The Cambridge Companion to Elgar

by Daniel M. Grimley (Editor), Julian Rushton (Editor)

Divided into three sections, this Companion explores Edward Elgar's early career, his major musical achievements, and the reception, performance and interpretation of his work. Placed in this wider perspective, Elgar emerges as a pivotal figure in the British cultural imagination at a defining historical moment for England's musical identity.

Genres: Music

278 pages, Paperback

First published January 6, 2005

Reviews

[Philippe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elgar is an interesting figure to dig a little deeper into. He is one of these composers whose variegated output is hidden behind very few signature pieces. For music lovers on the European mainland the name Elgar was for a long time almost exclusively associated with his Pomp and Circumstance marches. Later, perhaps in the wake of Jacqueline Du Pré’s mediatized performances, came the Cello Concerto. More recently the Enigma Variations have entered into the mainstream repertoire. But a huge swath of Elgar’s oeuvre remains largely unexplored. I am particularly thinking of his two symphonies and the three great oratorios - The Dream of Gerontius, the Apostles and The Kingdom - that tower as a mountain range of Himalayan proportions over the foothills of the occasional works (such as the marches). This book is a very useful guide for those who would like to venture a little further afield in their survey of Elgar’s music. Most chapters are devoted to particular portions of his oeuvre and offer work-by-work discussions by reputed scholars that go quite a bit further than the average CD booklet text. Only few music examples support the analyses so less technically minded readers need not be deterred.

Elgar was also a complex personality suffering from an almost pathological self-doubt and unquenchable nostalgia. Whilst the book does not offer a full-fledged biography of the man we learn a lot about his character and his most important sources of inspiration - particularly childhood remembrances, nature, close friends and, up to a point, his Catholic faith. Byron Adams’s psychological portrait of the composer seen through the lens of the great oratorios is one of the highlights of the book.

Elgar’s psychological complexity is reflected in the sophistication of his compositional strategies. Diana McVeagh in her chapter on the early works perceptively remarks: „Neither Elgar’s life nor his music is simple. In both there are many layers and contradictions. It was his good fortune that with his complicated nature he was born at a time when harmonic resources enabled him to express such ambiguities.” Elgar was born in 1857 when Wagner initiated work on his Tristan und Isolde, the music drama that single-handedly would shatter the foundations of Western tonal music. The high point of his compositional career fell in a time bracket - 1890 to 1914 - when this process of formal and harmonic dissolution pushed itself into an artistic aporia. Many of the chapters provide illuminating insights into the workshop of a composer who never in his life received a formal composition lesson. For instance, Christopher Mark revealingly centers his discussion of the theater music on Elgar’s use of diatonicism. Julian Rushton discusses the anatomy of the later orchestral scores from the viewpoint of their endings. And Robert Anderson shows how Elgar built up fluent sequential structures - mosaics as it were - by dovetailing smaller motifs.

Elgar’s last great composition - the musical character study Falstaff - was first performed in 1913, the year of the Sacre and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. The Great War came and soon after his wife Alice died. Musically, culturally, personally and politically this was a trauma that the composer would never really be able to heal. His creativity was largely spent and the remaining fifteen years of his life were passed in a state of morbid semi-retirement. I need to reread James Hamilton Paterson's fictional recreation of the aging composer's mindset in his magisterial Gerontius.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm giving this five stars even though while reading it I sometimes wanted to crush my own hand with a big rock just to generate some sort of excitement. It sustained me through a difficult period in a foreign country. Studying abroad in England, although it might have been a time to get insanely wasted, was actually when I really started to love classical music history/biography, I kid you not. Elgar is actually a lot more appealing than he seems. He was really nice to his dogs, and he was endearingly whiny. Sample quote: "No one in my whole life has EVER been kind to me."