ARTS RICK JONES ELGAR VARIATIONS
This composer of stirring imperial marches has in recent times been tainted by his association with the Emire. A new documentary, however, examines a spirituality and fallibility in his works that speaks to a new generation of audiences
B
ecause artists, as a rule, react against the generation immedi- ately preceding them, decades may pass before the true worth of
a particular individual’s oeuvre is realised. This is as it should be, of course; there would be no progress if we all were satisfied with our progenitors’ efforts. In the case of the composer Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934), how- ever, we have had to wait for the monuments of Empire to be forgotten before the real person, with all his frailties, deceptions and contradictions, could emerge. For many years, it was not possible to hear any of Sir Edward’s works without the spectre of the lofty Establishment brooding in the background. Elgar himself is partly to blame for this: with his dapper tailoring and bushy, patrician facial hair, he cultivated an image of confi- dence, ease and gentility and consciously and purposely allied his reputation with that of the imperial past. He loved being photo - graphed. Yet the first clues to a more fragile sensibility were already apparent in his faltering Catholic faith, a fact re-emphasised to latter-day audiences in recent centenary performances and recordings of, as well as publications about, his oratorios The Apostles (1903) and The Kingdom (1906). These were the first two parts of a projected trilogy on the history of the early Church, conceived using Wagner-style leitmotifs and planned for performance on consecutive days like the Ring cycle. Part III never materialised and Elgar several times nearly abandoned Part II for, at his own admission, a lack of conviction. His wife, Alice, encouraged him, forcibly it seems, to press on until one of his more sublime creations emerged, an intricate web of themes borrowed from the “O sacrum convivium” plainsong, in which, even so, the passages dealing with human failings – the remorse section of the Prelude, the arrest of Peter and John after Pentecost – are the most compelling. This fallible, emotional, calculating side of Elgar’s character is the subject of a remarkable new BBC Four TV film, Elgar: The Music
Maker, directed by John Bridcut, to be shown on Friday 12 November. It begins with touch- ing, grainy footage of the elderly composer, aware that his music was already tainted by association, enjoining an orchestra to play a Pomp and Circumstance March as if it were a fresh piece of music they had never heard before. The patriotic words had been imposed by others, rendering it almost unexportable as music. Indeed, for many years, it seemed that Elgar was unperformable abroad, so apparently English was his idiom. Bridcut leaves it to the Russian Vladimir Ashkenazy to insist that Elgar’sLand of Hope and Glory theme has an emotional power which com- municates with audiences on a much higher plane than the mere parochial. In fact, Ashkenazy makes his claim while listening to the music he is describing. Bridcut employs this technique several times in the film: his pundits listen and emote. We watch them listening. This is supposed to be death to a documentary, but it works. After all, we are listening, too, and when Bridcut’s subjects speak over the recordings, they do so sparely, spontaneously and in response to the music. Pianist David Owen Norris’ minimal, watery- eyed observations on the opening bars of Elgar’s First Symphony are unrehearsed, as are critic Michael Kennedy’s on the beautiful strings-only piece Sospiriand conductor Mark Elder’s astonished reaction to the haunting, little-known part-song “Owls”, a setting of the composer’s own extraordinary text. These scenes alone make this an extremely moving documentary, a genuine work of art in itself. But more than this, Bridcut succeeds in having us hear both the known and unknown works as if for the first time, which, with such emblematic scores as Elgar’s, is a considerable achievement. One is struck by the youth of some of the
speakers. A twenty-first-century generation now understands the man and his music. Natalia Luis-Bassa, a 34-year-old Venezuelan conductor, talks us through the three climactic cadences of “Nimrod” in the Enigma Variations and reports that she has tears not of sadness
Sir Edward Elgar depicted in bronze at the Elgar Birthplace Museum in Lower Broadheath, Worcestershire
but of emotion. She tells us too of the excite- ment of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra players as they read through the Second Symphony for the first time. Edward Gardner, 36-year-old music director of English National Opera, half-smiles connivingly as he lets us into the secrets of the 1912 summary oratorio The Music Makers. His admiration for the composer who made Judas the focus of the oratorio The Apostles is palpable and he holds us spellbound as he conducts the crowd- chorus confronting the 30-shekel traitor who is himself braving his own self-inflicted end. Suicide was a recurrent horror feeding Elgar’s bouts of depression. He confessed to an urge to end his own life after the disastrous premiere of the Dream of Gerontius in 1900. James Burton, 35-year-old conductor of Schola Cantorum, recent winners of the GramophoneChoral Award for their account of Elgar’s setting of Cardinal Newman’s epic poem, zealously demonstrates Elgar’s blazing originality at the revelation of God in that work. Bridcut’s lighting accentuates the seri- ous demeanours of the youthful choir and it is they who sing “Owls” as well as other self- revealing part-songs, such as “Deep in my Soul” and “Love’s Tempest”. Not content with being a mere documen-
tary, Bridcut’s film also has a striking and unexpected conclusion, just as Elgar enjoyed a final, harmonious and improbable love affair in the last two years of his life after a decade of guilt about his own marriage. There were other passions too – one in particular, Alice Stuart-Wortley aka “The Windflower”, who inspired several of his works – but it was the 20-year-old violinist Vera Hockman who cap- tivated the 75-year-old at last. She understood him, it seemed, a generation or two adrift. We proceed by leapfrogging. It is not the chil- dren who carry forward the baton, but the grandchildren. How new his music suddenly seems. Are we on the verge of an Elgar revival?
6 November 2010 | THE TABLET | 27
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