I had the pleasure this week of reading a recent essay by the cultural historian Joseph Horowitz called “Three Who Quit,” a moving meditation on the later-life silences of Elgar, Ives and Sibelius. Joe and I will be recording a podcast on the topic later this week, so watch this space for further discussions.
Joe’s essay examines the complex mix of reasons that might have contributed to each of the three composers’ retirement from major compositional efforts. These include things like failing health, grief over the loss of a muse/spouse, feeling alienated by modernist trends in music and the arts, grief and anger over the great wars of the 20th C., and a disconnection from the natural and rural roots which had nurtured so much of their creativity. All of this I agree with.
I’ve written before about how at least a portion of Sibelius’s inability to progress beyond Tapiola and the Eighth Symphony was due, at least in part, to purely musical challenges he couldn’t overcome. His obsessive insistence on absolute rigor in his symphonies, and his steadfast refusal to repeat even the most successful compositional formulae, meant he had precious little territory left to explore by the time he began work on his Eighth Symphony. It seems that from the Third Symphony onwards, each work cost him more, and, all too often, the price was paid in the terrifying amounts of booze needed to give him the courage to face the blank page.
Elgar’s silence is generally held to be the one most directly brought about by biographical factors of these three, in particular the trauma of World War I and the loss of his wife, Alice. Having just come from this year’s Elgar Festival, and reading Joe’s excellent essay, I found myself considering whether, like Sibelius, there were also some unsolvable musical problems holding Elgar back in his later years.
Unlike Ives, who genuinely seemed so diminished by his health problems that he lacked both the mental and physical strength to compose, Elgar remained relatively vital, and capable of bursts of creativity, right to the end of his life. In the previous two Elgar Festivals, I was lucky enough to conduct two works by Elgar which were composed long after the Cello Concerto had seemed to draw closed the official curtains on the play that was Elgar’s creative life.
In 1923, Elgar composed incidental music for a new play by Lawrence Binyon based on the Arthurian legends. To the extent it is known at all, it is through a suite orchestrated and arranged after Elgar’s death by Robert Kay. The original score is written for a tiny pit band or salon orchestra. At the 2023 Elgar Festival, we had the chance to play a much more comprehensive suite culled from my friend Ben Palmer’s excellent edition of the original music. The Elgar Society’s website rightly says of this music “Ignore the incidental music tag – the label is inappropriate, for the score contains some of Elgar’s most powerful and convincing post-1920 music. Michael Kennedy, in his book A Portrait of Elgar, describes it as ‘a superb score’” More recently, Anthony Payne used some material from Arthur in his completion of Elgar’s Third Symphony. Although, by the very nature of its origins, some of the music is ‘bitty’, the best of it is vintage Elgar: deeply moving, beautifully crafted, multi-layered and haunting. The intimacy of Elgar’s original scoring makes it all the more personal and poignant.
In 2022, the Elgar Festival presented the world premiere of a new version of Elgar’s Nursery Suite for string orchestra, made by Donald Fraser. It was my first meaningful contact with one of Elgar’s last works, written in 1930-1 to celebrate the birth of Princess Margaret and dedicated to her and her older sister, Elizabeth II. Contrary to the many comments like this one from Wikipedia “Most of the movements appear light, in the style of The Wand of Youth suites, and predominantly sunny in character,” I found it to be a pensive and gently sad work, very much an old man’s memories of childhood as an ever-more-distant and ever-fading dream.
So, if these late works tell us that Elgar could still write great music, and certainly his orchestration of the Bach Fantasia and Fugue tells us his genius for orchestration remained un-dimmed, why could he not write the concertos and symphonies the world really wanted from him? He did eventually try, leaving behind sketches for both a Piano Concerto and a Third Symphony.
This brings me to Elgar’s First Symphony, which we also played at the 2023 Elgar Festival. I’ve only now been listening to and making edit notes to the live recording of that performance, so the piece has been very much on my mind over the last week. Elgar 1 is, as they say in the conducting biz, one of my ‘party pieces.’ That’s a frivolous way of saying I love it with all my heart, couldn’t live without it and that any chance I have to perform it is always a hugely meaningful moment in my musical life. I’ve done it lots and lots and lots of times.
As I was finishing work on the edit yesterday, I found myself considering the fact that, much as I also love it, the Second Symphony has, up to this point, played a much smaller role in my life. Why? There’s no question in my mind that it’s an equally great work. But, ask me if I want to conduct and Elgar symphony tomorrow, and it will always be the First that comes to mind. To know the First deeply is to struggle to imagine what could come after it, or why you would not just pick it every time.
And, perhaps, this hints at one more reason that Elgar’s later years were as they were. So much of Elgar, for me, is like this. The Introduction and Allegro: the greatest string orchestra work ever written, concentrated in about 13 minutes of liquid genius. He never returned to the genre again. The Violin Concerto? I can imagine no more implausible musical sequel this side of “The Ring Cycle Two: Erda’s Revenge” than an Elgar Violin Concerto No. 2. Keep looking through his instrumental output – only one Cello Concerto, one String Quartet, one Piano Quintet. In the South stands alone as his sole Straussian tone poem. Following the muted response to his Second Symphony in 1911 (more about this shortly), Elgar even invented his own genre, the “Symphonic Study”, embodied only by Falstaff, which he considered his greatest orchestral work. And, of course, the most glaring omission in his catalogue must be the lack of a follow-up to the Enigma Variations.
With the exception of the symphony, and short forms like the Pomp and Circumstance marches, Elgar seemed to struggle to produce more than one work in each genre. Having lived for years with scores of the profundity of the Violin Concerto, the Enigma Variations and the First Symphony, it’s actually easy to imagine why. I find myself circling back to the work which marked my introduction to Elgar: the Cello Concerto. Listen to the end of that work, which is probably the finest, deepest, most personal page of music ever written for cello and orchestra, then try to imagine what on earth he could possibly have done in a second cello concerto?
And so, here I sit, 90 years after his death, looking at the First Symphony and thinking much the same thing – it says everything, it does everything, it is everything about it as I think about the Cello Concerto. There is nothing left for him to do. And yet, unique in his output, there is a Second Symphony, and it’s an equally great piece. This, especially in the context of Elgar’s wider approach to genre, might well be his greatest achievement. And it probably goes a long way towards explaining why the muted response to the work left such deep scars. I joked darkly above that Sibelius often had to pay for the price of creativity in alcohol. Don’t be fooled by Elgar’s comment that ““My idea is that there is music in the air- music all around us, the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require”. Elgar often had to find a more elusive internal currency to cover the cost of his genius, which left him all the more vulnerable to the myriad factors which led to his lessened creativity in the last 15 years of his life.
Fair play to Elgar, once he found his “tenth muse,” the violinist Jelly d’Arányi, he did make real headway on that Third Symphony and Piano Concerto, but Elgar’s sketches for these works, even viewed through the excellent realisation of the Third Symphony by Anthony Payne, still show that Elgar had a long way to go to find something new to say in each genre that was worthy of comparison to the earlier concerti and symphonies. Do I wish there was an Elgar Piano Concerto of equal stature to the Violin Concerto? Of course. But the Violin Concerto is enough. Frankly, it’s a miracle that he managed a Cello Concerto after it. I’m sure it was an absolute compositional necessity that the Cello Concerto be as different from the Violin Concerto as it was, and, for that matter, that the Second Symphony is as different from the First as it is. Payne’s realisation of the Elgar Third Symphony sketches is a very useful tool for understanding the magnitude of what Elgar was working on at the end of his life, but it also makes clear that Elgar still hadn’t quite figured out what the point was of an Elgar Third Symphony, or what creative space it could occupy that didn’t encroach upon that held by the first two. In this sense, it represents a very different set of problems for performers and would-be completers or realisers than, say Mahler’s 10th Symphony, which is compositionally complete in concept and content from beginning to end.
Mahler was lucky – he seemed to stumble early on to the idea of his symphonies as a single, unified whole. Almost a symphonic Ring Cycle, in which ideas, motifs, questions and postulations would be present throughout the whole musical journey his 11 symphonic works. Sibelius and Elgar, on the other hand, saw the symphony as a more rigorously self-contained form. From this point of view, it’s probably not unfair to suggest that Elgar’s Second Symphony cost its creator about as much as a good four or five of Mahler’s symphonies cost him.
It’s no wonder the old man found number three such a slog.
“Should be in a War Symphony” said Alice Elgar. Is this Elgar’s hidden Third Symphony?
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