{"id":9903,"date":"2024-06-16T16:33:28","date_gmt":"2024-06-16T15:33:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/?p=9903"},"modified":"2024-06-16T16:49:03","modified_gmt":"2024-06-16T15:49:03","slug":"elgars-enigmatic-silence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/2024\/06\/16\/elgars-enigmatic-silence\/","title":{"rendered":"Elgar&#8217;s Enigmatic Silence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I had the pleasure this week of reading a recent essay by the cultural historian Joseph Horowitz called \u201cThree Who Quit,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p>Joe\u2019s essay examines the complex mix of reasons that might have contributed to each of the three composers\u2019 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 20<sup>th<\/sup> C., and a disconnection from the natural and rural roots which had nurtured so much of their creativity. All of this I agree with.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"English Symphony Orchestra\/\/ Sibelius Symphony No. 6 and Tapiola (Trailer)\" width=\"1080\" height=\"608\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/IYxA32FnMgk?feature=oembed\"  allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/2011\/06\/07\/did-brahms-kill-sibelius-brahms-1-meets-sibelius-7u\/\">I\u2019ve written before<\/a> about how at least a portion of Sibelius\u2019s inability to progress beyond Tapiola and the Eighth Symphony was due, at least in part, to purely musical challenges he couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<p>Elgar\u2019s 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\u2019s Elgar Festival, and reading Joe\u2019s excellent essay, I found myself considering whether, like Sibelius, there were also some unsolvable musical problems holding Elgar back in his later years.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s creative life.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s 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\u2019s excellent edition of the original music. The Elgar Society\u2019s website rightly says of this music \u201cIgnore the incidental music tag &#8211; the label is inappropriate, for the score contains some of Elgar&#8217;s most powerful and convincing post-1920 music. Michael Kennedy, in his book A Portrait of Elgar, describes it as &#8216;a superb score&#8217;\u201d More recently, Anthony Payne used some material from Arthur in his completion of Elgar\u2019s Third Symphony. Although, by the very nature of its origins, some of the music is \u2018bitty\u2019, the best of it is vintage Elgar: deeply moving, beautifully crafted, multi-layered and haunting. The intimacy of Elgar\u2019s original scoring makes it all the more personal and poignant.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"2022 Elgar Festival Highlights. World Premieres of Elgar&#039;s Nursery Suite and Matthews Shiva Dances\" width=\"1080\" height=\"608\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/9l64VSkVozY?feature=oembed\"  allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>In 2022, the Elgar Festival presented the world premiere of a new version of Elgar\u2019s Nursery Suite for string orchestra, made by Donald Fraser. It was my first meaningful contact with one of Elgar\u2019s 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 \u201cMost of the movements appear light, in the style of The Wand of Youth suites, and predominantly sunny in character,\u201d I found it to be a pensive and gently sad work, very much an old man\u2019s memories of childhood as an ever-more-distant and ever-fading dream.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>This brings me to Elgar\u2019s First Symphony, which we also played at the 2023 Elgar Festival. I\u2019ve 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 \u2018party pieces.\u2019 That\u2019s a frivolous way of saying I love it with all my heart, couldn\u2019t live without it and that any chance I have to perform it is always a hugely meaningful moment in my musical life. I\u2019ve done it lots and lots and lots of times.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s no question in my mind that it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>And, perhaps, this hints at one more reason that Elgar\u2019s 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 \u201cThe Ring Cycle Two: Erda\u2019s Revenge\u201d than an Elgar Violin Concerto No. 2. Keep looking through his instrumental output \u2013 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 \u201cSymphonic Study\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n<p>And so, here I sit, 90 years after his death, looking at the First Symphony and thinking much the same thing \u2013 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 <em>is<\/em> a Second Symphony, and it\u2019s an equally great piece. This, especially in the context of Elgar\u2019s 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\u2019t be fooled by Elgar\u2019s comment that \u201c\u201cMy 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\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Jelly d&#039;Aranyi &amp; Ethel Hobday - F.Kelly Serenade Op.7\" width=\"1080\" height=\"810\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1A1-ydBOlks?feature=oembed\"  allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Fair play to Elgar, once he found his \u201ctenth muse,\u201d\u00a0the violinist Jelly d&#8217;Ar\u00e1nyi, he did make real headway on that Third Symphony and Piano Concerto, but Elgar\u2019s 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\u2019s a miracle that he managed a Cello Concerto after it. I\u2019m 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\u2019s 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\u2019t quite figured out what the point was of an Elgar Third Symphony, or what creative space it could occupy that didn\u2019t 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\u2019s 10<sup>th<\/sup> Symphony, which is compositionally complete in concept and content from beginning to end.<\/p>\n<p>Mahler was lucky \u2013 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\u2019s probably not unfair to suggest that Elgar\u2019s Second Symphony cost its creator about as much as a good four or five of Mahler&#8217;s symphonies cost him.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s no wonder the old man found number three such a slog.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Edward Elgar orchestrated Donald Fraser - Piano Quintet in A minor opus 84\" width=\"1080\" height=\"608\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ylFrNZmEn_s?feature=oembed\"  allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;Should be in a War Symphony&#8221; said Alice Elgar. Is this Elgar&#8217;s hidden Third Symphony?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<div id=\"wp_fb_like_button\" style=\"margin:5px 0;float:none;height:100px;\"><script src=\"http:\/\/connect.facebook.net\/en_US\/all.js#xfbml=1\"><\/script><fb:like href=\"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/2024\/06\/16\/elgars-enigmatic-silence\/\" send=\"false\" layout=\"box_count\" width=\"450\" show_faces=\"true\" font=\"arial\" action=\"like\" colorscheme=\"light\"><\/fb:like><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had the pleasure this week of reading a recent essay by the cultural historian Joseph Horowitz called \u201cThree Who Quit,\u201d 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\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9003,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[174,1052,63],"class_list":["post-9903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music-opion-life-as-a-performing-musician","tag-elgar","tag-ives","tag-sibelius"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9903"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9908,"href":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9903\/revisions\/9908"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}