THOUGHTS ON ELGAR'S 149th BIRTHDAY
- Arthur Butterworth
It is now Friday afternoon,
2 June 2006. This is the 149th anniversary
of the birth of Elgar: 2 June 1857,
so perhaps an occasion to contemplate
so many things concerning him, his music
and other inter-connected aspects of
the English tradition.
In the late 1980s we
did not move in the same musical or
social orbit, so the programme note
from the Huddersfield Philharmonic will
be new to you. At that time it had begun
to fall to my lot to provide the notes
for the concerts. This was something
congenial since it gave me an opportunity
to contemplate and re-consider my own
attitudes towards all these musico-historical
things. Hence this programme note.
It had always struck
me that the period around 1910, or perhaps
even the whole decade before had seen
the beginning of a new outlook in Europe:
that peculiar, feintly uncomfortable
awareness of the psychoanalytical things
being discovered by Freud, Jung and
Adler in that hot-bed of intellectual
ferment centred around Vienna.
One of the most significant
figures of course, was Mahler, whose
music seems - even now - the most cogent
musical expression of those times and
that place. But England was somewhat,
complacently isolated from all this;
after all it had the Royal Navy. Further
north, the Scandinavians, not least
Carl Nielsen in Denmark and even more
so Sibelius in Finland, were similarly
isolated from Vienna and the mid-European
ways of looking at things, although
Sibelius himself had been to Vienna
and had even thought that somehow he
might pursue a career as a violinist.
For a time is said to have played -
as a rank and file player - in the Vienna
Philharmonic, but ultimately his path
was to be a composer not a performer.
So how does all this
compare with Elgar and the English tradition.
Sir Hubert Parry and Sir Charles Stanford
were still leading lights in the realms
of English music, but Elgar was quickly
overshadowing them both. The programme
note comments on all this.
However, it is what
all this early twentieth century musico-social
history has meant to a later generation
that is probably worth contemplating.
It has certainly given me much to think
about when comparing my own experiences:
especially that awakening period of
youth: 1939 - that anxious yet peculiarly
ecstatic summer. More recently I have
read again the novel by Mary Wesley
"The Camomile Lawn" having
earlier seen it as a television serial
and read the book before. To me this
novel in a most uncanny way has a parallel
with my own holiday experience in Devon
in those weeks before the war broke
out. One very particular incident stands
out, which was to be paralleled in a
similar way some eleven years later,
in 1950.
One throbbing, warm
August evening, with the air so mild,
filled with moths, other insects and
that satisfying glow that comes at dusk
after a perfect summer day, I chanced
to be standing at a railway level crossing
at Paignton on the line between Torquay
and Kingswear. The evening train from
Paddington came through at a fair speed,
as the small crowd awaited at the level
crossing barrier. We all looked up as
the train steamed through with great
noise and smoke; the lights of the carriages
all aglow with holiday-makers newly
on their way to Kingswear. The thought
struck me: I wonder who all those people
are? what kind of lives do they lead?
There were some pretty girlish faces
at the window, but all too soon they
were gone in a flash and only the rear
red light of the last carriage disappeared
in the gathering darkness.
A day or two later
I witnessed an astonishing sight in
Torbay: a whole squadron of the Royal
Navy: two battle-ships, cruisers, destroyers
and frigates, probably thirty or more
vessels slowly steaming up from the
south-west. Everyone paused to look
at this marvellous sight, children playing
on the sands, old people in deck-chairs,
couples walking on the promenade; we
all stopped and gazed out to sea. It
was marvellous, yet disquieting and
alarming; for we knew all too well that
the war was imminent, and that in a
sense we were living an artificial life
of care-free pleasure. Within a couple
of weeks it came, and life took on a
different complexion altogether.
Years later, the war
having been over for five years or so,
I stood on a similar railway platform
one quiet, mild early September evening.
This time it was at Miller’s Dale in
Derbyshire. There was ever such a feint
drizzle, intermittent, and not unpleasant.
I stood on this quiet railway platform
that Sunday evening, waiting for the
London-Manchester train. In the bay-platform
was the local Buxton-Miller’s Dale two-coach
train with its tank engine quietly simmering
as it waited until the main-line train
had gone. I stood by the engine and
enjoyed the pleasant warmth from its
boiler; the rain just occasionally sizzling
on the warm engine. The crew were local
men, content just to wait, read the
paper and occasionally open the fire-box
door to shovel on a little more coal
to keep up the steam pressure; a pleasant
scene. I was struck by the similarity
to that occasion at Paignton in 1939,
especially as when the hurrying London-Manchester
train came in there was the same experience
of seeing the brightly-lit carriage
windows, with the faces blurred by the
rain-wetted glass.
Some time after this,
I wrote a work for a choral society;
"Trains in the Distance" and
one of the poems I chose was by Alfred
Noyes. This poem seemed to encapsulate
all my own feelings about these earlier
experiences, and yet to point to a parallel
with what seemed to be expressed in
Elgar’s Second Symphony - most especially
that awe-inspiring scherzo - which to
me seemed the very musical expression
of a vast, overwhelming train bearing
down upon one. There is always a feeling
of apprehension standing near level
crossing gates - when a main-line express
thunders through just a few feet away.
So a variety of different, yet curiously
connected experiences seem to have elucidated
the Musical "meaning" of Elgar’s
symphony.
The programme note
I wrote in 1988 tries to illuminate
all that I have felt about the symphony
and how it has - rather uncannily -
seemed to have a parallel with my own
musical feelings:-
--------------------------------------------------------
"On a Railway
Platform - Alfred Noyes
"A drizzle of drifting
rain and a blurred white lamp overhead
That shines as my love will shine again
in the world of the dead.
Round me the wet, black night and, afar
in the limitless gloom,
Crimson and green, two blossoms of light,
two stars of doom.
But the night of death is aflare with
a torch of back-blown fire,
And the coal-black deeps of the quivering
air rend for my soul’s desire.
Leap, heart, for the pulse and the roar,
and the lights of the streaming train.
That leaps with the heart of thy love
once more out of the mist and the rain.
Out of the desolate years the thundering
pageant flows:
But I see no more than a window of tears
which her face has turned to a rose.
These lines by Alfred
Noyes (1880-1958): "Leap, heart,
for the pulse and the roar ..."
seem to me to be an exact, verbal counterpart
of the passage in the scherzo of Elgar’s
Second Symphony: 3rd bar after figure
121 (page 118 of the full score) at
the huge, overwhelming climax of the
movement.
Naturally, these are
only subjective thoughts, others may
see this passage quite differently,
but this is how vivid it has always
appeared to my mind
Arthur Butterworth
