one; and a finale that with its pace and grandeur in steady triple time can augment so easily the fast triplets of the first movement portraying the golden sunset of an era. So, the energy and delight of movement one to the disintegration of delight of movement four, becomes the actual narration of the work
The Cello Concerto in unusually four movements, giving time for display, an elegy and a chromatic searching finale. Just a few masterpieces and there are more! Inspired and Important to prove we weren’t the Land without Music!
Finally, the importance of his recordings. Was there a better conductor of his own and others compositions? Strauss yes orchestrally but we have little idea of his operatic interpretation. Elgar, often in pre-electric as well, recorded so much of his music and well! Most works; sadly, not Introduction and Allegro. Under a very ‘knowing baton’ he gave us ‘his way’ with the music. Nervous, quick, balanced and structured and for us, a foil to an expansionist Barbirolli and perhaps a steadier Boult. An encyclopaedia and not least an insight into the standards and improvement of orchestral playing over those years. Compare the LSO of 1929 to the new LPO in the Froissart Overture.
Elgar is a part of my life I could not be without. With his notes I feel I know him. He is important for he makes me feel with his scores I can know him and share his sadness, frustrations of acceptance and his spiritual triumph that I hear so deeply at the end of The Apostles. For me that ending so well composed, built up overwhelming in its passion and grandeur, makes every note I conduct to all my audiences an evangelistic belief in the importance of this great man.
Adrian Brown February 2024
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