Edward Elgar and His World by Adams Byron

Author:Adams, Byron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

Elgar, Wagner, and Lyricism

Hadow’s concerns about Elgar’s use of leitmotifs were as much a matter of personal aesthetics as of technique. As noted above, opinion on Wagner in Britain was divided, with many leading figures within the renaissance set skeptical of the composer, at least as a compositional model and certainly as an ideologue. Hadow was less explicitly anti-Wagner than some, but his pronouncement in 1893 that it was “neither likely nor advisable that [Wagner] should exercise any permanent influence” on composers working in musical genres other than opera or music drama was somewhat ingenuous, to put it mildly.61 Yet this rejection of Wagner outside the theater was consistent with the idealism, derived largely from the critical writings of Hanslick, that pervaded contemporary British musical thinking. Such idealism found its perfect exemplar in the music of Hanslick’s hero, Johannes Brahms, who provided British composers with a “safe” compositional model that eschewed the extremes associated with Bayreuth.62 The Brahmsian model was realized most fully in Britain by Parry, whose emotional control and moderation in orchestration seems almost the antithesis to Wagner. For Elgar to make use of a Wagnerian orchestra, Wagnerian chromatic harmony, and an extensive network of leitmotifs in Gerontius and The Apostles was, to some extent, to state his allegiance to a composer against whom the leading faction in modern English music had defined itself. Moreover, despite Elgar’s plausible claim that his earliest acquaintanceship with reminiscence motifs had not been in Wagner but in Mendelssohn’s Elijah, the “thematic analyses” to Gerontius, The Apostles, and The Kingdom, which were written by Jaeger under the composer’s supervision, and which listed the works’ different motifs, were clearly based on Hans von Wolzogen’s Handbücher for audiences at Bayreuth.63 Comparisons with Wagner were thus inevitable.

These comparisons were often negative, notably with regard to The Apostles, where the composer’s leitmotif technique attracted unfavorable comments. For instance, J. H. G. Baughan of the Musical News felt that the piece lacked spontaneity and that Elgar’s use of leitmotifs elicited only boredom; the opening of Part II, indeed, was castigated as “bald, means absolutely nothing; and must surely have been written in a hurry.”64 This much we might expect from a critic who had previously claimed of Gerontius that it “lacked novelty and real inspiration,” that “the feminine whine and excessive love of minor harmonies” made “many of the score’s pages more painful than artistically impressive,” and that its “frequent faded feeling and morbidity” compared unfavorably with the “virility” and “robustness” of Elgar’s earlier (and more conservative) King Olaf.65 But criticism of this same passage in The Apostles also came from one of the most ardent advocates of Gerontius, Ernest Newman, for whom it had “no musical raison d’être. You could play the themes in any order you liked without any sense of discontinuity.” The problem with the oratorio, Newman argued, was that Elgar’s primary concern was to depict a literary narrative, which he achieved through juxtaposing motifs irrespective of musical sense. According to Newman, the music was incapable of developing “an organic life of its own… .

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