Edward Elgar: Music, Life and Landscapes

By Christopher Grogan

The first full-length study of the English composer’s complex interaction with his physical environment, and its new relevance in the 21st century.

More perhaps than any other composer, Edward Elgar (1857-1934) has gained the status of an “icon of locality,” his music seemingly inextricably linked to the English landscape in which he worked. This, the first full-length study of Elgar’s complex interaction with his physical environment, explores how it is that such associations are formed and whether it is in any sense true that Elgar alchemized landscape into music.

It argues that Elgar stands at the apex of an English tradition, going back to Blake, in which creative artists in all media have identified and warned against the self-harm of environmental degradation and that, following a period in which these ideas were swept away by the swift but shallow tide of Modernism in the decades after the First World War, they have since resurfaced with a new relevance and urgency for twenty-first century society.

Written with the non-specialist in mind, yet drawing on the rich resources of post-millennial scholarship on Elgar, as well as geographical studies of place, the book also includes many new insights relating to such aspects of Elgar’s output as his use of landscape typology in The Apostles, and his encounter with Modernism in the late chamber music. It also calls on the resources of contemporary social commentary, poetry and, especially, English landscape art to place Elgar and his thought in the broader cultural milieu of his time. A survey of recent recordings is included, in the hope that listeners, both familiar and unfamiliar with Elgar’s music, will feel inspired to embark on a voyage of (re)discovery of its endlessly rewarding treasures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526764638

Book preview

Prelude

… he has that peculiar kind of beauty which gives us, his countrymen, a sense of something familiar – the intimate and personal beauty of our own fields and lanes … When hearing such music as this we are no longer critical or analytical, but passively receptive. It falls to the lot of very few composers, and to them not often, to achieve this bond of unity with their countrymen.¹

When Elgar’s Cello Concerto reached my young ears fifty years ago across the seas, it transfixed me with its power to project a landscape I did not know. When knowledge came of Worcestershire, Elgar’s projection proved strangely accurate. How could music do that?²

I still remember the first time I heard [Elgar’s Violin Concerto] and how much it reminded me of the landscape, the colour, the image of England. It is always very emotional for me to perform this piece … as all the precious memories of my time in England come flooding back.³

As these three diverse quotations amply illustrate, Edward Elgar’s music has, since his death in 1934, become inextricably linked to an enduring popular cultural vision of the English rural landscape and in particular that of the Malvern Hills and the borderlands of Worcestershire and Herefordshire.

Although he never incorporated an English folk tune into his music (indeed, he disliked the practice and memorably asserted that ‘I write the folk songs of this country’), did not employ the imitative techniques of ‘nature painting’ used by some of his contemporaries and rarely gave his music topographically precise titles derived from English place-names, his distinctive sound world has become deeply associated with (and has been appropriated by advocates and promoters of) a pastoral idyll that, although highly selective and idealistic, is now a touchstone of cultural identity for the English. Of all British composers, he alone has achieved the status of an ‘icon of locality’;⁴ as Matthew Riley remarks, ‘British radio and television producers are more likely to reach for Elgar than any other composer when they wish to evoke a comforting vision of the English countryside’.⁵ Elgar, like the first-century British chieftain Caractacus⁶ before him, has become an integral element of the ‘spirit of place’ of the Malvern Hills, however each individual chooses to define that ambiguous and slippery term in contemporary culture. As Michael Bell has noted, a ‘common feature of the experience of place is the sense of the presence of those who are not physically there’,⁷ and Elgar’s presence undoubtedly accompanies those who walk those hills, as he himself predicted on his deathbed that it would. The architect Christian Norberg-Schulz has suggested that ‘places’ can be defined as the ‘spaces where life occurs … a place is a space which has a distinct character.’ Elgar’s music is one element that transforms the Malverns from space to place in the experience of its visitors.⁸

The Malvern Hills. (Photograph: Rex Harris)

The excerpts above (and many others might have served as appropriately) are from three types of commentator on whom Elgar’s ‘Englishness’ has had an impact, from three successive generations. The earliest is from a fellow Englishman, and more importantly, a fellow composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, who penned his tribute soon after Elgar’s death as a way of expressing the debt he believed English music owed to the older composer. Its key messages are that Elgar achieved ‘beauty’, and that it was possible to identify tangible qualities in Elgar’s music that identified him as a quintessentially English figure. In the world of the 1930s, at the height of Modernism, when such subjective musical signification was frowned upon (especially by the younger generation of composers and critics), these were brave positions for a prominent musician to hold. The second excerpt comes from the most prolific of Elgar’s modern biographers, the American Jerrold Northrop Moore, who fell in love with Elgar’s music in the 1950s. That Moore could hear Worcestershire in the music, although he had never visited it, and then have his imaginative vision confirmed when he eventually crossed the Atlantic, raises important questions regarding the evocative and metaphorical powers of music. The third, most recent, quotation is from the violinist Ning Feng, who studied in England, but learnt Elgar’s Violin Concerto in his native China and recorded it in 2018. For him, the power of the music lies in its ability to unlock his memories and love of his time in England. Memory in music is most commonly articulated through self-reference (the adapted reoccurrence of themes or tonalities either within or across works, both techniques that Elgar deployed effectively); but Ning Feng’s activated memories are not of a piece of music but something much wider – a country, its landscape and its culture.

Elgar was undoubtedly a musician who fed off the landscape and for whom a sense of place and ‘home’ was a definition of his identity and a motivating creative force. He often referred to its importance as inspiration. In 1896 he told an interviewer, ‘My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us and – you – simply – simply take as much as you require’. During the writing of Caractacus, the work most evocative of his beloved Malvern Hills, he sent a snippet of music to his publisher with the note, ‘This is what I hear all day – the trees are singing my music – or have I sung theirs?’. Twenty years later, his Piano Quintet was influenced by the images of supposedly haunted trees near his wartime retreat at ‘Brinkwells’ in Sussex, and, while rehearsing the First Symphony later in life, he asked the orchestra to play one passage ‘like something you hear down by the river’. Most significant in this regard are the memories he reshaped and shared with his friend Sidney Colvin in 1920:

I am still at heart the dreamy child who used to be found in the reeds by Severn side with a sheet of paper trying to fix the sounds and longing for something very great – source, texture and all else unknown. I am still looking for This …

Taking these verbal cues as its starting point, this book explores the connection between music and landscape in Elgar’s life and work from his earliest boyhood experiences, some of which were transformed into the Wand of Youth suites, through to his final extended score, the outwardly similar Nursery Suite. It addresses Elgar’s creative response to landscape and place, how that response alchemised into music and the vexed question of how associations of Englishness became so vital and tangible in the fabric of his music that they could be heard by both those that share his nationality and many others who had no first-hand knowledge of England at all. It should be emphasised that this study is not an attempt to find a single, definitive ‘solution’ to this puzzle. Since the composer’s death, a multitude of different, sometimes conflicting, theories have been put forward and it is perhaps most honest to declare from the start that, underneath the sometimes persuasive streams of verbiage and metaphor, this is almost certainly a quest without a Grail.

There is great value, nevertheless, in exploring the various stages of Elgar’s life, during which he was exposed to different landscapes, and examining the music he composed under its inspiration. To make the search as fruitful as possible, the book presents a collection of case studies of works to the creation of which an immersion in landscape seems to have been particularly important to Elgar. Although there may be no single moment of epiphany, this approach hopes to shed some light on the central conundrum by approaching it from a wide variety of angles. Although each section is designed to be self-standing, a number of threads emerge repeatedly which the concluding Postlude draws together, going on to argue that Elgar’s unique transmutation into music of his interaction with landscape constitutes a body of work that remains urgently relevant to listeners today, in an age of environmental collapse and climate uncertainty.

The book does not attempt a comprehensive survey either of Elgar’s life or his music. Many significant works, such as the ‘Enigma’ Variations and The Dream of Gerontius, are not explored in detail, not because they are deemed in any way insignificant, but conversely because they open up new areas of investigation that the scope of this book precludes. The Variations are a key to the inner landscapes of Elgar’s psyche, laid out across the years by this most subjective and autobiographical of composers, while The Dream of Gerontius creates a spiritual landscape conceived so broadly and deeply that it is, as the critic Arthur Johnstone astutely noted when the work was still new, utterly ‘remote’ from anything written before it. The ‘chivalric’ landscapes of Froissart, The Banner of Saint George and Arthur are also passed over, as not quite conforming to the definition of ‘landscape’ in the context of which this book proceeds. Nor can the book attempt to map the entirety of the global landscape that Elgar was exposed to during his lifetime.

The history of Elgar reception carries with it a great deal of baggage, much of which has been painstakingly divested over the past twenty years by a renaissance of scholarship and critical reappraisal. This book, aimed at a non-specialist readership, attempts to distil a portion of this scholarly insight into an accessible narrative that may play a part, together with the recent high-profile efforts of conductors like Daniel Barenboim, to slay once and for all some mythical dragons: that Elgar’s music is enervatingly nostalgic, conservative, bombastic and, perhaps most pernicious of all, only for English ears. As was universally acknowledged prior to the cultural earthquake of the First World War, Elgar is quite simply a late Romantic/early Modernist (depending on the viewpoint) composer par excellence, who stands alongside Mahler, Strauss, Sibelius, Nielsen and Debussy at the summit of musical accomplishment in the decades he was active.

That said, neither does the book attempt to liberate Elgar from the English landscape. The distinctively Finnish sound world of Jean Sibelius’s symphonies has not impeded enjoyment of these great works across the world, while the touches of local colour in Gustav Mahler’s symphonies (folk inflections, Alphorns and bells, for example) have been happily embraced by international audiences. As the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler noted in the 1930s, ‘there has never been music which does not have the nation as its source’.⁹ Rather than downplaying Elgar’s national origins, therefore, this book draws on recent literature that has opened new doors into an understanding of how music both shapes and is shaped by local environments, by exploring how works can be ‘placed’ in the geography around them, and the processes by which this identification can be embedded in the fabrics of the works themselves. From such studies have emerged new explanations of music, and other ‘social and cultural phenomena in relation to various human, institutional and natural geographies’.¹⁰ It is hoped that these new insights will encourage listeners to return to a wealth of much-loved but, in some cases, almost over familiar repertoire, and gain from it a fresh perspective, deeper insight and fresh enjoyment. Writing this book has made me listen to Elgar’s extraordinary music with new ears; if it succeeds in getting its readers to do the same, then it will have done its job.

Landscapes of Victorian Art and Music

‘As I watch [the world]’, wrote Nan Shepherd in 1945, ‘it arches its back, and each layer of landscape bristles’. It is a brilliant observation about observation. Shepherd knew that ‘landscape’ is not something to be viewed and appraised from a distance, as if it were a panel in a frieze or a canvas in a frame. It is not the passive object of our gaze, but rather a volatile participant – a fellow subject which arches and bristles at us, bristles into us … it is dynamic and commotion causing, it sculpts and shapes us not only over the courses of our lives but also instant by instant, incident by incident. I prefer to take ‘landscape’ as a collective term for the temperature and pressure of the air, the fall of light and its rebounds, the textures and surfaces of rock, soil and building, the sounds, the scents and uncountable other transitory phenomena and atmospheres that together comprise the bristling presence of a particular place at a particular moment.’¹

Before attempting to determine how the English landscape drew such a recognizable creative response from Elgar, it seems prudent first to establish an understanding of ‘landscape’ and to explore the cultural context and associations to which Elgar belongs, especially with regard to Victorian painting, perhaps the most dominant expression of the English landscape and one to which Elgar’s music is inextricably linked. Indeed, as Tim Barringer has argued:

Elgar’s musical score, his writings, and the performance of his own artistic identity are imbricated with ideas of space, place and associations that are profoundly visual in origin … for Elgar, landscape was mediated by the visual, enculturated in landscape painting and other such forms of representation, prior to the composer’s response to it in music.²

‘Land’ is simply terra firma. It is not defined by humanity’s presence upon, or perception of, it. The arrangement of ‘land’ into ‘landscape’, however, is an act of human intervention, whether physical or imaginative, or both. It is, as Simon Schama has observed, ‘our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape’:

The word itself tells us as much. It entered the English language, along with herring and bleached linen, as a Dutch import at the end of the sixteenth century. And landschap, like its Germanic root, Landschaft, signified a unit of human occupation, indeed a jurisdiction, as much as anything that might be a pleasing object of depiction.³

Humans create landscape not for aesthetic reasons but for the purposes of subsistence and the demands of economics. Thus primaeval forests make way for fields, hills are quarried, rivers re-routed and roads and railways laid down. Cities are built, serviced by transmission towers, electricity pylons and, most recently, wind turbines. Any land that remains untouched survives only because it is difficult to adapt to satisfy human needs and hence the profit motive. The Lake District, an area that retained until the twentieth century some of the aura of untampered wildness that the Romantic poets sought and found there, did so because it was unsuitable for pasture, arable farming, or industry and the building of settlements. Ironically, the Romantics, in popularising these landscapes, brought to them the mixed blessings of tourism; in consequence, these swathes of land too have taken their place as landscapes managed for enjoyment and profit. As early as 1818, John Keats found the Lake District fatally compromised by contact with ‘the miasma of London’, a flood of tourists having been drawn there by the presence of William Wordsworth.

The second level of human intervention is at the imaginative level. Whether or not a landscape is ever interpreted as a work of art, it is, as Malcolm Andrews has said, ‘already artifice … Even when we simply look we are already shaping and interpreting … whether or not we are artists, we have been making this kind of mental conversion for centuries. The habit is part of the whole history of our relationship with the physical environment.’⁴ For landscape to be reimagined and turned into ‘art’, there follows a second stage of the process of human intervention. To begin with, this is spontaneous, it involves no more than ‘looking’. As E.H. Gombrich has said,⁵ there is no such thing as an ‘innocent eye’; the human mind is for ever sorting, classifying and evaluating what it sees in terms of expectations and comparisons. Whoever looks into the mirror of landscape cannot but encounter a reflection of themselves – their histories, emotions, preferences, cultural associations, memories. This raises the question of whether an objective link can be established between the formal properties of a landscape and its ‘quality’; whether there is more to the aesthetics of landscape than simply a personal preference for one view or another. Some take the view that aesthetic value ‘derives from the formal properties of the landscapes, such as shape, line, colour, texture and their interrelationships. The principal determinants of aesthetic value are expert judgements of these basic landscape elements’.⁶ This idea chimes well with eighteenth-century ideas in art and music criticism, when adherence to form, structure and line comprised the criteria for separating good from bad. From the early 1800s, however, the rise of the philosophy of the ‘Sublime’ injected a new subjectivity into the appreciation of nature and its artistic expression, a subjectivity that became the bedrock of Romanticism. Artists now subverted order, coherence and structure in an attempt to bypass the rational mind and elicit a purely emotional response, not just to the landscape itself but to something else that the landscape held – a transcendent quality beyond the visible. For Immanuel Kant, writing at the beginning of the period, the ‘Sublime’ was that characteristic of Nature which could not be represented but only felt, lacking contours and intelligibility.

In contemporary thought, Mary Carman Rose has identified three ways in which landscape can affect the viewer: directly through an immediate reaction to experience; obliquely, responding aesthetically to ideas gained through the contemplation of natural things; and intellectually through an appreciation of a pattern in nature.⁷ To these might be added an associated reaction arising from another scene that the landscape resembles; and a reaction brought about by an artistic association with the landscape, through familiarity with a painting, novel, poem or piece of music. All such reactions are highly subjective, suggesting that most of the trappings of landscape beauty are those added by personal or group associations and experience, and cultural inheritance from previous generations. The aesthetic value placed on a landscape is not inherent, therefore; it is something that the mind constructs by comparing it with other places it has experienced as (or has been told are) beautiful and determining if it meets a series of pre-formulated expectations.

Viewers are more than observers in this process, however; they too are in the landscape and an indivisible part of it. As Férdia J. Stone-Davis has observed, ‘lived bodies belong to places and help to constitute them … time and space are not neutral frames into which humans insert themselves and their activities. Rather, time and space gather relevance in relation to the interaction between a subject and her environment.’⁸ So by the time the viewer of the landscape steps back to enjoy, interpret or otherwise evaluate it, she is already immersed in its ‘pragmatic meaning’.⁹ Once immersed in a landscape, the viewer is compelled to attempt to replicate that landscape through expressive means. Arthur Danto suggests that:

… the entirety of philosophy is somehow connected with the concept of representation –that human beings are ens representans – beings that represent the world; that our individual histories are the histories of our representations, and how they change in the course of our lives; that representations form systems which constitute our picture of the world; that human history is the story of how this system of representations changes over time; that the world and our system of representations are interdependent in that sometimes we change the world to fit our representations, and sometimes change our representations to fit the world …¹⁰

Over time, habitats that originally offered benefits for subsistence have developed into landscapes that are aesthetically pleasing and valuable. Views across an open savannah allowed early humans to see prey across a long distance, whilst a mixture of woodland and water provided protection and security, as well as refreshment and means of escape from predators. What might now be regarded as a scenery preference is thus based deep within the human psyche. In turn, aesthetically significant landscapes have become associated with literary, artistic or poetic figures – Wordsworth’s Lake District, Constable’s Suffolk, Elgar’s Malverns – and are seen as both profitable and deserving of protection because of the artistic representations they have inspired.

The need to replicate begins early. Children draw familiar objects and people as a way of beginning to understand the world, of framing the places they know prior to expanding their vision. Adult social interaction derives from the same compulsion – whether it takes the form of sharing information with friends about the day just gone, or taking photographs of beautiful landscapes. For many (witness the images of visitors standing with their backs to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, taking selfies with the painting in the distance), the value of their replication has come to exceed that of the object or landscape itself, a very human characteristic cautioned against by William Blake in ‘Eternity’:

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sun rise.

Yet Blake’s own poems set out to capture moments of joy and sorrow; indeed it would seem that, as Richard Holloway writes:

All human art flows from this compulsion to represent or describe or make over again all the worlds we experience. And the best artists do it to a miraculous degree … Great art does not tell or talk about its subject. It shows it, makes it present. It is all part of the human passion to preserve at least the memory of the past before it hurtles into oblivion.¹¹

Holloway overstates his case here, as some artistic movements, including the Modernism that emerged on the cusp of the First World War, actively sought the obsolescence of what had gone before in a drive to ‘make it new!’ as Ezra Pound declared. For the Romantics, however, art was indeed fired by the impulse to preserve things of value in a rapidly changing technological and geographical environment. In 1843, Søren Kierkegaard wrote:

Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other clause – that it must be lived forwards. The more one thinks through this clause the more one concludes that … life can never really be understood in time because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting place from which to understand it.

The role of the Romantic artist was to provide that moment of ‘perfect repose’ that Kierkegaard desired, the single, still point that might be the gateway to a more profound understanding of life.

The art form in which landscape is most explicitly appropriated for this purpose is that of painting, and the representation of landscape is a defining feature of Romantic art generally and English art in particular. Although offering itself as, on one level, a topographical record, such paintings carry multiple symbols and messages, key amongst which is the portrayal of landscape not as ‘seen’, but as it might be in an ideal world, the ineffable realm one step beyond the present. The artist’s search was for an absolute, something beyond grasping, that painting could suggest, but never wholly capture. Such pictures read as ‘the elegiac record of humanity’s sense of alienation from its original habitat in an irrecoverable, pre-capitalist world. There is as much myth as history in that.’¹² Their aim was to present a sense of what lay beyond commonplace reality, so that, as the twentieth-century philosopher Jean-François Lyotard has described it:

The art-lover does not experience a simple pleasure … from his contact with art, but expects an intensification of his conceptual and emotional capacity, an ambivalent enjoyment. Intensity is associated with an ontological dislocation. The art-object no longer bends itself to models, but tries to present the fact that there is an unpresentable.¹³

The methods by which English landscape art sought to present the ‘unpresentable’ were many and varied, depending on the principles and motivations of the artist. The spectrum ranged from the ‘Sublime’-influenced Romanticism of J.M.W. Turner and John Martin to the naturalness of Constable, Cox and the Worcester-based Benjamin Leader. Some groups, including the Pre-Raphaelites, insisted on extra-pictorial elements, which might be didactic or moralistic; others, such as John Linnell, created scenes rich with Christian symbolism. Linnell was father-in-law to Samuel Palmer, perhaps the most visionary of the landscape artists of the era. Others, including Leader, an older contemporary of Elgar, who worked in the same surroundings around Worcestershire, ‘celebrated the English landscape in a quietly idyllic way, without the ruggedness of David Cox or the charged symbolism of Linnell.’¹⁴ Leader also, however, suffused his art with the message of a landscape that was no longer vibrant, but dying, as rural depopulation and agricultural depression took their toll.

Elgar was happy to acknowledge that he owed Leader an artistic debt, thanking him ‘for the inspiration which his picture of the country had been … in carrying out what he had been able to do in his own art’.¹⁵ Their emotional kinship is evident from a comparison between Leader’s canvas Landscape After Rain (the cover illustration for this book) and Elgar’s magical part-song ‘The Shower’ of 1914, which uses a poem of Henry Vaughan’s that echoes Leader’s title:

Cloud, if as thou dost melt, and with thy train

Of drops make soft the Earth, my eyes could weep

O’er my hard heart, that’s bound up and asleep;

Perhaps at last,

Some such showers past,

My God would give a sunshine after rain.

Whichever school they belonged to, however, all English landscape artists shared three points of commonality, which Elgar was later to adopt and make his own in the sphere of music. The first is of the landscape as an archetype of national and individual identity. Those who painted historic landscapes (especially the Pre-Raphaelites with their emphasis on medievalism) invested heavily in reconstructing the geographies of past times, seeing the landscapes through the eyes of those who lived in them. They treated landscape as a reflection of the society which ‘first brought it into being and [continued] to inhabit it’.¹⁶ In this, they recognised, as Pierce Lewis has said, that ‘our human landscape is our unwitting autobiography, and all our cultural warts and blemishes, our ordinary day-to-day qualities, are there for anybody who knows how to look for them’.¹⁷

Time spent within a place is stored in the memory, each of which becomes part of the much deeper repository of histories that have passed within that place. In the Victorian era, there emerged a new sense of local identity and artists began to define themselves as belonging to, and expressing the spirit of, a certain ‘place’ and landscape. It is scarcely surprising then that the second common concern for Victorian artists was the fragility of rural life. The loss of landscape was an existential threat to English identity that was current and visceral. The Victorians inhabited the first industrial age and dramatic changes in technology, work and the economy had shifted many people’s lives into cities where they had no past, no established identity and no community. As capitalist society promoted this societal transformation and at the same time provided the money which commissioned new art, the nostalgia of both artists and, paradoxically, their patrons for the countryside became ever more intense. They clung to vanishing ideals of country life because they understood that they were in imminent danger of losing them; indeed, many rural traditions were already, as Thomas Hardy observed, ‘absolutely sinking, [have] nearly sunk, into eternal oblivion’. All that was left was to preserve the memory of a dream. As Charles Masterman wrote in 1908, in the depths of this destructive period of agricultural depression and rural depopulation:

No-one today would seek in the ruined villages and dwindling population of the countryside the spirit of an England, four-fifths of whose people have now crowded into cities. The little red-roofed towns and hamlets, the labourer in the fields at noontide or evening … now stand but as the historical survival of a once great and splendid past.¹⁸

The Victorian imperative for landscape preservation was to reach its zenith in the foundation of the National Trust in 1895 by Octavia