The Edwardian age was prosperous; Britain,
a great nation, was secure, wealthy,
self-confident and unassailable, at
least to all outward appearances. By
the end of the first decade of the century
however, central European life and culture
was in a ferment with feint but already
ominous signs of political upheaval
and revolutionary ideas in intellectual
circles. The psychoanalytical insights
offered by Freud were reflected in the
surrealist arts; the lid of Pandora’s
box being lifted was never to close
again. But England seemed secure from
all this, safe in its isolation, protected
by its sea-wall and the Royal Navy.
Not so on the continent where music
could hardly remain untouched by such
fundamental stirrings in society. Strauss
and Mahler proclaimed, if in Mahler’s
case somewhat unintentionally, the growing
stature of Austro-German artistic and
politico-philosophy. Only in far-off
Scandinavia was there really a dissident
voice: that of Sibelius, whose Fourth
Symphony written in 1911, turned his
back on the "cocktails of every
hue and colour" perpetrated by
the central European composers with
their outrageous excesses, and offered
instead "pure cold water".
Nonetheless Sibelius in his own way
commented on the decadence of things
in this stark, perplexing symphony,
now oddly enough, seen to have an unlikely
parallel with a composer not to gain
wide recognition for another fifty years
or so: Anton Webern.
Elgar, on the other
hand while not showing any evidence
of being influenced by Mahler - still
at the time virtually unknown in England
- was a stalwart champion of Richard
Strauss. It was after all Strauss who
hailed Elgar as the "first English
progressive composer". Elgar’s
own melodic invention, contemporary
harmonic idiom, Wagnerian development
of ‘leitmotif’ (or leading-theme), but
most of all thoroughly up-to-date manner
of virtuoso orchestration had been inestimably
influenced by Strauss; his last great
orchestral score ("Falstaff"
- 1913) was said to have been modelled
on Strauss’s "Ein Heldenleben",
Elgar came late to the notion of the
symphony. In spite of the early success
with the "Engima" Variations,
his work up to this point had largely
and inevitably been concerned with the
great choral tradition of English music,
"The Dream of Gerontius",
"The Apostles", and "The
Kingdom" being the means of achieving
worldwide recognition.
In 1908 however,
appeared the First Symphony in A-flat,
dedicated to Hans Richter and first
performed by the Hallé Orchestra
in Manchester on 3rd December. Elgar
had said there was no specific meaning
behind it "beyond a wide experience
of human life … and a massive hope for
the future". It seemed to epitomise
the ideals of Edwardian England; its
opening solemn march theme in many moods:
calm, reflective, consoling, foreboding,
eventually triumphant. The symphony
was a huge success from the very beginning
and won universal acclaim.
Less than
three years later, on 24th May 1911,
the year of Mahler’s death and Sibelius’s
Fourth Symphony, the Second Symphony
of Elgar had its first performance at
the Queen’s Hall, London, with the composer
conducting the 130-strong Queen’s Hall
Orchestra. It was a dispiriting occasion,
the audience being very small and unexpectedly
cool in its reception. Elgar was hurt
and remembered it with bitterness even
twenty years later. Now, however, there
is not the slightest doubt about its
stature and importance in the history
of British music. It is dedicated to
the memory of King Edward VII, who had
died while the work was in the early
stage of composition. Its spiritual
essence lies in the quotation from Shelley
which heads the score: .... ‘Rarely,
rarely comest thou, Spirit of Delight!’...
though many listeners have been puzzled
to know which way to take this: it depends
on one’s personal attitude towards Elgar’s
music and the age it symbolises.
It
begins with a magnificent, flamboyant
gesture: supremely confident, imperial,
noble and lofty in sentiment. As with
the First Symphony though, there are
undertones of self-doubt, conflict,
insecurity and immense yearning. An
episode in the first movement, an intense
singing tune played by the cellos has
a sinister quality which Elgar described
as a "sort of malign influence
wandering through the summer night in
the garden", and - to those old
enough to remember the summer of 1939
- so acutely seemed to recapture this
mood just before the outbreak of a second
world conflict, as indeed it might well
have invoked in Elgar a similar premonition
of what was so soon to come after 1911.
The second movement is a massive funeral
march, said to have been occasioned
by the untimely death of Alfred Rodewald,
the Liverpool business-man and very
accomplished amateur conductor who had
been one of Elgar’s staunchest friends
and source of encouragement. This march,
however, has all the panoply of state
mourning, bringing before one’s inner
vision the picture of London and the
funeral of the King himself. It is interesting
to compare this with the not dissimilar
funeral march, the opening movement
of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, alike in
essentials of funeral solemnity but
so different in national character.
With Elgar there is a "smiling
through the tears" dignity and
consolation absent from the frenzied
agony of Mahler’s more forceful utterance.
The scherzo is buoyant, but of nervous
energy and its central episode is a
soul-searching return to the "malign
influence in the garden" from the
first movement, now presented in a fearful,
awe-inspiring and utterly overwhelming
nightmare: Elgar said it was the "horrible
throbbing in the head of some violent
fever" - as if one were being trampled
underfoot by the thunderous hooves of
horses charging into battle. It could
also be the pounding, inexorable rhythm
of a train bearing down on one in the
dark such as is recalled by Alfred Noyes:
… "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"
… Thus the twentieth century with its
threat of war-like machines might also
have been an unconscious awareness in
Elgar’s creative imagination.
The last
movement returns to a more self-assured,
almost complacent, theme. This is developed
at length, sometimes with rather too
much repetition and a deal of Elgar’s
undue obsession with sequential patterns.
The ending promises to be grandiloquent,
an apotheosis re-affirming greatness
perhaps, but slowly the realisation
dawns on the listener that it is not
to be. Instead it ends calmly and reflectively,
but assuredly for all that, like some
radiant sunset, with the promise of
a fine day tomorrow? The true essence
of this ending however was perhaps never
more eloquently expressed than by the
late John Barbirolli, who - from personal
experience of the time, no doubt - quoted
the famous saying by Viscount Grey of
Falloden who, on the evening of 3rd
August 1914 when war was imminent, said:
... "The lights are going out all
over Europe, we shall not see them lit
again in our lifetime". Thus, the
symphony, as it were, marked the closing
of an era.
Arthur Butterworth
Arthur
Butterworth Writes
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Butterworth web-site
