UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Date:______

I, ______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in:

It is entitled:

This work and its defense approved by:

Chair: ______

Elgar in Cincinnati: Mysticism, Britishness, and Modernity

A thesis submitted to the

Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF MUSIC

in the Division of Composition, Musicology, and Theory of the College-Conservatory of Music

2006

by

Austin D. Padgett

B.M., Samford University, 2004

Committee Chair: bruce d. mcclung, Ph.D. ABSTRACT

Edward Elgar visited Cincinnati in 1906 to conduct The Dream of Gerontius at the Cincinnati May Festival, and the criticism surrounding the event was distinct to the circumstances surrounding the performance. The 1906 May Festival was a critical event for the future of the organization: Theodore Thomas, the festival’s founding music director, had recently died, the May Festival Chorus had been disbanded and newly reformed, and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra would appear in the festival for the first time. The May Festival Board contracted Elgar to guarantee a large, ticket-buying audience, but he was hindered from public exposure by his commitment to his publisher, his grief over his father’s death, and the closure to the public of the festival rehearsals. If

Elgar’s presence was going to be a promotional device for the May Festival, the critics, who held the only public forum, had to create a sense of importance to surround the composer’s presence. This thesis explores the criticism and reception of Elgar in

Cincinnati, examining the themes of mysticism, Britishness, and modernity about the composer and his music and demonstrating their place in the context of Cincinnati’s musical history and Elgar’s biography. Copyright © 2006, Austin D. Padgett ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank my committee members Kenneth Griffiths and Jeonwong Joe for their time and commitment given to this project. I am most grateful to my thesis advisor, bruce mcclung, whose knowledge of Cincinnati and precision in editing made this thesis a joy to work on and an educational experience. I also wish to thank my mother for her support and encouragement throughout the entirety of my life and my wife for her optimism and for watching a tireless puppy while I diligently worked on this project. CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ii

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER TWO: MYSTICISM 19

CHAPTER THREE: BRITISHNESS 36

CHAPTER FOUR: MODERNITY 57

CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION 69

BIBLIOGRAPHY 82

APPENDIX: 1906 MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM 88

i LIST OF FIGURES AND EXAMPLES

1.1 Picture of Lawrence Maxwell, Jr. 9

4.1 Excerpt from The Dream of Gerontius, “Jesu Maria” 60 4.2 Excerpt from The Dream of Gerontius, Christ Theme 61

5.1 Picture of the Hotel Sinton 76 5.2 Picture of the Burnet House Hotel 77

ii CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

According to the Nielsen Ratings, the portion of the Academy of Motion Picture

Arts and Sciences Awards that is televised each year, popularly known as the “Oscars” or the “Oscarcast,” has been gradually losing its annual viewership. To boost pre-show speculation and viewer interest, the Academy has placed new demands and hopes in the event’s emcee, traditionally a comedian, to increase ratings and diversify demographics of viewers. In 2005 Chris Rock, an African-American comedian, “was recruited in an effort to extend the Oscar’s brand to young and minority viewers.”1 However, Rock,

whose comedic routine often derides the stereotypical differences between races, was

criticized in the press for “mercilessly ridiculing Hollywood” and “crossing the line.”2

This was deemed the sole reason for a drop in total viewership: 43.5 million in 2004 to

42.1 million in 2005.

This same tactic was used in 2006 when the Academy chose Jon Stewart, host of

Comedy Central’s Daily Show, as emcee for the broadcast. When interviewed by The

Financial Times, Robert Thompson, a specialist in television and popular culture, said,

“Bringing in Jon Stewart is one way to juice it up.”3 While many interpreted the

Academy’s choice of emcee as an attempt to reach a new demographic, others in the

press anticipated failure, “It remains to be seen whether Stewart will work wonders for

1 Joshua Chaffin, “Stewart Seeks to Boost Oscar Audience,” Financial Times of London, 4 March 2006, 4.

2 The Record (Bergen County, N.J.) 5 March 2006, sec. E, 1.

3 Chaffin, Financial Times of London, 4. ABC.”4 To rationalize their opinions, many papers compared Stewart to David

Letterman, who hosted the Oscars in 1995 to critical disapproval. Both emcees were

New York comedians at the potential “breakthrough point” of their careers, and

Letterman and Stewart used a “comedic humor that had not become mainstream.”5 The

most important similarity to columnists was that both comedians were Hollywood

newcomers, seen as “outsiders poking fun at a crowd of Hollywood insiders on what is

regarded as the industry’s biggest celebration.”6

Because the host’s opening monologue is traditionally kept secret and Stewart

was kept busy with his obligations to Comedy Central and ABC, the weeks before the

2006 ceremony were filled with speculation about the reach of Stewart’s celebrity; the

press continuing to use the model of Letterman as a construction of the absent Stewart

and as a predictor of his forthcoming failure. The weight of Stewart’s fame, seen as

small in the media, was compared to the task of boosting the ceremony’s sagging ratings,

and, in this comparison, the comedian’s power as a celebrity is measured.

It is a common occurrence for institutions to rely on famous or notorious

personalities to raise money or achieve public appeal, but the popular press utilizes these

occasions to open the discussion about the idea of celebrity and its influence on an

audience. In Celebrity and Power, P. David Marshall describes celebrities as the

“production locale for an elaborate discourse on the individual and individuality.”7 In

4 The Record (Bergen County, N.J.), 5 March 2006, sec. E, 1.

5 Chaffin, Financial Times of London, 4.

6 USA Today, 6 January 2006, sec. E, 1.

7 P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 4.

2 this way, celebrity is a constructed, subjective identity, and it is a product to be

consumed:

The greatness of the celebrity is something that can be shared and, in essence, celebrated loudly and with a touch of vulgar pride. It is the ideal representation of the triumph of the masses. Concomitantly, celebrity is the potential of capitalism, a celebration of new kinds of values and orders, a debunking of the customary divisions of traditional society, for the celebrity him or herself is dependent entirely on the new order.8

This type of construction is nothing new, and the subject of this thesis is a similar

occurrence of the celebrity fabrication of Sir Edward Elgar.

Many groups claimed interest in Edward Elgar in the first decade of the twentieth

century, each of them formulating a different view of the composer by downplaying

biographical and compositional elements or others. His career and marriage began with

constructive molding from his wife, Caroline Alice Roberts, who came from upper-class

society. With Elgar’s cooperation, “she designed a new man,” introducing him to the

manners and social atmosphere of the English gentleman.9 Also, the English Musical

Renaissance, led by Charles Villiers Stanford and Hubert Parry, desired Elgar to enter

their fold. His Roman Catholicism and association with the rural hill-country of England,

however, presented an “obvious contradiction” to the protestant, London-based

Renaissance.10 They began to reinvent Elgar by encouraging universities to offer him

honorary degrees, an important measure of worth for the Renaissance. These degrees

were followed by “social honors” and allurements to “London’s clubland.”11

8 Ibid., 6.

9 Diana McVeagh, “Mrs. Edward Elgar,” The Musical Times 125, no. 1692 (Feb. 1984): 76.

10 John Butt, “Roman Catholicism and Being Musically English: Elgar’s Church and Organ Music,” in The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, ed. Daniel Grimley and Julian Rushton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 106.

3 Outside of England, communities evaluated Elgar using their own criteria, which

depended on several factors, including the preferences of the critic, the makeup of the

readership, and the artistic climate of the society. Each instance of criticism, reception,

and construction, however, must be analyzed in its own circumstances. In German

reviews, Aidan Thomson finds that Max Hehemann, a critic for Die Musik, viewed Elgar

“at the forefront of a burgeoning national school,” emphasizing the composer’s cultural

origins.12 Conversely, Thomson writes that Otto Lessman, editor of the Allgemeine

Musik-Zeitung, valued musical aesthetics and the influence that continental music had on

Elgar, and he writes that in Lessman’s perspective, “Elgar had joined the European

mainstream in writing in a post-Wagnerian, post-Brahmsian, implicitly German idiom.”13

This variety of construction techniques demonstrates the diverse range of ways to

imagine Elgar—each for a different audience.

The Cincinnati May Festival claimed interest in Elgar by approaching him to

appear as guest conductor in the 1906 May Festival—his first professional appearance in

the United States. At that time the festival was a biennial event that performed large-

scale works in nightly concerts. Rooted in the Saengerfest tradition, the festival thrived on the health of its choral forces. The first festival director was Theodore Thomas, founder of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who brought his own instrumentalists to accompany the volunteer choir and hired soloists. The organization aggressively sought to debut works and artists, such as the American premiere of Bach’s Magnificat in 1875

11 Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance 1840–1940: Contructing a National Music (New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), 63–4.

12 Aidan Thomson, “Elgar in German Criticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, ed. Grimley and Rushton, 206.

13 Ibid., 208.

4 and the world premiere of John Knowles Paine’s Song of Promise in 1888. This trend suffered a long break between 1894 and 1914. Many of the members of the Board of

Directors at this time were focused on the financial, not the artistic, success of the festival. In order to move tickets, Lawrence Maxwell, Jr., president of the Cincinnati

May Festival Association asked Elgar to lead his own works at the 1906 May Festival, hoping the Englishman would be a “drawing card.”14

In 1905 Elgar was an established British composer and rising in his global fame through performances of his oratorio The Dream of Gerontius. In this same year, Robert

J. Buckley published Sir Edward Elgar, his installment in the popular Living Masters of

Music series. Buckley wrote: “What Wagner did for opera, from the point at which it was left by Mozart and Weber, Elgar is doing for oratorio from the point at which it was left by Handel and Mendelssohn, and, as many believe, with equal inspiration. This is but a part of his work, but were this his solitary achievement he would have richly earned a conspicuous place among the immortals.”15 In a 1904 lecture given by Henry Krehbiel in

Cincinnati, the New York Tribune critic labeled Elgar and Richard Strauss as the “two foremost composers of the day.”16 This type of international acclaim also helped Elgar to obscure the accomplishments of the English Musical Renaissance, and by 1901 Elgar was being hailed as the master of all English composers:

The coming man has already arisen in the English musical world, an artist who has instinctively freed himself from the scholasticism which, until now, has bound English art firmly in its fetters, an artist who has thrown open mind and heart to the great achievements which the mighty tone masters of the century now

14 Cincinnati Post, 7 May 1906, 3.

15 Robert J. Buckley, Sir Edward Elgar (New York: J. Lane Publishing, 1905), 88.

16 Cincinnati Enquirer, 13 May 1904, 7.

5 departed have left us as a heritage for one to come—Edward Elgar, the composer of The Dream of Gerontius.17

Theodore Thomas had previously conducted Gerontius at the 1904 May Festival,

and its success and the fame of the composer may have drawn the Board of Directors to

consider the composer for a guest conductor and celebrity at the upcoming festival. Also,

the Board of Directors already had an artistic relationship with the composer. Henry

Wulfsohne, an arts administrator for the Musical Bureau of New York, wrote to Elgar on

5 October 1903 to ask him to request a personnel change in the 1904 May Festival:

Your magnificent work Dream of Gerontius will be given in quite a number of places in America. The principal production will be the one in the Cincinnati Festival this coming May, under the direction of Theodore Thomas. Ellison van Hoose, the tenor, sang the part last spring in New York, and made a wonderful success of the part, by the voice as well as by a glorious inspired interpretation. So much so, that at the repetition of its production here, by Mr. Damrosch, and in Boston by Mr. Lang he is re-engaged. It seems the Cincinnati people enjoyed Mr. William Green of London. I heard this artist last spring, and I think he cannot do justice to the part.

As you heard Mr. van Hoose, and know his work, could you not write a line to the President of the Festival: Mr. Maxwell, and to Mr. Thomas, requesting them, in the interest of all concerned to have Mr. van Hoose sing the Dream of Gerontius, the other works produced can be given to Mr. Green.18

It is unknown whether Elgar made such a request, but William Green performed the tenor

role in 1904. This letter reveals that Elgar was familiar enough with the Cincinnati

festival to make such recommendations, which he did; the Cincinnati Enquirer reported

that Muriel Foster, British soprano, came “warmly recommended by Dr. Elgar, and was

chosen by him for the part of the angel in ‘Gerontius’ at the first production of the

17 Otto Lessman, “Elgar,” Musical Times 2 (1901): 112.

18 Henry Wulfsohne, New York, to Edward Elgar, 5 October 1905, Elgar Birthplace Museum Letters (EBML) 5867.

6 work.”19 Whatever the criteria and reasons for choosing the composer, Elgar’s presence

at the 1906 festival was sure to be an important and profitable investment.

In fact, the May Festival was in need of more than monetary gain; the 1906 May

Festival would require a complete restructuring of its modus operandi. Theodore

Thomas, musical director the May Festival from its first 1873 performance, died on 4

January 1905, and the organization of the festival prior to that time had been solely

dependent on his leadership. He had formed the orchestra by hiring professional

musicians from New York and supplemented them with local musicians in festivals prior

to 1880. In this year, Thomas had moved back to New York after a dispute with the

College of Music, which he had founded. From that point on, Thomas had brought his

own orchestra to Cincinnati for each festival from New York or Chicago, where he had

later lived.

Thomas’s death spurred a chain of events that changed the outlook of the 1906

festival. The May Festival Choir planned a memorial concert, which was to be given on

20 March 1905, and the group struck a deal with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to

come and accompany the program. The Festival Board, however, was torn on the issue,

and the minutes reflect the gridiron atmosphere of their meeting: “Expressions by several

members of the Board were made to the effect that the giving of this concert was a

mistake, other members favored the idea. No action was taken by the Board.”20 The clash between the organizations that took place over their respective events “was carried on with about as much dignity as might have been expected from schoolboys of fifteen

19 Cincinnati Enquirer, 13 May 1904, 7.

20 May Festival Minutes, vol. 4, February 13, 1905, 223.

7 and eventually the choir seceded.”21 Enraging the chorus, Lawrence Maxwell, Jr., vice- president of the May Festival Association (see Figure 1.1), stated that he was “against the giving of the memorial concert, saying that it had not the sanction of the board, that the program was a log of ‘hash,’ and that it would make Thomas turn in his grave to listen to it.” As a consequence of Maxwell’s statements, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra retracted its offer to accompany the program, citing its own heavy schedule.22 The

Festival Board, in an act of either reconciliation or humiliation towards the chorus, planned its own memorial concert to open the 1906 May Festival. The chorus responded in a letter by demanding Maxwell’s resignation, adding that “if the Board of Directors do not find this request acceptable, we find no other course open to us than to insist that this communication shall constitute the resignation of the chorus, to take effect at once.”23

The May Festival Chorus was soon disbanded, and the Board of Directors chose Maxwell as the next president of the May Festival Association.

In the midst of the upheaval, the festival reorganized its board and established a marketing plan for the 1906 concerts to choose “[Frank] Van der Stucken as festival conductor, and to depend upon Sir Edward Elgar as a foreign attraction.”24 Frank van der

Stucken was the conductor of the recently formed Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and the board decided that the Cincinnati orchestra would play in the 1906 May Festival for the first time. The May Festival Chorus was formed afresh under the same name, as the

Cincinnati Enquirer reported:

21 Cincinnati Enquirer, 2 May 1906, 7.

22 Cincinnati Enquirer, 25 February 1905, 10.

23 Cincinnati Times-Star, 28 March 1905, 10.

24 May Festival Minutes, vol. 4, June 19, 1905, 231.

8 Fig. 1.1 Lawrence Maxwell, Jr.

9 A new choir, almost as numerous as the old one, was organized, and for six months kept at such a white heat of enthusiasm as to make not only weekly mass rehearsals possible, but two and sometimes three part rehearsals possible also. A contingent of fifty or more of the old guard returned to their allegiance and the choir begins the Festival letter perfect.25

Despite this enthusiasm, the local press was leery of presenting an entirely reconditioned

festival. Paradigms of Cincinnati’s musical world were shifting, and the future of the

festival was in question. It was more important than ever that Elgar be persuaded to

come to Cincinnati.

Lawrence Maxwell, Jr. initiated the business propositions with Sir Edward, who

had recently received knighthood.26 On 3 August 1904, Maxwell wrote the following

letter, offering Elgar a commission and the opportunity to conduct at the 1906 May

Festival:

I am writing you at the request of the board of directors of the Cincinnati Musical Festival Association for the purpose of conveying to you a request, of which I understand you have already had an intimation through our chorus master, Mr. [Edwin] Glover.

I am sending you by this mail a copy of our official programme book, from which you may ascertain something of the scope of the work of our association, which has been giving biennial festivals, under the direction of Mr. Theodore Thomas, for nearly a third of a century. At our last festival we sang your Dream of Gerontius.

It would give us great satisfaction if we could induce you to let us have a new choral work of a character suitable for such a festival, to be given at our next festival held in May, 1906, and if you could arrange to come to Cincinnati as our

25 Cincinnati Enquirer, 2 May 1906, 7.

26 Lawrence Maxwell was one of the original members of the group who had invited Theodore Thomas and his Chicago orchestra to perform in Cincinnati in hopes of establishing a permanent festival. In his term as president, he often traveled throughout the United States and Europe to hear possible May Festival soloists and judge their merits. He was a famous attorney, working briefly as Solicitor General under an appointment from President Grover Cleveland. Much of his political and social fame came early in his career, when he argued an oft-cited inheritance case before the Supreme Court.

10 guest to conduct its performance, and perhaps also the performance of one or more of your orchestral numbers.

Will you please let me know at your early convenience whether the suggestion meets your approval? Our association would take pleasure in appropriating one thousand dollars as an honorarium.

We would desire the privilege of the first performance, and it would be necessary that the chorus parts should be in our hands, ready for us in rehearsals, by October first, 1905.27

The letter, housed in the Elgar Birthplace Museum, has red underlined markings

underneath “one thousand” and “privilege of the first performance,” marked by Elgar. At

the top, in blue, is written, “No.” Despite his initial negative decision, Elgar was

persuaded by the monetary offering and chose to meet with Maxwell when he came to

the United States to obtain his honorary doctorate from Yale. In a letter, Elgar wrote,

“Mr. Maxwell of Cincinnati is coming to see me on Friday [30 June 1905] & we may

settle something—my feelings are dead against coming here again but my pocket gapes

aloud.”28 Maxwell was able to successfully negotiate the following contract with Elgar:

This agreed between the Cincinnati Musical Festival Association and Sir Edward Elgar that he will conduct the Apostles and Gerontius and such of his orchestral compositions as may be agreed upon, at the musical festival to be given by said Association in Cincinnati in May 1906 & that in consideration thereof, said Association will pay him at the close of the festival one thousand pounds sterling. Elgar is not to conduct any other concerts in the United States prior to July 1, 1906.

The contract was a shrewd business move and was recognized as such in a letter from

Frank Van der Stucken: “After many delays and discussions, I received a cablegram from Cincinnati, authorising me to engage Sir Edward’s services for the sum of one

27 Lawrence Maxwell, Cincinnati, to Edward Elgar, 3 August 1904, EBML 5870.

28 Letters in the Novello Archives quoted in Richard J. Smith, Elgar in America: Elgar’s American Connections between 1895 and 1934 (Rickmansworth, England: Elgar Editions, 2005), 40.

11 thousand pounds. I never believed that it would come to this, for never has such a price

been paid for a composer before this.”29 By contracting Elgar to give his first professional

American performance, the festival was assured the novelty of a celebrity appearance in

their city.30

Sir Edward and Lady Elgar departed England on 6 April 1906 aboard the White

Star’s largest vessel, the Celtic. The ship docked in New York harbor on Easter morning,

15 April. Upon arrival, Elgar granted an interview to a reporter that examined issues of nationalism still discussed in academic circles today:

“Coming to America makes me feel almost like coming home,” said Sir Edward yesterday. “I was here last summer to see some of the friends which I have made here, and being a man of, I hope, modern ideas, I feel at home among the ‘go- ahead’ people of the United States.”

“What do you think of American music?” he was asked.

“I do not know it thoroughly so cannot express an opinion,” he answered. “We have heard in England some of the oratorios of Professor Parker of Yale, and I know some of the works of MacDowell and Chadwick. But I suppose mentioning those few would be like merely touching a fringe of American music.”

“What is the matter with English music?”

“Well we live on an island, and that makes all the difference. Some of us never get off it.”31

His comments mirror his famous Peyton Lectures of 1905 and 1906, a series of talks

given in Birmingham in which Elgar criticized the English Musical Renaissance.

29 Ibid., 41.

30 The original offer to Elgar for an honorarium of one thousand dollars presents a discrepancy with the contract to pay him one thousand pounds. Ultimately, Elgar was paid 1,500 U.S. dollars, but no evidence has been found of any negotiations over Elgar’s contract.

31 New York Herald, 16 April 1906, 8.

12 In New York, the Elgars spent the night in the Manhattan home of Samuel

Sanford, and they attended a dinner party with their friend Julia Worthington, who would later join them in Cincinnati. The couple departed New York by train and traveled nearly eight hundred miles to the Queen City. In a letter to her daughter, Carice, Lady Elgar reveals that it was not the most pleasant trip: “Perhaps we passed the nicest country at night, for in the morning it was most uninteresting, clearings, little wooden houses & hideous towns. Faser [Elgar] was tired & rather headachey when he woke, but recovered after breakfast.”32 Frank Van der Stucken and Lawrence Maxwell awaited their guests at the train station with a host of reporters. After his arrival, Elgar gave a brief, diplomatic speech:

The fame of your festivals in Cincinnati is well known in England. They are regarded as the first of the large musical events in America, and their reputation for high artistic ideals was the inducement which prevailed upon me to come to this country for the purpose of conducting some of my works. I had been requested quite a number of times to come to the States, but I abhor the idea of making a tour from city to city. My first trip to America was last summer which was purely a personal visit. When the invitation came from the Cincinnati festival to conduct some of my works at the 1906 festival the ideal surroundings appealed to me and here I am. I am very anxious to meet your chorus of which I hear the most favourable reports.33

It is unclear whether these are Elgar’s actual words or a reporter’s paraphrase of his speech. What is known is that Lady Elgar later commented that “E. not very gracious.”34

Maxwell transported the Elgars to the Cincinnati Country Club in Walnut Hills, an isolated area with a golf course, and they would reside here for the rest of their time in

Cincinnati when Elgar was not conducting rehearsals or performances.

32 Alice Elgar, Cincinnati, to Carice Elgar, 23 April 2006, EBML 78.

33 Cincinnati Enquirer, 18 April 1906, 7.

34 EBML 78.

13 The May Festival’s Board of Directors hoped Elgar’s celebrity would be a drawing card that would attract a massive audience to the May Festival, but he would seldom be seen. The previous festivals had had open rehearsals and many other public opportunities for Cincinnatians to meet and mingle with the stars, but this would not be the case in 1906. With a completely restructured program, Frank Van der Stucken anticipated rehearsals would be full of personnel problems and musical challenges and considered options that would allow the performers to focus on the music. Subsequently, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that rehearsals would be closed to the public:

It has been decided that beginning to-day all the rehearsals of the May Festival Chorus, orchestra, or chorus and orchestra, given before the first Festival concert of Tuesday evening, May 1, shall be entirely private; that no tickets will be issued for these rehearsals, and that only the necessary and usual escort of women members of the chorus will constitute an exception to this rule.35

Even if the inquisitive wanted to read about Elgar in the local paper, very few interviews would be found because of the composer’s personal indisposition toward the reporters.

In the letter that Lady Elgar penned to her daughter upon arrival in Cincinnati, she wrote that Maxwell and Van der Stucken were accompanied with reporters and photographer, and “this rather infuriated Faser [Elgar].”36 While Elgar was at the Cincinnati Country

Club, he penned a letter to his publisher, Alfred Littleton, that indicates his distaste for the press, writing, “it is so very pleasant: the snapshotters & interviewers are soon disposed of & the rest is sunshine.”37 Even the press was aware of Elgar’s attitude; in a rare interview with the composer after Elgar’s first performance at the May Festival, a

35 Cincinnati Enquirer, 18 April 1906, 7.

36 EBML 78.

37 J. N. Moore, Elgar and His Publisher: Letters of a Creative Life (New York : Oxford University Press, 1987), 643.

14 Cincinnati Enquirer reporter wrote, “With his usual aversion to publicity, the eminent

composer was loathe to discuss the evening’s work.”38 Outside of the May Festival,

Elgar attended few social functions, and those he did attend were private, upper-class

parties.

Elgar was also under pressure from his publisher to complete his orchestration for

The Kingdom. In the same letter to Alfred Littleton, Elgar expressed his desire to have

the rest of the proofs delivered to him, and the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that the

composer spent most of his mornings and evenings completing this task in solitude:

Sir Edward Elgar has been living at the Country Club since he came to conduct some of the festival rehearsals over a fortnight ago. The desire for privacy, to which he gave expression when he came, has been respected, and he has enjoyed the transportingly beautiful scene with which he has been surrounded and the opportunities for work and exercise which the conditions offered to the full.39

In several private sources, the Elgars comment on the composer’s orchestration

workload. On April 27, Elgar wrote a letter to Ivor Atkins, choirmaster of the Worcester

Cathedral: “Letter recd. No music yet. All well here but hot. Dreadfully busy

orchestrating the Kingdom.”40 The next day, Lady Elgar commented in her diary that “E.

had a great day at his orchestration, worked for some hours.”41 Perhaps the greatest hindrance to Elgar’s public life, which might have also kept the press away, came through a cable on May 1 that informed Elgar of his father’s death. Elgar did not attend the opening concert, which was the board-endorsed event in memory of Theodore

Thomas, in order to properly mourn for his own loss.

38 Cincinnati Enquirer, 3 May 1906, 7.

39 Cincinnati Enquirer, 6 May 1906, 3.

40 E. W. Atkins, The Elgar-Atkins Friendship (Newton Abbot : David & Charles, 1984), 150.

41 The Diary of Alice Elgar, 28 April 1906, unpublished, The Collection of the Elgar Birthplace Museum.

15 Elgar conducted several concerts at the 1906 May Festival.42 The second concert was held on Wednesday, May 2, 1906, and the entire evening was devoted to Elgar’s The

Apostles, an oratorio from 1903. The following afternoon’s concert contained the

composer’s In the South Overture in a mixed program of various, canonical works.43 On

Saturday afternoon, May 5, Elgar conducted his Introduction and Allegro, a work entirely

for strings. The final concert was held on the same evening, and the program consisted of

The Dream of Gerontius followed by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. After the festival, the Cincinnati Enquirer claimed that the 1906 performances “marked a new order of

things” in the history of the festival and that “Sir Edward Elgar’s brief stay here was a

matter of great moment to the musical history of the community, and the performance of

his works under his immediate direction a matter that will not soon be forgotten.”44

Sir Edward and Lady Elgar remained in Cincinnati on Sunday, May 6, and they

lunched at The Pillars where “music by a negro band [gave] Sir Edward an idea of

another kind of American music.”45 Lawrence Maxwell, Jr. accompanied the Elgars to

the train station, and Lady Elgar wrote that “Maxwell was very proud & jubilant &

admiring of E.”46 The couple left Cincinnati, traveling to Niagara Falls. While in New

York, they mailed a Cincinnati Zoo postcard to their daughter, Carice.

42 Though the Festival Board had shown interest in commissioning a work from Elgar, all of the composer’s works had been previously performed in Europe and America. Every piece other than Gerontius, however, was a Cincinnati premiere.

43 A transcription of the 1906 May Festival program is in the appendix.

44 Cincinnati Enquirer, 6 May 1906, 3.

45 Ibid.

46 The Diary of Alice Elgar, 7 May 1906.

16 To the Cincinnati Enquirer, Elgar’s residence in 1906 was “a moment of great matter to the musical portion of the community.”47 Relying on Elgar’s presence, both physically and musically, to draw the audience, the financial support, and the artistic respect that would insure the continuation of the May Festival tradition, it became necessary to create other means for the community to embrace and explore Elgar.

Criticism and concert reviews became the forum for Elgar’s public appearances outside of his actual conducting. This was not done through standard interviews; the composer limited the access of most reporters to him. Rather, critics and reporters conveyed Elgar through the criticism, concert reviews, and the journalistic writing that surrounded the festival.

This thesis demonstrates that the critics were instrumental in exploring Elgar’s celebrity, which embodied the characteristics of mysticism, Britishness, and modernism in order to kindle the public support that would assure the security of future May

Festivals. After an examination of some precedents that can be compared to Elgar’s reception in Cincinnati, a chapter is devoted to each topic. Elgar’s mysticism is analyzed in view of his Catholicism and Cincinnati’s religious heritage. His Englishness is surveyed through American perceptions of the British people and particular constructions that the press used to describe Elgar as an Englishman. Elgar’s reception as a modern composer is examined through the lens of Cincinnati’s affinity for the “modern music” of

Strauss and Wagner.

Although separated by a century, the circumstances and strategies surrounding the

2006 Academy Awards ceremony and the 1906 May Festival are similar. The ceremony and festival were both corporate events struggling with change: the Oscars with its

47 Cincinnati Enquirer, 6 May 1906, 3.

17 fluctuating audience demographic and the May Festival with the loss of its founding director. In an effort to alleviate their concerns, each institution chose a celebrity whose appeal would hopefully increase patronage and the publicity for their performances, and,

John Stewart and Edward Elgar were considered outsiders to their respective venues.

Most importantly, the media was vital to the marketing and reception of each affair through their speculation and analysis of the newcomers and their accomplishments.

18 CHAPTER TWO

MYSTICISM

In his last letter, dated 25 December 1944, to Frederick Delius, Elgar writes, “It has been a matter of no small amusement to me that, as my name somewhat unfortunately is indissolubly connected with sacred music, some of your friends and mine have tried to make me believe that I am ill-disposed to the trend and sympathy of your Mass of Life.”1

It is partly true that, in the later years of his life, Elgar “progressively abandoned God for

chemistry and dogs.”2 Before these years of religious apostasy, however, Elgar was

bound to his Roman Catholic faith through his sense of orthodoxy, and his devout

practice has been a lightning rod for several important debates in Elgar scholarship. In

attempts to solve the riddle of the Enigma Variations, several scholars have established

their arguments on Elgar’s religiousness. For instance, Byron Adams contends that

homoerotic material is found within Enigma, and this material is revealed through a study

of Elgar’s Catholic discipline, interpreting a sentence from Elgar’s program notes, which

reads, “The enigma I will not explain—its dark saying must be left unguessed,” and

assuming that the words dark saying are lifted from the Vulgate version of First

Corinthians 13:12:

On 12 February 1899, Edward Elgar, who was within eight days of completing the orchestration of his “Enigma” Variations, attended Quinquagesima Mass at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Malvern. As the former organist of St. George’s Roman Catholic Church in Worcester, Elgar was familiar with the

1 J. N. Moore, Edward Elgar: Letters of a Lifetime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 241.

2 Butt, “Roman Catholicism” in The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, ed. Grimley and Rushton, 106.

19 liturgy of the day, as well as with the Vulgate version of the Epistle, drawn from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Elgar certainly knew its translation in the Authorized Version: “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.” Elgar must have rendered “aenigmate,” a term with Greek origins, as “darkly,” which in the passage from Corinthians means “obscurely” or “as in a puzzle.”3

Though this seems demanding of Elgar’s religious education, Adams’s analysis is not alone. Ian Parrott uses the same information to conclude that Elgar’s “dark saying” is a code for a numerical game in the work:

Elgar was a practicing Roman Catholic at the time and knew his Vulgate well. In 1899 Quinquagesima Sunday fell on February 12—bang in the middle of his last week’s work, orchestrating his Variations for Orchestra, op. 36, “Dedicated to my Friends pictured within.” Did Elgar go to church that day? Mrs. Elgar Blake, by reference to her mother’s diary, was able to tell me that he did. By referring to a Chapter 13, which is divided into 13 verses, Elgar was to see his 13 friends in a new light, and they him.4

Beyond these attempts to solve the Enigma Variations, the composer’s Catholicism has also played a prominent role in his biography.

Elgar’s father became organist at St. George’s Roman Catholic Church in 1846, and Edward would take the post at the same Worcester church between 1885 and 1889.

For Elgar’s musical education, this exposure would prove beneficial. Examining the collection of surviving service orders, John Butt finds that the Catholic service gave Elgar the opportunity to hear more continental music, such as the works of W. A. Mozart, F. J.

Haydn, Beethoven, Hummel, Weber, Pergolesi, Handel, and Spohr, than an Anglican service could offer, and the composer “enjoyed the frequent services of opera singers

3 Byron Adams, “The ‘Dark Saying’ of the Enigma: Homoeroticism and the Elgarian Paradox,” 19th-Century Music 23 (2000): 218–9.

4 Ian Parrott, “Elgar’s Enigmas,” The Musical Times 111 (1970): 895.

20 visiting Worcester, since these were invariably Catholic.”5 Elgar’s general schooling was also Catholic; he attended various institutions in and near Worcester, such as the Littleton

House. His faith, however, did trouble him in several ways. Gertrude Walker, from

Worcestershire was an early love interest of Elgar, but when he asked her father for permission to marry Gertrude, “the grounds of his rejection were obvious: he [Elgar] was a Roman Catholic, had no prospects and was not a ‘gentleman.’”6 Beyond mere religious differences, this denial follows the Protestant mistrust of Catholics, believing it

“impossible to owe equal allegiance to the British monarch and to the Pope,” particularly after the Act of Catholic Emancipation in 1829.7 Though Elgar’s Catholicism is a crucial element in his biography, it has a mixed reception as a source of his compositional character, and this is most true of his most Catholic work—The Dream of Gerontius.

The Dream of Gerontius

John Henry Newman wrote an extended poem titled “The Dream of Gerontius” in

1865. In Henry Jennings’s biography of Cardinal Newman, the author writes, “The death-bed of a dear friend was the inspiring cause which occasioned ‘The Dream of

Gerontius.’”8 The poem is a story of a soul’s journey through the afterlife, including

Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, and the poetry primarily consists of dialogue between

5 Butt, “Roman Catholicism” in The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, ed. Grimley and Rushton, 107.

6 Robert Anderson, “Gertrude Walker: An Elgarian Friendship,” The Musical Times 125 (1984): 698.

7 Butt, “Roman Catholicism” in The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, ed. Grimley and Rushton, 106.

8 Henry J. Jennings, Cardinal Newman: The Story of His Life (London: Houghton & Co., 1892), 87.

21 Gerontius and his Angel. The work was a commercial success in Britain and was reprinted in Newman’s anthology of collected verse in 1868. Artistically, Gerontius entered the literary canon soon after publication. Richard Hutton, a London literary critic, testifies to the poem’s importance and timelessness:

The Dream of Gerontius is one of the most unique and original of the poems of the nineteenth century, as well as that one of all of them which is in every sense the least in sympathy with the temper of the present time, indeed the most completely independent of the Zeitgeist.9

This importance was only bolstered through the death of General Charles Gordon.

Gordon, an officer in the British Army and a hero of imperial Britain, led his forces to victory over the rebels in the Second Opium War and achieved further notoriety when he established peace in the Darfur Revolution of 1878 through simple, diplomatic efforts. British opinion of Gordon was one of imperial grandeur, military strength with the civility of an Englishman. In 1884 Gordon defied an order from the British government to abandon its efforts against insurgents in Sudan. With his military support withdrawn, Gordon’s small band of soldiers defended the city of Khartoum, but the

British public rallied for the redeploying of troops to support Gordon. After the government gave in to popular demands, the forces returned to Sudan to find Gordon’s body and a captured city. When Cardinal Newman read of Gordon’s death, “he was deeply moved to learn that one of the books which Gordon had with him in Khartoum was The Dream of Gerontius, and the copy, marked in pencil, was eventually sent to him to see.”10 Gerontius began to be reprinted, and newspapers published Gordon’s

9 Richard H. Hutton, Cardinal Newman (London: Methuen and Co., 1889), 48.

10 Bertram Newman, Cardinal Newman: A Biographical and Literary Study (New York: The Century Co., 1925), 197.

22 annotations, which many readers sketched into their own copies of the poem. Soon, the poem began to be published in editions with “Gordon’s Markings.”11 Father Thomas

Knight gave Elgar such an edition as a wedding gift in 1889.

Elgar’s musical setting of the poem begins with an orchestral prelude, followed by Gerontius crying, “Jesu, Maria—I am near to death, and Thou art calling me.”

Arguing that Gerontius is a stylistic synthesis of oratorio and opera, Stephen Banfield describes the ambience of the unstaged work’s opening:

You can almost hear the curtain going up at the end of the Prelude, to reveal first the dimly-lit sick room and then the tossing and turning of the dying man in his bed, agonies which we back-project into the Prelude itself once we realise what has been going on as it were behind that curtain, just as, some ten years later, we realise with prurience what has been going on before the curtain rises on a very different bed scene in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. Elgar’s dramatic timing and establishment of atmosphere in these few moments of mise en scene are perfect, just enough—only eight bars—to prepare us for Gerontius to speak.12

Elgar’s text is his own abridgement, set in two parts, and the music is through-composed within each part. Part One takes place on Earth as Gerontius passes into death. As his health fails, priests continue to pray for him, requesting God to have mercy on his soul.

After a lengthy aria, Gerontius dies and the performing forces, soloists, chorus, and a large orchestra, unite in a final prayer for the deceased. Part Two begins with the appearance of Gerontius’s Guardian Angel, who will escort him through the different stages of afterlife. The pair travels first across the landscape of Hell, where the famous

Chorus of Demons sing of their dismay. After this Gerontius is allowed a glimpse of

Heaven, and the angel leads him to Purgatory to await his soul’s final purification before entering eternal paradise.

11 John Pollock, Gordon: The Man Behind the Legend (London: Constable Publishing, 1993).

12 Stephen Banfield, “The Dream of Gerontius at 100: Elgar’s Other Opera?,” The Musical Times 141, no. 1873 (Winter 1984): 23.

23 Gerontius became, along with the Enigma Variations, one of Elgar’s most cherished works, and it was primarily responsible for the subsequent commissioning of more oratorios and, consequently, his status as a “sacred music composer.” Premiered in

1900, the oratorio corresponds chronologically with Elgar’s emergence as an international composer, and Gerontius was Elgar’s first large-scale work to be successfully presented, solidifying its position as Elgar’s quintessential work and the oratorio as Elgar’s genre par excellence. Stephen Banfield describes Gerontius’s place in

Elgar’s fame:

Elgar knew how firmly the mantle [of authority] could now sit upon his shoulders when he promoted himself to the role of Newman’s musical interpreter thirty-five years later. Both wrote and published their Dream quickly and decisively, for all their diffidence. In a sense it was Elgar’s confession, as it had been part of Newman’s ongoing one, and to make a confession public is to identify oneself, however remotely, with St. Augustine. Or, if not necessarily to confess, to write such a work is at least to profess in the sense of leaving no room for disclaiming the biggest issues: a professor’s inaugural lecture should do just that, and Gerontius, when its time came after eight years’ contemplation, was undoubtedly Elgar’s inaugural.13

Reception of Gerontius

The Cincinnati premiere of The Dream of Gerontius was held at the 1904 May

Festival, and the Cincinnati Post hailed the performance, under the direction of Theodore

Thomas, as the “climax of the May Festival Season.”14 The soloists for this performance were Muriel Foster, contralto; William Green, tenor; and Watkin Mills, bass; and the

Cincinnati Enquirer documented Foster’s credentials in an article that preceded the performance:

13 Banfield, “The Dream of Gerontius at 100,” 23.

14 Cincinnati Post, 14 May 1904, 5.

24 Miss Foster makes her festival debut at this concert. She comes warmly recommended by Dr. Elgar, and was chosen by him for the part of the angel in Gerontius at the first production of the work. She has been identified with this part in all the English performances. Miss Foster during the last three weeks has sung in New York, Boston, and Chicago, and no English singer who has visited the country received such an enthusiastic reception from the leading critics.15

Indeed, Foster did not disappoint the critics: the next day’s Enquirer reported, “As the exquisite melodies rippled from her marvelous organ there was none but was willing to concede that no fitter person could have been chosen by the composer to originate this part.”16 Henry Krehbiel, a well-known critic from New York and a hometown hero to

Cincinnati, praised the performances of all the soloists, chorus, and orchestra:

Knowing the character of the performances which the oratorio has received in the East, I have no hesitation in saying that this surpassed them all, especially in the creation of that atmospheric mood which is essential to an appreciation of the composition’s greatness and beauty.17

Though the work requires an “atmosphere” to be appreciated by the audience, Krehbiel

describes Elgar’s musical setting of Cardinal Newman’s religious poem and the theme of

passing into death as accessible:

Edward Elgar, the English composer was the star of the evening. Around him in The Dream of Gerontius all the other musical lights revolved. A devout Catholic himself, Elgar approached his subject with awe and reverence—but his treatment and working out is so solemn, and sacred a subject, with all its mystery, is not veiled in mystery.18

This broad understanding of the work mirrors the idea of its universality found in English

criticism of Gerontius.

15 Cincinnati Enquirer, 13 May 1904, 7.

16 Cincinnati Enquirer, 14 May 1904, 7.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

25 The British criticism of The Dream of Gerontius often finds the work to lack

mysticism and to have a universal appeal across the religious landscape. In some cases

critics suggest that Elgar misses the religious significance of Cardinal Newman’s poem.

For example, E. A. Baughan, a British critic and reporter for The Daily Telegraph, wrote,

“If [Gerontius] has a weakness it is that a note of mysticism which somehow lies behind

Newman’s realistic and verbally clumsy poem is not quite realised.”19 In the same

review, Baughan finds that “[Gerontius] seems to me just to miss a spiritual

something.”20 In most British criticism, the religious experience of Gerontius, as a person, is universal and not reserved only for those initiated into a mystical experience.

Arthur Johnstone, the music critic for The Manchester Guardian, wrote that Gerontius is

“a typical person, belonging to no particular age or country,” and Johnstone’s analysis of

Elgar’s work began with a comparison of Gerontius and Everyman. 21 The latter is a

sixteenth-century morality play, in which the title role befriends five other characters:

Discretion, Strength, Five-wits, Beauty, and Good-Deeds. All of these companions

accompany Everyman in his journey to meet Death, but by the end of the trek all of his

friends except Good-Deeds have abandoned him. In the final scene, the narrator returns

to the stage to explain how good deeds save man from “everlasting death”:

The moral men may have in mind; Ye hearers, take it of worth, old and young, And forsake pride, for he deceiveth you in the end, And remember Beauty, Five-wits, Strength, and Discretion, They all at last do Everyman forsake, Save his Good-Deeds, there doth he take.

19 E. A. Baughan, “Music that Speaks to the Heart,” in The Best of Me: A Gerontius Centenary Companion, ed. Geoffrey Hodgkins (London: Elgar Editions, 1999), 129.

20 Ibid., 135.

21 Arthur Johnstone “A New Kind of Musical Eloquence,” in The Best of Me: A Gerontius Centenary Companion, ed. Geoffrey Hodgkins (London: Elgar Editions, 1999), 144.

26 But beware, and they be small Before God, he hath no help at all. None excuse may be there for Everyman: Alas, how shall he do then? For after death amends may no man make, For then mercy and pity do him forsake. If his reckoning be not clear when he do come, God will say—ite malediciti in ignem aeternum. And he that hath his account whole and sound, High in heaven he shall be crowned; Unto which place God bring us all thither That we may live body and soul together. Thereto help the Trinity, Amen, say ye, for saint Charity.22

Johnstone compares the two works, finding that both describe the journey of a soul to the afterlife, but for the critic the most important aspect of Gerontius and Everyman is that they allow their audiences to understand the ecumenical experience of death and the contemplation of eternity. “Everyman” developed into an entire category of fictional character analysis, and though Everyman is a character that everyone can relate to, the generic religious experience described by Johnstone is not found in the reviews of the

1906 May Festival.

After Elgar’s first night on the conductor’s podium at the Festival, The Cincinnati

Enquirer published a review that emphasized the importance of the festival tradition, the composer’s music, and the mysticism found in his works:

Last night’s concert was an event of musical history as something of heroic moment and extraordinary éclat. No wonder that never before at the Festivals so many musicians of authority from all parts of the country were gathered and that Cincinnati for one week at least has become the musical Mecca of America. That Mr. Elgar himself attached much importance to this Festival performance of his principal works is easily recognized from the fact that for the past two weeks he has been at home with the chorus and gently leading them into the sprit of his own conceptions and inspirations on the subject. His finishing touches were in the

22 Everyman: A Morality Play, Early English Books 1475–1640 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1985) 52.

27 direction of insisting on a slower tempo here and there-more subdued effects and greater contrasts-leading to a greater embodiment of the mystic forces in his music and their adequate expression.23

This review reflects a shift in the discourse that surrounded the performances of

Gerontius and demonstrates some of the distinction between European and American

criticism. British reviews found that the oratorio lacked religious mysticism and what the

work displayed was a religious affect that everyone could experience. Conversely,

Cincinnati critics describe Gerontius as a mystical work; while it does express emotional overtones that the audience can perceive to exist, only those initiated into a Roman

Catholic, religious mindset can understand its ultimate meaning.

Under Elgar’s baton the Cincinnati critics expressed an expectation that the concert would give an extra-musical experience. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported, “The

chorus has prepared Gerontius perfectly, and, under Sir Edward Elgar’s personal

direction, a performance of great spiritual and artistic significance may be expected

tonight.”24 The Cincinnati Times-Star warns, however, that Elgar’s conducting is of little importance when compared to his abilities as a composer to reveal a sense of mysticism in his music. Under the headline “Exalted Spirituality Marks Sir Edward Elgar’s Work,” the Times-Star published:

There is a little story going about which, though not positively authenticated, is nevertheless illustrative. It is told that when Sir Edward Elgar was approached on the subject of directing his compositions at the May Festival, he hesitated, remarking that he was a composer and not a conductor. Sir Edward Elgar’s position in the festival scheme should be considered solely from the standpoint of authorship, and in that role will be found of deep significance as exhibiting the

23 Cincinnati Enquirer, 3 May 1906, 3.

24 Cincinnati Enquirer, 5 May 1906, 16.

28 latest phase of musical development. Elgar’s best effort is along the line of exalted mysticism.25

The above article reveals two of the fundamental themes found in the reviews of the 1906

May Festival: Elgar’s poor conducting and the mysticism of his works.

These two themes are not necessarily contrary. Henry Krehbiel described Elgar’s conducting style and explained how it accommodates the composer’s inclination towards the importance of emotions:

Sir Edward is not a conductor to invite stout reliance from a technical point of view. His gestures seem more calculated to evoke expression than precision. He beats nuance more clearly than he does time. He seems, indeed, singularly indifferent to the technical duties of the conductor, but he invites sympathy for the spirit of his music much oftener than he commands obedience to its letter.26

The Cincinnati Enquirer reconciled the composer’s conducting and mysticism by explaining that the composer’s artistic intentions reigned over his mannerisms on the podium:

It would be unfair to pass upon the qualifications of Mr. Elgar as a conductor. In the preparatory work two weeks before the Festival it became evident that he insisted more upon nuance and an understanding of the inner, spiritual meaning of his music than upon technical finish and rhythmic precision.27

Beyond the spiritual atmosphere that Elgar’s conducting suggested, the critics found that Gerontius was fixed on mysticism, and The Cincinnati Enquirer printed a review that established the criteria that must be met in order to properly set Cardinal

Newman’s poetry to music:

It is evident that the musical setting of such a poem called for exceptional qualities on the part of the composer. He must be in emotional sympathy with its

25 Cincinnati Times-Star, 3 May 1906, 2.

26 Cincinnati Enquirer, 3 May 1906, 3.

27 Cincinnati Enquirer, 6 May 1906, 3.

29 mystical suggestiveness and recognize also its religious significance. In all points Elgar appears to have been well equipped and to have written with devotion and conviction.28

In the same article, the reporter described the essential features that Elgar required from

his libretto:

Cardinal Newman wished to have music set to [his poem], and talked with Dr. Dvorák, who did not find the subject sufficiently dramatic. The quality of mysticism, however, pleased Dr. Elgar, who is a devout Roman Catholic, and not disinclined toward mysticism.29

The spiritual similarities between Elgar and Newman begin with their practice of

the Catholic faith, and it is this aspect that creates a sense of mysticism in Elgar’s works.

The Enquirer published a review of the performance that described the work’s mysterious, spiritual traits, which cannot be understood by the common listener:

The mysticism of Elgar’s creation is many times apparent, but only in musical form and expression—the subject itself upon which this mysticism is so effectively employed is as clear as daylight to the Catholic believer. It is pierced by the eye of faith as much as the beautiful poem of Cardinal Newman that supplied to the composer his expository text. The prayers of the priest for the dying, the supplications of the faithful for the souls in purgatory, the journey of the liberated soul through space in the company of his guardian angel—his arrival close to the Judgment Seat—the execrations of the devilish host, the purging of the remains of sin in a place which is heaven without its actual enjoyments, may be mysterious to the uninitiated, but they are familiar to every Catholic child who knows his catechism.30

In the Cincinnati criticism of Gerontius, the spiritual complexity of Elgar’s mysticism

does not allow the entire audience to fully experience the performance as it was intended

by the composer and poet.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Cincinnati Enquirer, 7 May 1906, 7.

30 Mysticism

The word mysticism, etymologically rooted in the Greek mystikos, is the designation of a philosophical idea that is, as its name describes, mysterious and secretive. Christopher Nugent, a theology scholar, describes the act of defining mysticism as more challenging than uncovering the history of the subject. He writes,

“Mysticism is both exclusive and inclusive, and nothing that can be said about it exhausts it.”31 Scholars of theology normally formulate a definition of mysticism as a direct experience with or of God, and their studies often document historical examples of mystics. After the Biblical authors, particularly the Apostle Paul, many authors begin their analyses of mystics in the Christian tradition with Origen of Alexandria. Living in the third century, Origen was a leader of exegetical thought and published several theological treatises. He is viewed as a mystic because of the revelation that came to him, revealing a second gospel found within the works of Christ. Describing this vision as the basis of Origen’s dogma, W. K. Fleming writes:

Mysticism finds its place in Origen’s conception of the Incarnation. We have the idea of the mysteries and their initiates in a more sharply defined form. Those who look to and value the Scripture facts, and especially the Gospel history, as the basis of their faith merely have according to him “somatic” or outward Christianity. Even the Cross is but teaching for babes. The acts of Christ are riddles—symbols that shadow forth the “pneumatic” or spiritual Gospel, for the real life, death, and resurrection of the Christ are part of a universal law enacted beyond time, in the counsels of eternity.32

This concept of inner, personal faith and an initiation into a knowledge of God are tropes of mysticism scholarship, which values individual’s experience. Though some texts

31 Christopher Nugent, Mysticism, Death, and Dying (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994), 2.

32 W. K. Fleming, Mysticism in Christianity (London: Robert Scott, 1913), 59.

31 discuss categories or schools of mystical thought, such as Sufism and Quietism, most

authors focus on particular mystics, such as St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Jan van Ruysbroek,

or St. Ignatius of Loyola. Recent scholarship, however, has surveyed the experiences of

mystics across the centuries and found similarities among them that are used as tests to

identify an authentic mystical experience. In Varieties of Mystic Experience, Elmer

O’Brien summarizes his findings in three rules that determine whether something or someone is mystical:

1. The object confronted in mystic experience is thought by the mystic to be somehow ultimate. 2. The manner of confrontation is immediate, direct. 3. The confrontation is always different from the familiar exercise of either sense perception or of reasoning.33

The assumption that a mystical experience is singular and personal, not universal, guides

these rules, and it is under this overarching supposition that Gerontius fails to be a

mystical work in the scholarly sense of the word, despite the claims made by the

Cincinnati critics in 1906. Elgar revealed his intent for Gerontius to be an “Everyman-

work” in a letter, dated August 1900, to A. E. Jaeger, one of the composer’s friends and

his publisher:

Look here: I imagined Gerontius to be a man like us, not a priest or a saint, but a sinner, a repentant one of course but still no end of a worldly man in his life and now brought to book. Therefore I’ve not filled his part with church tunes and rubbish but a good, healthy, full-blooded romantic, remembered worldliness so to speak.34

Elgar’s ecumenical intent mirrors the language of reviews from the British premiere and

first May Festival performance in 1904 of Gerontius and clearly removes the work from

33 Elmer O’Brien, Varieties of Mystic Experience (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 4.

34 Percy M. Young, Letters to Nimrod (London: D. Dobson, 1965), 101.

32 the category of private spirituality. Could another definition of mysticism have possibly

informed the critics at the 1906 Festival?

Mysticism in early twentieth-century America was limited to the Roman Catholic

faith, and Protestants at the turn of the century did not regard the mystical experience as

legitimate for several reasons.35 Mysticism is an extra-Biblical knowledge of God, and

all Protestant denominations in America relied solely on Biblical scripture for their

worship, services, and doctrine.36 For instance, the Lutheran denomination maintains that

“the Bible is the inspired Word of God alone,” and their faith does not consider religious

experiences, save for the sacrament, or apocryphal texts to give spiritual enlightenment.37

Presbyterians and the other Protestant denominations in Cincinnati in the early-twentieth

century had similar doctrines.38

The mysticism of Gerontius is founded on the dramatic landscape of death and

the afterlife. In Mysticism, Death, and Dying, Christopher Nugent examines the

relationship between death and mysticism and finds that the most mystical experience in

the Catholic tradition is death. He writes, “We speak of ‘the mystery of death.’ The very

word mysticism seems rooted in death.”39 Another theological aspect of Catholicism that

35 Mysticism in America is detailed in “Twentieth-century Catholic Mysticism” in Steven Fanning, Mystics of the Christian Tradition (London: Routledge, 2001), 190–201.

36 The first Protestant denomination to recognize non-Biblical experiences in their services was the Pentecostal movement, which began in the first decade of the twentieth century. A detailed comparison of the beliefs of fundamentalist denominations and early Pentecostal doctrine can be found in Walter Hollenweger, Pentecostalism: Origins and Developments Worldwide (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1997).

37 Frank S. Mead, Samuel S. Hill, and Craig D. Atwood, Handbook of Denominations in the United States, 11th ed. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), 206.

38 Concise summations of denominational theology and historical developments can be found in ibid.

39 Nugent, Mysticism, Death, and Dying, 12.

33 is foreign to the Protestant view of eternity is the doctrine of purgatory. Ludwig Ott

describes this tenet in Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma:

In purgatory suffrages operate in such a manner that the satisfactory value of the good works is offered to God in substitution for the temporal punishment for sins which the poor souls still have to render. It operates by way of remission of temporal punishments due to sins.40

The journeys of death and purgatory are the dramatic settings of the Dream of Gerontius,

and they are embedded in Catholic mysticism—a theological point that Protestants,

believing in an instant transportation to God’s presence after death, do not embrace.

With the contrast between Catholic and Protestant doctrine, “mysticism” attains a new

definition. It is no longer a direct experience with or of God but the spiritual experience

of Roman Catholicism.

Conclusions

Before the British premiere of Gerontius, A. E. Jaeger wrote a letter to Elgar that

revealed his anxiety over the religious reception of the work in England. He wrote:

There is a lot of Joseph and Mary about the work: very proper for a Roman Catholic lying at death’s door to sing about, but likely to frighten some damned fools of Protestants.41 I had a long talk to the secretary of one of the big Glasgow societies yesterday and showed him proofs and so generally enthused over the work that I hope he will strongly recommend Gerontius to his Society. But he at once, on reading the words, spoke of the Roman Catholic element being so prominent. “Tommy rot!” you say: “Ditto!” says I, who am rather an Agnostic than anything else. But alas one must deal with people as one finds them, and if,

40 Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (New York: Tan Books and Publishers, 1974), 322.

41 Jaeger uses the phrase “Joseph and Mary” to note the Catholic nature of Elgar’s work. Protestants have historically shunned the Catholic pre-occupation with the non-divine, Biblical figures. Joseph and Mary do not appear in the oratorio. Rather, Jaeger uses their names as synonyms with the “Roman Catholic element” of Gerontius.

34 without bowdlerising a superb poem one can remove Mary and Joseph to a more distant background, it may not be a bad thing.42

Elgar replied that he would not change a word of his text, and Jaeger’s concerns never

came to fruition.

Cincinnati was a stronghold of both Catholic and Protestant denominational

churches. The city was a seat for the district’s Roman Catholic archbishop and was home

to large Lutheran and Presbyterian houses of worship. The success of the 1904 May

Festival performance of Gerontius affirms that the Cincinnati audience had no hostility towards the mystical implications of the work. Yet, there is a distinct change in the critical descriptions of Elgar and Gerontius that accompany Elgar’s presence at the 1906

festival, and the subjects of mysticism and initiation in the 1906 reviews replace the

ecumenical perceptions of 1904. The critics at the 1906 May Festival acted as apologists

for Elgar’s Catholicism. The peculiarity of a Catholic, English composer and the

significant, but not apparent, religious depth of Gerontius implored explanation. In

Cincinnati the critics used mysticism as a point of departure for the discussion of Elgar

and his work. By combining descriptions of Elgar’s expressive style of conducting, the

religious nature of Cardinal Newman’s poem, and the mystical, musical setting of the

text, the reviews of the concert offer a glimpse into two realms of Elgar. In the same

criticism, “mysticism” refers to Elgar’s inner being (his religion) and outer workings (his

expressive leadership that brings forth the spiritual aspects of his music).

42 Young, Letters to Nimrod, 91.

35 CHAPTER THREE

BRITISHNESS

The idea of “Britishness” has been, as Paul Ward argues in Britishness Since

1870, completely unstable throughout its history, invariably in the process of construction

and reconstruction.1 Many authors have attempted to define national identity, and their

ideas can be found in the popular press. Bill Bryson, for example, provides a list of

cultural items that he believes only the British can understand:

There are certain things that you have to be British in order to appreciate: Sooty, Tony Hancock, Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men, Marmite, skiffle music, the Morecombe and Wise segment in which Angela Rippon shows off her legs by dancing, Dixon of Dock Green, HP sauce, salt cellars with a single large hole, making sandwiches from bread you’ve sliced yourself, really milky tea, allotments, the belief that household wiring is an interesting topic for conversation, steam trains, toast made under a gas grill, thinking that going to choose wallpaper with your mate constitutes a reasonable good day out, wine made out of something other than grapes, unheated bedrooms and bathrooms, seaside rock, erecting windbreaks on the beach.2

In contrast, many academic scholars, who sell far fewer copies of their books, have

studied the same topic, beginning with the 1707 Act of Union between England and

Scotland or the 1800 Act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain. Many nationalism

scholars, such as Tom Nairn and Christopher Harvie, agree that Britishness has been in a

crisis and decline since the end of the World War II, but agree that the sense of national

coherence before the 1940s was strong and multifaceted.3 Though these sources examine

1 Paul Ward, Britishness Since 1870 (London: Routledge, 2004), 2.

2 Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island (London: Doubleday Books, 1995), 117.

3 Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London: New Left Books, 1977); Christopher Harvie, “The Moment of British Nationalism, 1939–1970,” Political Quarterly 71 (2000): 328–40.

36 the same subject, they approach different audiences with analyses that concentrate on

Britain’s ethnic identity solely on its native soil.

Of foremost concern here is the construction of Britishness in the United States.

Though this chapter will focus on several specific characteristics of perceived

Britishness, it will consider the overarching attitudes of Americans toward the English, particularly those Katherine Jones has documented. Jones’s Accent on Privilege: English

Identities and Anglophilia in the U.S. is a sociological study that examines “English accents on American television to sell high-quality product, the popularity of Masterpiece

Theatre and similar British television programming, the influx of British films and actors in the U.S., the extensive interest in Princess Diana and the mourning that accompanied her death, and the fact that Britain is Americans’ number-one travel destination in

Europe.”4 Though much of Jones’s work emphasizes current attitudes, she explains that the first two decades of the twentieth century contain the same “hegemonic images of

Englishness, especially those emanating from media, popular culture, or collective memories or myths,” culminating in the perception of England as a “beautiful, green, historical theme park” and the English as intelligent, sophisticated, white, and male.5

Elgar was perceived as all of these things in the press, but was unavailable for public appearance at the 1906 festivities for several reasons, discussed above. First,

Elgar generally despised the American press and would grant few interviews during his time in Cincinnati. Also, the normally public rehearsals were closed to all visitors to ensure the most professional of work environments in this crucial year of transition for

4 Katharine Jones, Accent on Privelege: English Identities and Anglophilia in the U. S. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 13.

5 Ibid., 14.

37 the May Festival. Last, Elgar was under immense pressure from his publicist to complete

his orchestration for The Kingdom, and the composer would spend most of his spare hours accomplishing this task. This is problematic, however, because the May Festival

Board of Directors would “depend upon Sir Edward Elgar as a foreign attraction.”6

Knowing that the city would be interested in the description of the exotic qualities

of the visiting composer, the local press used recurring markers to indicate Elgar’s

Britishness. Most prominently, critics repeatedly mentioned Elgar’s mustache in the

reviews of the concerts and reports of the composer’s time in Cincinnati. Also, the

reviews that discuss Elgar’s activities outside of rehearsals focus on his passion for golf

and his apartment at the Cincinnati Country Club. Finally, a particular report on the

arrival of the composer and his wife at the train station described the luggage and clothes.

Cincinnati reporters used all of these items, mustache, golf, and fashion, as images to

reveal the national qualities of Elgar and his wife and affirm Elgar’s Englishness to the

Cincinnati readership.

Elgar as British?

Though American audiences and newspapermen may have accepted Elgar as a

quintessentially British composer, the composer’s status as such in music history has

been debated, particularly in England’s perception of the composer. The English Musical

Renaissance is a contemporary appellation given to the growth of England’s nationalistic,

musical culture in the late nineteenth century. This growth includes the founding of the

Royal College of Music in 1882, the establishment of Henry Wood’s Queen’s Hall

Orchestra in 1896, and the founding of the Promenade Concerts in 1895. It is most

6 May Festival Minutes, vol. 4, June 19, 1905, 231.

38 associated with Sir Hubert Parry, Sir Charles Villier Stanford, and Sir Alexander

Mackenzie and, more importantly, the metropolitan and academic center of London.

Elgar, however, would “rise to become the outstanding English composer . . . without his ever being part of the London-led revival.”7

Elgar did not hesitate to assume the privileges that the Renaissance could afford him at first. After the successful premiere of Enigma Variations at St. James Hall in June of 1899, Stanford, Parry, and Mackenzie approached Elgar to join their ranks. At the heart of these meetings were proposals for honorary positions at Cambridge and the

Royal College of Music and a membership in the prestigious Athenaeum gentleman’s club. Though the composer accepted these academic and social accolades, he soon became disenchanted with the scholastic expectations placed upon him, refusing requests to stand examination duty and ignoring the elder composers’ pleas to join the battle being waged against London publishers for better wages. In doing this, Elgar revealed “his lack of any sense of belonging to a team, a sensibility so vital to the ‘official’ Renaissance.”8

Elgar did not need the publicity machine that the Renaissance composers had established; he was already a household name in Britain. In fact, British critics regarded

Elgar, as J. N. Moore discusses at length, as the “Rudyard Kipling of musicians,” revealing the composer’s magnitude, public popularity, and his increasing association with the royalty of England.9 Another factor that freed Elgar from the Renaissance was his success in Germany. Julius Buths, musical director for the Lower Rhine Festival, and

7 Hughes and Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance, 59.

8 Ibid., 64.

9 J. N. Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 240–5.

39 Otto Lessman, editor for Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung, both attended the premiere of The

Dream of Gerontius. In a review for The Musical Times, Lessman distinguished Elgar from his Renaissance peers:

The coming man has already arisen in the English musical world, an artist who has instinctively freed himself from the scholasticism which, until now, has bound English art firmly in its fetters, an artist who has thrown open mind and heart to the great achievements which the mighty tone masters of the century now departed have left us as a heritage for one to come—Edward Elgar, the composer of The Dream of Gerontius.10

Julius Buths gave the continental premiere of Enigma Variations and The Dream of

Gerontius in 1902, and Elgar became a European household name, his music being increasingly performed throughout Germany. At the Dusseldorf premiere, Richard

Strauss attended and gave an oft-quoted toast at the ensuing reception: “I raise my glass to the welfare and success of the first English progressivist, Meister Edward Elgar, and of the young progressivist school of English composers.”11

Elgar severed his ties to the Renaissance, particularly Stanford, in 1904 by two acts. Although Stanford had secured the composer a symphonic commission from the

Leeds Festival, Elgar withdrew his symphony and gave it instead to Hans Richter, a

Viennese conductor who had conducted the first complete performance of Wagner’s Der

Ring des Nibelungen at Bayreuth. In the same year, Stanford had advised the University of Leeds to offer Elgar a full professorship. The university accepted his advice and made the composer a generous offer, but Elgar declined and accepted the newly created

Richard Peyton Chair of Music at the University of Birmingham, which only required six lectures a year from the composer. Elgar’s priority for his German associates and his

10 Lessman, “Elgar,” 112.

11 Michael Kennedy, Life of Elgar (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 98–9.

40 apparent disregard for the laurels of British academia precipitated the Renaissance’s decision to discount Elgar from their ranks. Elgar’s actions have come to be seen as more than mere career decisions. Rather, they are a commentary on the artistic and philosophical differences in English music, marking “Elgar’s conscious decision to confront Grove’s Renaissance directly—the first time a powerful dissenting voice had been publicly heard, and from the most potentially damaging source.”12

Elgar’s proverbial “frontal assault” came in the form of his 1905–6 Peyton

Lecture Series, which he titled “A Future for English Music.” These lectures “set out a vision which amounted to an Elgarian ‘manifesto.’ In them, Elgar revealed his ambition to bring together his own artistic followers in Birmingham, in effect, founding a

‘Midlands School.’”13 In his first lecture, Elgar attempted to accomplish three goals: an execration of Renaissance academicism, a defense of his own musical style, and a new definition for English music. The Renaissance, Elgar argued, was a movement fixated on the past and neglectful of the present state of English music:

What, then, is and can be an English School of Music? It is easy to go back to the days of Purcell and revel in the glories of those days and earlier, when England led the world in the matter of composers; but such thoughts have no practical value on the music of the present day, which in this University is all we have to consider.14

Elgar further criticized the current isolation of English music, stating that “it is saddening to those who hoped so much from these early days, to find that after all had been written, and all the endeavour to excite enthusiasm for English music, . . . to find

12 Hughes and Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance, 67.

13 Ibid., 68.

14 Percy Young, A Future for English Music and Other Lectures by Sir Edward Elgar (London: Dobson Pulblishers, 1968), 51.

41 that we had inherited an art which has no hold on the affections of our own people, and is held in no respect abroad.”15 This critique placed the music of the Renaissance in a lower category than Elgar’s works, which had recently achieved their continental acclaim. In this way, Elgar defended his style of music against the objections of the Renaissance, which, since he had departed its company, treated his music as populist and coarse.

Elgar, however, claimed that “vulgarity may in the course of time be refined. Vulgarity often goes with inventiveness, and it can take the initiative.”16

As for his populism, Elgar set forth new criteria for an ideal concert audience:

Looking at great creative artists, we find that a totally different attitude has been adopted. The dramatist does not write his work for an audience of other dramatists, and a painter does not paint or produce his pictures for a public consisting of mere technical painters. The novelist certainly does not write merely for other novelists; but the musician always seems to have the fear of other musicians before his eyes. It is quite possible for any student to find errors in the way of fifths and so forth in the works of the great masters; but these men have always written for a larger audience. It must be understood distinctly that by these “larger audiences” I do not mean the popular public. Far from that—taking it as a necessary evil that audiences must exist or that music itself must cease to exist, let us consider what sort of audiences we want to please. We like to see scientific men, artists of all kinds, and literary men, actors—in fact everyone who is concerned with art in any shape or form.17

Elgar believed that where Renaissance composers abounded in technical skill, they lacked in artistic inspiration, which was the integral force of his music. His works were accessible to an audience beyond performers, and he counted “amongst his hearers and supporters the most cultured literary men, artists, sculptors, scientists, and in fact all cultivated people not necessarily musicians.”18 Though Elgar criticized the Renaissance

15 Ibid., 35.

16 Ibid., 49.

17 Ibid., 17.

18 Ibid., 57.

42 as conservative and backwards-looking, he drew upon the historical weight of

Shakespeare, who he saw as “deeply provincial, non-urban, and non-academic,” to bolster his movement:

I would remind those who still hold this spurious idea of an Englishman [John Bull], that another man, whose influence at any rate came from a district very near to us here, has drawn for us, not in one character but in many, what I hold to be the ideal Englishman. We are in his own country, and I am not confounding the personality of the man Shakespeare, the writer, with the personalities he has drawn for us—has more than drawn—has made living: Mercutio, the gallant gentleman, Falconbridge, the brave and daring spirit: I need not continue my list. Why should we accept as an ideal for English music a type that exists in no other art? I plead then that the younger men should draw their inspiration more from their own country, from their own literature—and, in spite of what many would say—from their own climate. Only by drawing from any real English inspiration shall we ever arrive at having an English art.19

With this, Elgar called for a new national style and, in the same speech, revealed that there were at least two British styles and aesthetics governing musical composition in the first decade of the twentieth century. The Renaissance was an alliance of composers bound to the university, craft, and London, but Elgar’s Midland school was to be affiliated with myth, inspiration, and rural England, the “district of England which was parent of all that is bright, beautiful and good in the works of him whom we know and love under the name of Shakespeare.”20 Elgar correlated this new musical style to the pre-eminent association of Britain as the “beautiful, green, historical theme park,” and

Britishness, for Americans, hinges on these very exotic elements.

19 Hughes and Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance, 69; Young, Future for English Music, 51.

20 Ibid., 29.

43 The Britishness of Facial Hair

Several reviews from the 1906 May Festival concerts provided physical descriptions of Elgar. The articles were also surrounded by photographs, an abundance of which appeared in the newspaper leading up to the concerts. Beyond the photos, reporters gave several quasi-poetic depictions of Elgar’s facial hair: “In appearance Sir

Edward Elgar is typically English, with a slight stoop of his shoulders. His mustache is a heavy drooping one, and he is very retiring and modest in his manner.”21 When first read, Elgar’s mustache seems to do little to describe Elgar as “typically English.”

However, it is a distinguishing trait that marked the composer as an outsider in America.

Elgar was famous for his mustache. Of course, this is not unique to the composer;

G. K. Chesterton, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, David Lloyd George, Horatio Kitchener, Des

Lynam, and David Niven were all Englishmen recognized by their mustaches. Nor is this to say that the mustache only marks Britishness. Many other notable personalities have sported mustaches: Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Albert Einstein, Gabriel Fauré, and

Mark Twain each had one, and other qualities are associated with the mustache, such as the connivery of the mustached villain Snidely Whiplash. But what is important to the reception of Elgar is that, in the era in which he came to Cincinnati, the mustache was in vogue in Britain and out-of-fashion in America.

The mustache has come in and out of style throughout the centuries. In modern history, the clean-shaven face was fashionable until the second half of the nineteenth century. Before this there were a few extreme measures to keep the haired face out of fashion. For instance, Peter the Great established a beard tax throughout Russia in 1698.

Every person outside of the lower class had to pay one hundred rubles per year to enjoy

21 Cincinnati Enquirer, 18 April 1906, 7.

44 the amenity of the beard. Along with this pleasure, Peter forced the bearded to wear a medallion that read “Beards are a ridiculous ornament.”22 Public distaste for facial hair continued in America until the 1830s, when Joseph Palmer was attacked in Fitchburg,

Massachusetts for wearing a beard. Palmer was known for his insistence on wearing a beard “in an age when beards were ridiculed and worn only by Jews.”23 After he was imprisoned, Palmer began to publish an abolitionist, pro-beard newspaper. His publishing occurred at the same time as when facial hair began to reappear in Europe and was followed soon after in America.

Though America was relatively accepting of facial after 1830, the turn of the decade brought the clean shave into fashion through the work of one inventor: King

Camp Gillette. After losing his home in 1871 to the Great Chicago Fire, Gillette became a traveling salesman of disposable bottle caps. Noticing the increasing market for items that must continually be purchased, he sought to perfect his idea for a “safety razor.”

After developing his product for nearly a decade, Gillette was granted a patent license in

1904, and the Gillette Safety Razor Company began mass production in Boston. Within the year, Gillette secured a contract with the United States Armed Services, marketed his product across the country, and began the rebirth of the morning shave for American men. In his biography of Gillette, Russell B. Adams contends that the invention of the disposable razor in the late nineteenth century led to the trend of clean-shaven American men.24

22 Diane Stanley, Peter the Great (New York City: Four Winds Press, 1986), 20.

23 Carl Watner, “Those ‘Impossible Citizens’: Civil Resistants in 19th-Century New England,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 3 (1980): 179.

24 Russell B. Adams, King C. Gillette: The Man and his Wonderful Shaving Device (Little, Brown and Company, 1978) 13.

45 During the same period in Britain, facial hair was at its fashionable apex. In an article for The American Journal of Sociology, Dwight Robinson examines pictures of men in the Illustrated London News, a weekly published periodical. For every picture in his sample between 1842 and 1972, Robinson documents the type of facial hair, if any, that the pictured man possesses. To maintain the purity of his study, Robinson excludes group photographs, pictures of royalty, advertisements, and, most importantly, pictures of non-British persons. Though Robinson’s charts indicate a peak in beards in the 1890s, the mustache continues to gain popularity, peaking at nearly fifty percent of all pictures in 1905 and 1906, the year that Elgar came to Cincinnati. Robinson also records the percentages of the clean-shaven Britishmen. Though the American man was more inclined to shave his entire face in the first decade of the twentieth century, Robinson finds that only twenty-two percent of the men in the pictures from 1906, a total sample of

347, were shaved completely, and the established perception of British men as a whiskered people was established by the 1890s, when only ten to fifteen percent of the pictured men shaved their entire faces.25 With these two contrasting groups, the bare- faced American and the prickly British muzzle, Elgar’s mustache appeared exotic and marked him as an Englishman.

Golf and the Englishman

Cincinnatians who read about Elgar were sure to be curious about what he did for leisure. In an effort to assure citizens that their city offered the composer opportunities for his spare time, critics offered appraisals similar to the following:

25 Dwight E. Robinson, “Fashions of Shaving and Trimming of the Beard: The Men of London Illustrated News,1842–1972,” American Journal of Sociology 81, no. 5 (March 1976): 1138–41.

46 Sir Edward Elgar, who is to conduct several of his works at the forthcoming May Festival, accompanied by Lady Elgar, arrived in town yesterday afternoon at 1 o’clock. They were met at the depot by Frank Van der Stucken and were taken at once to the Country Club, Grandin Road, where they will stay while in the city. After an informal lunch with Lawrence Maxwell, Jr., Sir Edward Elgar, who is passionately fond of outdoor life, found his way over the golf links and grounds of the club.26

Though Elgar was under pressure to complete his orchestration, he did not miss a chance

to play through the eighteen holes that the country club offered, and the media coverage

of his stay is sprinkled with comments about his passion for golf. Elgar began the sport

in the early 1890s and soon joined the Worcester Golf Club, finding the game to be “the

best form of exercise for writing men as it involves no risk of accident, is always ready

without much preliminary arrangement, and has the inestimable advantage of being

solidly respectable, inasmuch as it is seldom worth seeing and rarely worth reading

about.”27 Though Elgar enjoyed golf, it seems to be less of an aspect of Englishness because the game was popular in both America and England. Golf, however, was played by two different classes in the two countries.

The rise of golf in England coincides with the first half of Elgar’s life and the increasing relationship between Britishness and sport. Though much of the public attended popular team sports like soccer, cricket, and rugby, Britons, in great quantities, began to play golf, and all of these sports became identities for different regions or social strata of England:

Sport became a central part of the identification of many people, not separate from their lives but an integral feature. The association of sport with national identity was particularly enhanced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the emergence of Social Darwinist ideas that suggested that virility and

26 Cincinnati Enquirer, 18 April 1906, 7.

27 J. N. Moore, Elgar and His Publisher: Letters of a Creative Life (New York : Oxford University Press, 1987), 643.

47 dynamism were necessary to national survival and that these characteristics were racially predetermined.28

Golf became the “integral feature” in the lives of the English middle class.

In 1850 England had a single golf club, the Royal Blackheath. By 1880, eleven more had been founded, and the clubs peaked at over twelve hundred in 1914.29 This

“golf boom” was brought forth by the middle class, which saw several advantages in the game. Golf was much less expensive than the upper class field sports and was safer than the more youthful games like rugby. Also, it could be played by a wide range of ages and both sexes, and it was not limited to a particular season. Interestingly, most of the clubs created ad hoc courses, using the existing landscape—“ditches and hedges for ‘natural hazards’; barns or farm cottages served as stores for the simple kit of players who wore old clothes, usually Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers.”30 With these humble beginnings, England’s golf clubs did not promote a social hierarchy like the country clubs of the United States.

American golf of the early twentieth century maintained the elitism and wealth of the “Gatsby class.” With the completion of Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Long Island and the Chicago Golf Club in Wheaton in 1895, golf entered a new era of luxury in the

United States, touting the “exclusiveness associated with a game played in the posh

28 Ward, Britishness, 74.

29 B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 648.

30 John Lowerson, “Scotish Croquet: The English Golf Boom 1880–1914,” History Today 33 (1983): 26.

48 country-club settings.”31 The Cincinnati Country Club, Elgar’s residence while in

Cincinnati, was founded in the same year, and the Club’s handbook recounts its origins:

In the fall of 1895 a number of Cincinnati men returned from their summer vacations with more or less knowledge of golf. Some of these men met on Wednesday, the twenty-third of October, in the office of Nicholas Longworth, First National Bank Building, Third and Walnut Streets, to form a golf club. William H. Taft, then judge of the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, was made Chairman, and William Collins Herron acted as Secretary of the meeting.32

In 1902 the Cincinnati Country Club incorporated and purchased most of the property, a dairy farm known as “Meyers’ Pasture,” between Bedford Avenue and Grandin Road.

The Country Club then leased the property to the Cincinnati Golf Club, which built its clubhouse, including the “east room [where] the women of the club served tea.”33 The board fixed yearly dues at a relatively high fifteen dollars, which did not include the five dollar initiation fee. With a roster that included a President, Governors, and judges, the social atmosphere of the club was upper class and limited to a membership of fifty men.

Although golf might first appear less of a marker of Elgar’s Britishness because of the popularity of golf in the United States and Britain, the class distinction between the two countries reveals a misinterpretation of the composer’s passion for golf. Elgar emerged from the middle class, the son of a provincial shopkeeper, married a middle- class woman, and approached golf through the British club system, which was established and maintained through England’s middle class. In the eyes of an American readership, however, to whom a country club was synonymous with privilege and

31 Robert Adams and John Rooney, “Evolution of American Golf Facilities,” Geographical Review 75 (1985): 419.

32 Joseph Wilby, Handbook for the Cincinnati Country Club (Cincinnati: n.p.., 1965), 6.

33 Ibid., 10.

49 fortune, Elgar’s regular golf outings invoked the model of the stereotypical Englishman encountered at the beginning of this chapter—sophisticated, privileged, and male.

The Englishness of Fashion

One of the traditions of the early May Festivals was the newspaper’s coverage of the fashion found among the audience. The following is a typical example of the florid imagery used to describe the garb of the attendees, particularly those found in the expensive box seats:

Being a matinee the women wore their most killing clothes. In the Longworth box were Mrs. Longworth, Hon. and Mrs. Nicholas Longworth, Mr. and Mrs. George Ingalls and Mrs. Kate Jordan Magoun. Mrs. Longworth was very effective in an afternoon toilet of pale heliotrope velvet and a violet hat with shaded plumes. Mrs. Nicholas engrossed a great deal of attention of the audience to the exclusion of everything but Gadski. She wore a white Princess gown, the full corsage of black and white stripes held by a broad band of flowered ribbon. Her brown hair was surmounted by a great hat of majenta straw covered with roses of the same tint.34

This attention to detail, however, was not exclusive to the concert reviews.

Elgar and his wife arrived in Cincinnati two weeks before the opening concert of the Festival in order to rehearse the choir. With the anticipation of their arrival, the reporters at the train station recounted their stories with vivid, pictorial descriptions of the pair of travelers. The best example appeared in the evening edition of the Cincinnati

Enquirer:

When the train pulled in at 1 p.m. the first to be exposed to the Cincinnati atmosphere were two English travelling rugs, gorgeously striped and barred, three English-looking “boxes” of leather, liberally decorated with labels, and a small woven fibre handsatchel—the personal property of Lady Elgar.

Following the luggage came the English-looking owners. A tall spare figure in ice-cream clothes, with drawn brows and a worried expression, that’s Sir Edward Elgar, the famous English composer who reached

34 Cincinnati Enquirer, 4 May 1906, 3.

50 Cincinnati Tuesday to conduct his own works at the May Festival. Lady Elgar, small, plum, with laughing blue eyes and the prettiest manners imaginable, accompanied him.

Sir Edward Elgar is the typical Englishman, silent, reserved and unsocial—until after dinner. He pulled at his drooping moustache nervously and waved the interviewers away with a thin, but firm, hand.

His horse-blanket-checked great coat struck the bystanders dumb with admiration. It was so English you know.

Lady Elgar was enveloped in a long, red cloak with a white boa about her throat. She wore a small travelling hat.

Her voice is low and sweet and her laugh is as full of fun as that of a girl. “I have met so many nice people in America that I can have nothing but the pleasantest impressions of your country,” she said. “And the young American girls—they are so sweet and charming that I never will believe the writers who say they are anything but delightful. I have been to America once before, but this is my first visit to Cincinnati.”

Mr. Schmidlapp’s closed motor waited the company near the depot entrance, and drawn up beside it were the photographers, seeing which the English conductor gave a hollow groan and murmured “Again!” Very genially the American Van der Stucken faced the recalcitrant ones towards the cameras. “What’s one more of less?” he remarked, as the artists gave high signs to a porter to depart from the field of vision. The visitors accepted the situation with a rather ill grace and as speedily as possible entered the closed car accompanied by Mr. Maxwell and were driven to the Country Club, where apartments have been reserved for them.35

The most evident aspects of this article are its approval of Lady Elgar’s social graces and its complete recognition of Sir Edward’s lack of the same. Another facet of the writing is its particular attention to the Elgars’ belongings and clothes. In a period when national identities were being assigned to high art, there are definitive links between national identity and objects—Englishness and things. Beyond this, the author implies that there is a common perception that accompanies these objects in Cincinnati, but Englishness is not the same concept as the Englishness perceived in America.

35 Cincinnati Enquirer, 19 April 1906, 3.

51 In order to establish how British fashions were different from American fashions at the time, a source of styles of dress will be categorized by nationality. Such sources are readily found in period costume manuals and fashion histories, and this section will use these materials to isolate separate elements in the article above to find the national identity of each item and how Cincinnatians would perceive its particular qualities as such.

The Horse-Blanket Checked Coat

The article names Elgar’s coat as a “great coat,” but this term is unclear to the cut of the garment. The “great coat” refers to two trends in British fashions: the outdoor frock coat and the Ulster traveling coat.36 Both styles are long coats, extending beyond the knees, but the frock coat was cut straight to the leg in the front. The Ulster coat was a much looser cut, falling from the shoulders without cutting into the waist and often had a shoulder cape. Because the frock coat was “universally black,” it can be assumed that

Elgar was wearing the Ulster traveling coat, which was “most often in check tweeds.”37

Because of the length, often extending to the ankles, the coat was much longer than the prevailing fashion in America.

While the frock coat was popular in late nineteenth-century America, it “shrank into a modern-looking jacket, cut short and square,” which was worn “buttoned high and opened low” in order to expose the vest by the turn of the century.38 These coats,

36 Charles Beard and Phillis Cunnington, A Dictionary of English Costume (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1960), 97–8.

37 Alan Mansfield and Phillis Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume in the Twentieth Century 1900–1950 (Boston: Plays, Inc., 1973), 246–7.

38 Brandon Marie Miller, Dressed for the Occasion: What Americans Wore 1620–1970 (Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1999), 51.

52 extending only a few inches beyond the waist, were paired with matching pants and were the forerunner of the business suit. In America, these suits were preferred by the upper class, who rarely wore longer coats outside of winter, and men of the middle class usually wore sweaters, non-matching suits, and suits that buttoned lower to show the tie and collar.

Because Elgar’s Ulster coat was much longer than the prevailing American fashion, the composer’s appearance was unusual. With the press swirling about him and the attention afforded to him by some of the wealthiest men in Cincinnati, Elgar’s coat may have been perceived as a mark of a stereotypical, affluent Englishman. In fact, the pattern of the coat’s fabric reveals that this was not the case. The checkered pattern was popular throughout most of the nineteenth century, but in the last two decades became

“worn below the level of fashion.”39 In keeping with Elgar’s personal affinity for the

Midlands, the checkered style was most popular in working class, factory towns at the beginning of the twentieth century, but for the Cincinnati audience, it was “so English, you know.”

Lady Elgar’s Red Cloak and White Boa

The author of the article depicted Lady Elgar as graceful, charming, socially diplomatic, and “English-looking.” With so much to say about her mannerisms and her attitude towards America, the author still found time to describe her garments; “Lady

Elgar was enveloped in a long, red cloak with a white boa about her throat.”40 As the

39Anne Buck, Victorian Costume (New York: Costume & Fashion Press, 1984), 111.

40 Cincinnati Enquirer, 19 April 1906, 3.

53 reporter pointed out, this apparel served to identify the composer’s wife as a British woman.

Lady Elgar’s cloak was an item at the top of British fashions at the turn of the century. The garment was popular in the early 1830s, being worn for “comfortable out- of-door wear in cold weather,” but these early cloaks were bulky wool garments, “often interlined with an extra layer of wool.”41 This style was no longer produced in the 1850s, losing favor to the jacket, but was revived in the first decade of the twentieth century. By

1903, English cloaks were “fashioned from light cloth materials and often had a velvet collar” and were cut to either three-quarter or full length.42 The red color of the coat could have been inspired by the “rich ruby [that] was launched in honour of the

Coronation” in 1902.43

In the United States, large cloaks were no longer in fashion because women wanted to display their shoulders: “The huge leg-of-mutton sleeves were a short-lived fad [of the late 1890s]. By 1900, women wanted to show off their shoulders again, which helped to pronounce the fashionable S-curve of a woman’s figure.”44 Accompanying this trend, the shawl, which exposes the top of the back as it wraps around the body, became the most popular garment worn over the dress. The fashionable colors for these garments were cream, black, and other “soft colors,” and Lady Elgar’s red coat was in bold contrast to the neutrally colored fashions of contemporary America.45

41 Buck, Victorian Costume, 94.

42 Mansfield and Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume, 42.

43 Ibid., 55.

44 Miller, Dressed for the Occasion 56.

45 Ibid.

54 Boas were not popular in America at this time because they covered the shoulders, but they were regularly worn in Britain. The English costuming texts claim that “feather boas were the most popular [accessory item]” and “in 1900 many of the boas reached almost to the ground; in 1905 knee-length of ostrich feathers.”46 However long Lady Elgar’s boa was, it and her resplendent coat covered her completely and introduced bright colors to an American city filled with bare shoulders and muted-colored women’s apparel, maintaining the exotic appeal of the couple’s arrival.

Conclusions

This chapter opened with a discussion of the fluidity of Englishness in England and Bill Bryson’s list of things that only the English can “appreciate.” A similar catalog is found in Jeremy Paxman’s The English:

Off the top of my head, mine would include “I know my rights”, village cricket and Elgar, Do-It-Yourself, punk, street fashion, irony, vigorous politics, brass bands, Shakespeare, Cumberland sausages, double-decker buses, Vaughan Williams, Donne and Dickens, twitching net curtains, breast-obsession, quizzes and crosswords, country churches, dry-stone walls, gardening, Christopher Wren and Monty Python, easy-going Church of England vicars, the Beatles, bad hotels and good beer, church bells, Constable and Piper, finding foreigners funny, David Hare and William Cobbett, drinking to excess, Women’s Institutes, fish and chips, curry, Christmas Eve at King’s College, Cambridge, indifference to food, civility and crude language, fell-running, ugly caravan sites on beautiful clifftops, crumpets, Bentleys and Reliant Robins, and so on.47

While these items may be “touchstones” of English culture, the truth is that such lists are groups of over-generalizations. Shakespeare is received in many distinct ways, depending on where his work is being performed. Though Elgar made Paxman’s list, this chapter argues for a different treatment of the composer’s reception in Cincinnati, where

46 Mansfield and Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume, 54.

47 Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People (New York: The Overlook Press, 1999), 22–3.

55 critics understood Elgar as English through their own lens of national identity. This treatment focuses on the time and place of 1906 Cincinnati, when the May Festival was searching for a celebrity to secure ticket sales in a year of complete transition within the structure of the festival. For the press, every aspect of the two visitors was perceived as

English. Their traveling rugs were English, as was their leather luggage and Elgar’s mustache. To maintain the newsworthiness of spectacle, reporters presented the model of the typical Englishman as intelligent, sophisticated, and white. For example, Elgar’s love of the golf green, which is already a pictorial landscape of the “beautiful, green, historical theme park,” is misinterpreted as an emblem of wealth because the members of the country club in Cincinnati where Elgar stayed were wealthy. While it may seem that this is a discussion of Anglomania more than Englishness, these discussions are particularly important to Elgar’s reception history because European and American audiences, much to the contrary of Paxman’s list, regarded the composer’s national identity differently.

56 CHAPTER FOUR

MODERNITY

After Edward Elgar seceded from the British Musical Renaissance in the early twentieth century, English music consisted of two distinct camps. Charles Villier

Stanford and Hubert Parry championed the Renaissance’s styles of composition.

Composing for smaller performing ensembles, these composers admired the musical philosophies of the formalistic school in Germany. Elgar’s Midland School favored orchestral compositions, evoking emotion at the sake of contrapuntal precision or proper voice leading. The April 1905 issue of Musical Opinion examined the common characteristics of each school in response to Elgar’s Peyton Lectures:

There must, at any rate, be a sound cause for the great influence that Mendelssohn had, a very great influence indeed. I admit that it was most necessary that this influence should be put an end to. But the school of Stanford and Parry went the wrong way about their work. Stanford was naturally more taken up with chamber music than with any other form of composition. His early operas may be looked upon as his last offering at the shrine of Wagner. Now, in chamber music there is no doubt that Brahms was for a long time the only modern voice. There were no opportunities at either Oxford or Cambridge of hearing orchestras; nor are there any opportunities to this day. Consequently, you will find that all musicians educated at either of the universities, and all amateurs as well, have a particular love of chamber music and naturally of Brahms.1

Stanford studied in Leipzig, the stronghold of Mendelssohn’s music and, more importantly, the seat of anti-Wagnerism on the continent. The Renaissance shares the label conservative with Brahms and Mendelssohn, but its music, unlike Brahms and

Mendelssohn, had little popular appeal across Britain. In his Peyton Lectures, Elgar criticized the Renaissance for lacking proletarian accessibility, for being confined to the

1 Henry Witherspoon, “The Recent Music of Stanford and Parry,” TheMusical Opinion 28 (1905): 499.

57 small performance halls of universities, for valuing academic technique over artistic inspiration, and for neglecting the orchestra as a performing force. In a single speech

Elgar created, as discussed above, a new school of composition in Britain.

As the two camps became more distinct from another, Elgar’s music took on the label modern, but British critics were careful in how they used the term. British scholar

Jeremy Crump describes the criteria that critics pursued for a progressive composer of their nation:

Commentators were looking for a native musician whose self-confidently reserved manner contrasted with the Wagnerian self-possession of foreign composers, notably Richard Strauss. They found Elgar English in bearing as well as in the sentiments expressed in his works.2

Yet the British discourse on music includes many comparisons to continental composers, particularly Strauss. For instance, Robert Buckley scrutinized the musical resemblances of the two composers in his 1906 biography of Elgar:

In subject and sound Gerontius recalls Strauss and the Tod und Verklärung; but here, at all events, the two masters have little in common. Strauss impresses me as looking from the outside, as taking his inspiration from external things. With Elgar the opposite impression is paramount.3

Crump offers an explanation of these apparent contradictions. He writes that the critics in England associated Elgar with progressive, German composers in order to distinguish him from the English Musical Renaissance but still regarded Elgar as tasteful to British sensibilities:

Emphasis placed upon Elgar’s modernity served to locate him within the European mainstream, and there was evident pleasure displayed in the press when

2 Jeremy Crump, “The Identity of English Music: the Reception of Elgar 1898–1935,” in Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, ed. R. Colls and P. Dodd (Dover, N. H.: Croom Helm, 1986), 170.

3 Buckley, Elgar, 66.

58 Strauss dubbed Elgar “the first English Progressive.” But Elgar’s modernity was seen as distinct from that of Europeans. His works were preferred by many to those of Strauss and Mahler since they lacked the pretensions of the former and the neuroticism of the latter . . . . That Elgar could be celebrated as a modern composer reflects the conservatism and insularity of the concert-going public before 1914. They showed a willful lack of interest in the Second Viennese School . . . . Elgar was modern in a peculiarly English way; experiment was tempered by genuine if vaguely defined feeling.4

The element that made Elgar a modern composer is that he is singular in style, not

associated with a school, and this definition is connected to the English audience’s

perception of what modernity was.

The reviews of the 1906 May Festival included many references to Elgar’s modernity and compared his music to Strauss’s works, similar to British criticism.

Reviewers, however, found that Elgar belonged to the same European school as Wagner and Strauss. This chapter will analyze these comparisons, explore Cincinnati’s definition of modernity and reconcile the composer’s image as an Englishman with his progressive,

German-influenced style.5

The Musical Style of Gerontius

Elgar scored The Dream of Gerontius for large orchestra, which consists of triple

woodwinds (three flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two

bassoons, and double bassoon), triple brass (three trumpets, four horns, three trombones,

and bass tuba), two harps, organ, percussion (tympani, gong, schellen, glockenspiel, snare and bass drums, cymbals, and triangle), and strings. Elgar often divides the strings into

4 Crump, “Identity of English Music,” 170–1.

5 In this chapter the word modernity is used extensively. Its intended meaning is that of the musical style of progressive composers around 1906. It will not be replaced with modernism or the adjective modern, except where it originally occurs in quotations, in order to avoid confusion with twentieth-century artistic movements and aesthetic categories.

59 many parts. For example, they are often divided into eighteen or twenty parts at cadential passages. In his analytical notes to Gerontius, A. J. Jaeger writes, “The score is altogether, perhaps, the fullest and most complicated in English music.”6

Gerontius opens with a lengthy prelude, which reveals themes that are used throughout the rest of the work. Jaeger described the significance of the prelude, its historical place in the European tradition, and the noteworthiness of the motives found therein:

As the Dream is, so far, Edward Elgar’s most important contribution to his art, so the orchestral prelude is his longest and most remarkable movement of the kind. It is modelled on the Weber-Wagner operatic prelude, in that it deals with material to be found in the body of the work, and in such a way that, once the significance of the various themes is understood, the intelligent listener can easily attach a connected programme to the music without having to draw very largely upon his own imagination.7

Elgar uses recurring musical material, often labeled by American critics as leitmotivs, to connect similar dramatic events in Gerontius. Figure 4.1 is the opening vocal passage of the work, Gerontius’s cry to Christ.

Jaeger identifies this as the “Christ” theme, and this motive returns at several important junctures in Gerontius. When the soprano soloist prays for Gerontius’s soul at the side of his deathbed, she implores Jesus to receive the soul in grace:

By Thy birth, and by Thy cross, Rescue him from endless loss;

6 A. J. Jaeger, The Dream of Gerontius: Book of Words with Descriptive Notes (London: Novello, 1900), 4.

7 Ibid.

60 By Thy death and burial, Save him from a final fall; By Thy rising from the tomb, By Thy mounting up above, By the Spirit’s gracious love, Save him in the day of doom.

Elgar uses a portion of the Christ motive in the flutes and clarinets as a counter-subject to

the soprano’s melody, as seen in Figure 4.2:

In his descriptive notes, Jaeger describes his adoration of this theme, “Human and

soothing in its influence, it suggests the idea of Christ’s presence and Christ’s peace.”8

Elgar also closes the first part of Gerontius with a grandiose gesture to Jesus when the

soloists and chorus, in the role of priests and assistants, send Gerontius’s soul into the

afterlife:

Go on thy course; And may thy place today be found in peace, And may thy dwelling be the Holy Mount of Zion: Through the same, through Christ our Lord.

Elgar uses many other themes in a similar manner. Though the composer utilizes

this compositional device, it lacks the dramatic sophistication of his German

contemporaries. Wagner’s leitmotivs inform the audience in a variety of ways, often demonstrating a character’s intentions, which are often contrary to the text that character is singing. Elgar’s compositional technique relegates the leitmotiv to the relatively simple task of depicting the text through recurring musical ideas. While it is easy to

8 Ibid., 8.

61 compare this trait to Wagner because of the musical unity found in each composer’s

works, both composers use the technique with different intentions.

Though Elgar loathed the idea of Gerontius being categorized as an oratorio, the

work has since been relegated to that genre. Gerontius is in the sacred vein, divided into

parts, unstaged, and it has the familiar performing forces of soloists, chorus, and

orchestra. British critics described Gerontius as an anomaly of its genre because the

oratorio contained mystical subject matter, leitmotivs, and chromatic harmonies. In a classification of the musical style of Gerontius, Buckley, Elgar’s first biographer, wrote,

“With all his modernity Elgar’s method is rather a reversion to Bach, whose Saint

Matthew Passion has been [Elgar’s] model of expressiveness through the whole of the

modern period.”9

For British critics, critics who were “looking for a native musician,” Elgar’s

Gerontius displayed some distinctive traits that served to set Elgar apart from the

Renaissance and, simultaneously, conserve his identity as an English composer. Crump

acknowledges that Elgar’s appeal in Britain is rooted in his use of orthodox genres:

fanfares and oratorios. He writes, “The Englishness of Elgar’s music was a product of

his use of established forms, many of them the most common in English music halls in

the 1890s.”10 At the same time, critics perceive Elgar as a progressive composer, using

chromatic harmonies and dramatic devices similar to many German composers of the

long nineteenth century. Middle classes enthusiastically embraced Elgar’s style,

disregarding its similarities to the controversial and audience-alienating music of Strauss,

and British critics regarded Elgar’s works as populist music. The same critics utilized the

9 Buckley, Elgar, 68–9.

10 Crump, “Identity of English Music,” 169.

62 composer’s modernity as a tool to distinguish him from the academic music and conservative philosophies of the English Musical Renaissance.

Elgar’s Modernity in Cincinnati

Before the full performance of Gerontius, Henry Krehbiel gave a lecture on the work and Elgar’s status in the domain of coetaneous composers. The Cincinnati

Enquirer reported on the talk and accompanying excerpts from the work:

Mr. H. Krehbiel, the eminent musical critic of the New York Tribune, gave an interesting lecture last night at the Odeon on “Elgar and The Dream of Gerontius.” Mr. Krehbiel is a great admirer of Dr. Elgar, and in the course of his remarks last night made a strong comparison between him and Dr. Richard Strauss, much to the advantage of the former.

In the course of his talk, Mr. Krehbiel gave a brief sketch of Dr. Elgar and his present position in the musical world, and then presented a lucid exposition of the composer’s treatment of Cardinal Newman’s masterpoem, “The Dream of Gerontius.” The lecture was illustrated by selections from the composition, with Dr. N. J. Eisenheimer at the piano, Mr. Ferd Havenzahl as tenor and Mr. Carl Gant as bass. Through the kindness of Mr. Gantvoort, the editor of the College of Music Courier, which contains his analytical review of the Dream, copies were distributed in the audience and aided to grasp the matter in hand.11

Krehbiel’s comparison of Elgar and Strauss was, as in Britain, a common rhetorical device in criticism. Cincinnati’s critics, however, were much more willing to completely include Elgar in the ranks of the continental composers.

The Cincinnati Enquirer printed several articles that described the modernity of

Gerontius and placed the work in the context of the progressive composers of the New

German School. In an article that uses language similar to Jaeger, a reporter expresses how Gerontius surpasses the traditional oratorio:

Naturally, the conventional oratorio form, with set arias and choruses, was out of place in the interpretation of such a poem, and Elgar has discarded it. He has

11 Cincinnati Enquirer, 2 May 1906, 3.

63 adopted instead the most modern methods. The score is modern, not only in its demand for a large and varied orchestra, but in its use of distinctive themes, associated with death, fear, prayer, sleep, energy, angels, demons, and other ideas, emotions and incidents. The orchestral prelude is based chiefly upon such motives and, as in Wagner’s music-dramas, these themes are developed and transformed to correspond with new shades of meaning in the text; but, unlike Wagner, Elgar does not employ them contrapuntally. Except in rare instances, they are used one at a time, but they are kept musically alive, and therefore are part of a system far more highly organized than that of Berlioz, whose “fixed ideas” remained unchanged throughout a composition.12

This review is rich with musical observations, which clarify the author’s definition of

“modern methods.” For this reviewer, Elgar’s use of large orchestra and leitmotivs

identify him with the progressives in continental Europe. Most of the other reviews,

however, are vague in their descriptions of Elgar’s modernity, mentioning few specific

details and relying on esoteric descriptions of the score. The Cincinnati Enquirer printed a review of Elgar’s performance that lacks any explanation of the author’s intended meaning: “Around this story of Gerontius Elgar has woven one of the most strikingly

modern and uniquely original musical fabrics of the present day.”13 In an earlier article

that describes the city’s enthusiasm for Elgar’s visit, the critic describes Gerontius’s modernity in inexplicit terms of relaxed form and orchestration: “Elgar has allowed himself the freest scope, and he has not bound himself by conventional forms. Rather he has a modern exuberance of expression, with all the most advanced modes of orchestral coloring at his command.”14

These critiques present a breach in Elgar’s identity. He is simultaneously English

as a man and German as a composer. This discrepancy is reconciled by examining the

12 Cincinnati Enquirer, 22 April 1906, 3.

13 Cincinnati Enquirer, 6 May 1906, 3.

14 Cincinnati Enquirer, 3 May 1906, 3.

64 musical expectations of the Cincinnati audience, and it is in the theme of modernity that

all of the common motives of local criticism, mysticism, Britishness, and modernity, are

reconciled.

Cincinnati viewed itself as one of the gateways through which Wagner

appreciatively entered the American musical establishment. The Cincinnati Enquirer

published an article that describes the city’s musical progressiveness and invited the

audience to receive Elgar as a disciple of the future:

It is not so many years back when the Queen City was one of the few places on the American continent where Wagner met an appreciative response, and now that the great German master is recognized the world over, Cincinnati is opening its arms at welcome to those who are following in his wake. Then it was said that the preponderance of the German element was responsible for this sentiment; but the accord spontaneously given Dr. Elgar, an Englishman, an almost unknown to local concert goers, must be attributed only to the high degree of musical acumen which characterizes the Festival audiences.15

After The Apostles was performed at the second concert of the Festival, The Cincinnati

Post hailed Cincinnati as a hotbed of progressive concert billing: “Marvel at the program!

English and German, completely modern, joined together to reveal the most important

phase of musical literature.”16 Indeed, Cincinnati’s taste at this time revolved around the

Austro-German canon of works. The first concert of the Festival, presented a Bach

cantata, scenes from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, and Brahms’s German Requiem.

Elgar’s The Apostles was given the entirety of the second concert, but the third concert

was composed of Beethoven’s Leonore Overture, No. 3, an aria from Mozart’s Don

Giovanni, Schumann’s First Symphony, Elgar’s In the South Overture, an aria from

Marschner’s Hans Heiling, Loeffler’s La Mort Tintagiles, and the Prelude and a scene

15 Ibid.

16 Cincinnati Post, 3 May 1906, 3.

65 from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. This programming, typical of Cincinnati, demonstrates the city’s palate for the music of Austro-German composers, and it is evidence that, for Cincinnati, Elgar’s music is completely at home in its surroundings.

Two years prior Richard Strauss had visited Cincinnati in order to conduct his works. The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra invited him to appear in the final concert of their 1904 season. In an article that promoted Strauss’s upcoming concerts, the Enquirer

anticipated that the audience would approve of the performances despite American

audiences’ dislike of contemporary music:

Dr. Strauss is a great conductor, and, too, he is a great composer. No musician with the spirit of the twentieth century surging through his life will gainsay that fact. And, which is more to many men, he is a capital fellow. But it is the music that is the stumbling block and gives the lovers of the dear old masters something to think about. Dr. Strauss is ultra-modern; and his compositions present innovations which the most of us must stand on tiptoe to reach. We anticipate the sensation we shall enjoy when we are given his ideas from the end of his own baton. Perhaps Dr. Strauss’s compositions need the Western atmosphere to impart to them the true ring and add the proper garnish.17

On the evenings of 8 and 9 April, Strauss conducted his tone poems Don Juan and Tod

und Verklärung, and his wife, Pauline de Ahna, sang three of his orchestral lieder. In its

brief review of the concert, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported on the esotericism of

Strauss’s music:

The wizard visionary, Dr. Strauss, gave an interpretation to his two tone poems, Don Juan and Tod und Verklaerung, that opened up a new realm of knowledge and appreciation of the wonderful new message that he has given to the musical world.18

Cincinnati’s critics in 1906 would have been reaching to describe Elgar, a mystic,

an Englishman, and a representative of England’s Midland school composers, with the

17 Cincinnati Enquirer, 20 March 1904, 3.

18 Cincinnati Enquirer, 10 April 1904, 4.

66 same nomenclature as Strauss, the “most radical of composers.”19 Just as British critics used Elgar’s modernity for the task of distinguishing him from the English Musical

Renaissance, Cincinnati reporters described his progressiveness within the confines of mysticism and Britishness. In an article for the Cincinnati Enquirer, the music critic describes an important difference between Elgar and Strauss, particularly noting their religious differences:

The exaltation the music of The Dream of Gerontius communicated to every listener who heard the work at the 1904 Festival made its repetition at this Festival most natural. It may not be out of place at this moment to call attention to the spiritual elevation shown by Elgar in his choice of subjects for musical setting. Invariably he goes to noble sources. His Gerontius is from one of the noblest poems Cardinal Newman has ever written, while the words of The Apostles are from the Bible. One has only to contrast this with what appears to be the source of inspiration of another great composer of today, who seems to prefer the most erotic of subjects.20

Though Elgar is progressive, the Enquirer explains that he is an amalgamation of the new and the traditional: “With its amplification of modern forms of orchestral expressions,

[Gerontius] sustains all the dignity and depth of the old masters.”21

Elgar’s modernity, standing together with his Britishness, is connected to his expressive mysticism. With Gerontius, he freed the concept of the oratorio, a historically

English genre, from its form to become expressive of its mystical subject matter. The

1906 criticism surrounding Elgar’s modernity is saturated with comments on his musical expression, whether in his formal structures, letimotivs, or chromaticism, and the value of

Elgar’s modernity is that it allowed the composer, while an Englishman, to have the

19 Cincinnati Enquirer, 20 March 1904, 3.

20 Cincinnati Enquirer, 5 May 1906, 16.

21 Cincinnati Enquirer, 6 May 1906, 3.

67 capability to reach out to and attract an audience accustomed to the music of Wagner and

Strauss.

68 CHAPTER FIVE

CONCLUSION

Henry Krehbiel admitted that Elgar’s presence at the 1906 May Festival “piqued curiosity,” much of which came from the “preconceived ideas” of “a delicately molded individual.”1 As the critics and reviewers of the concerts were the only sources of access beyond the concerts that Cincinnatians had to Sir Elgar, their “molded individual” shaped public opinion of the composer. The critics consistently wrapped Elgar in the enigmatic nature of mystical Catholicism, exotic Britishness, and the artistic modernity. This was not the case when he returned to Cincinnati five years later.

Elgar returned to Cincinnati with the 1911 Sheffield Choir Tour, which was organized after a lack of patriotism and imperial awareness was sensed throughout

England and its colonies:

The British Governments in the past did not set very much store by the Colonies beyond a materialistic view. So long as they were a source of income there was no call for further thought. If they gave any passing trouble or expense they were regarded as a burden to the State. Neither was the British Empire visualized by the people at large.2

Several successful attempts to bridge the cultures of the motherland and colonies were achieved by Dr. Charles Harriss, an English organist who held a church position in

Ottawa, Canada and founded the McGill Conservatory of Music in Montreal. After several smaller concerts and tours, Harriss hoped to “precipitate the idea of fostering the development of ‘Reciprocity’—Dr. Harriss’ favourite word—between the component

1 Cincinnati Enquirer, 3 May 1906, 3.

2 Henry Coward, Round the World on Wings of Song (Sheffield: J. W. Northend, 1933), ii.

69 parts of the British Empire—making brothers of all, and this, to be done on the ‘plane of music.’”3 He partnered with Sir Henry Coward, a choral conductor in England, and they both sought financial support for a tour to venture through England’s “dominions.”

Coward was the leader of the Sheffield Choir, and he selected 130 of its singers to participate in the tour. This core group was annexed by another 70 singers from provincial choirs. The touring group prepared many of the largest choral works that could be performed on a tour, including Handel’s Messiah, Mendelssohn’s Elijah,

Verdi’s Requiem, Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust, and Elgar’s The Dream of

Gerontius. During the time of preparation, Harriss traveled to each site to confirm arrangements, ultimately planning a tour to travel through Canada, the United States,

South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. It was billed as a world tour of the English- speaking nations, celebrating the coronation of King George V. The enormity of the tour expanded Harriss’s idea of “precipitating reciprocity” to become the promotion of the

Empire throughout the English-speaking dominions, including transnational business and the core interests of Britain.

When he organized the programs for each concert, Harriss asked for requests from each city where the choir would perform. With the overwhelming amount of requests for Elgar’s works, Harriss thought it would be advantageous to recruit the composer as a celebrity conductor on the tour. Elgar agreed to appear on the portion of the tour in Canada and the United States. Though he planned to depart with the choir on

17 March 1911, Elgar was too sick to travel. In a letter to Alfred Littleton, the composer explained his infirmity: “I have an awful cold and chill—I may be able to go to Canada

3 Ibid., 5.

70 as the horrid thing is at present only in my head—there’s plenty of room for it you’ll say!

I am not allowed out.”4 Elgar’s doctor soon permitted him to leave, and he sailed for

America on 25 March, arriving in New York on 1 April. From there, he traveled to

Toronto, and, in a letter to Frances Colvin, explained his misery in traveling and his financial need to take part in the tour:

Here in this awful place, without the heart to write to anyone, although my thoughts are with all of you dear people, every nerve shattered by some angularity, vulgarity, and general horror.

I had a dreary crossing—found myself in New York and was looked after well and motherly by our dear friend Pippa—travelled all night and am now here in ice and snow, brilliant sun and piercing wind and longing for home. Oh! How I long to be back.

My love to you both. I know I ought to be glad that perhaps I shall earn some money but I would rather starve—if it were not for the others. Truly parts of the world are beastly!

Edward

I am fairly well—but oh! The icy wind and piles of rocks of ice.5

The tour continued to Buffalo and then to New York City. From there, the choir traveled to Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Chicago, where the members of the choir were introduced to the culture of the Windy City by attending a hog slaughter in the stockyards. Elgar completed his tour with the choir by traveling to Milwaukee, St. Paul, and New York, where he sailed back to England.

While in route to Cincinnati, the choir sang “O Gladsome Light,” “Moonlight,”

“You Stole My Love,” and “My Country, ‘tis of Thee” at the Ohio State Legislature

4 J. N. Moore, Elgar and His Publishers: Letters of a Creative Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 739.

5 Edward Elgar, Toronto, to Frances Colvin, London, 3 April 1911, EBML 3426.

71 Building in Columbus. From there, the choir left for Cincinnati for rehearsals with the

Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which would accompany the choir in its performances in Cincinnati and Indianapolis. Elgar led the rehearsal and met with Leopold Stokowski, conductor of the Orchestra, on the morning of 18 April and conducted the performance of

Gerontius on the same evening. The choir performed in Cincinnati for three more nights without Elgar as conductor, and, during this time, he penned the following letter to Alice

Stuart-Wortley, complaining about his schedule in the States:

I rushed from Buffalo to N.Y. where Pippa and nice Mr. Gray took care of me. Trains full this way so I had to leave on Easter Sunday morning 11 oc and travelled until 7:30 the next morning; I loathe and detest every moment of my life here! But I have lovely things to think of and shall soon be back and hope to see you. All I can do is count the days—I despise myself for not bearing it better but I cannot help it and want to talk to you and perhaps other educated people—it is all so raw and silly out here.6

In the Cincinnati Times-Star, the reviewer wrote that Gerontius “is no novelty to this city, where it has been heard at two May festivals; neither is the personality of its distinguished composer, Sir Edward Elgar, a novelty.”7 While the author evidently intended his remarks to be interpreted as a claim of familiarity with the composer and his greatest work, it also reveals the lack of urgency in the criticism surrounding this particular performance. To be sure, even in 1911, the papers remembered Elgar’s 1906 appearance and how the Cincinnati choir was masterful in its performance and grandiose in its abilities:

The first program was given over to a performance of The Dream of Gerontius, under the personal direction of the composer, Sir Edward Elgar. Several years ago, Sir Edward conducted this work at one of our May Festivals. The means at his disposal at that time were far more extensive than those afforded him last

6 J. N. Moore, Edward Elgar: The Windflower Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 154.

7 Cincinnati Times-Star, 18 April 1911, 14.

72 night, and therefore, he was able to give a performance which is still recalled with pride.8

While each newspaper includes similar statements to the above, Elgar was rarely mentioned in the news and criticism involving the tour.

In 1906 Cincinnati’s newspapers were full of comments that explained Elgar’s

Catholicism or the mystical subjects of Gerontius. This specificity in 1906 is exchanged in 1911 for vague descriptors. For example, the Enquirer published the following explanation of Gerontius: “Its phrasing of some of the wonderful passages of the

Cardinal Newman poem, for example, revealed the intent of the verses as we have never heard it before, while the enunciation throughout was a sheer delight because it was so natural and so distinct.”9 Though the author acknowledges an “intent,” it is never clearly defined. A similar comment is found in the reporting of the performance of Henry

Turnpenny, who sang the role of Gerontius: “There was a lack of beauty in his singing, however, and little or no temperament. He sang the notes, but did not seem to be able to convey the finer sentiment of the text or the music.”10 Again, mysticism could be the serious nature of subjects guiding the lyrics, but it is never categorized as such like it had been in 1906.

In that performance, Elgar’s music had been heard as cutting-edge and at the forefront of a burgeoning musical style. In 1911, however, Gerontius had started to show its age. Where Elgar had been hailed in the ranks of Wagner and Strauss in 1906, the

1911 critics questioned the composer’s abilities:

8 Cincinnati Enquirer, 19 April 1911, 7.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

73 The Dream of Gerontius was produced Tuesday night at Music Hall. Cardinal Newman’s poem, which is used as the text for the work, is of wonderful beauty, which Elgar has portrayed in a masterful manner, so far as his use of instrumentation is concerned. It cannot be said, however, that the voice parts, either solo or chorus, are of equally compelling beauty. There are moments when the solos, particularly, those of Gerontius (tenor), approach tedium. This is likewise the case as to the choruses.11

Also notable in these reviews is the careful attention paid to Cardinal Newman as the

author of the poem. Newman had died twenty-one years earlier in 1890, but interest in

his publications was reviving, and many important books about him were published

between 1911 and 1915, including several volumes of his Collected Works, published by

Longman, Green, and Co., and other literary selections that were edited by Gilbert

Garraghan.

The reporters’ interest appeared to be with the choir rather than Elgar, and the

papers reflect a curiosity about this group of foreigners. Some stories focused on

individual members. For instance, the Cincinnati Post ran a story about Lady Helen

Noel, daughter of the Earl of Gainsborough, and her willingness to participate in the tour

in lieu of attending the coronation of King George V. She was quoted as saying: “I

would rather sing a solo with the Sheffield Choir before an audience such as Cincinnati

furnished Tuesday night than attend the coronation. I saw one anyhow, but now I am

seeing something different every day.”12 It can be assumed that Lady Noel was referring to the coronation of King Edward, but the most interesting comments are implied by the author of the article:

11 Cincinnati Times-Star, 18 April 1911, 14.

12 Cincinnati Post, 19 April 1911, 2.

74 Instead of attending the coming coronation of George V., the titled English girl will be traveling in Pullman coaches, or hurrying in and out of hotels, just like any American girl on a concert tour.13

This text seems to assume that all British live a quality of life closer to that of royalty—at least closer than any “American girl.”

The similar theme of the British lifestyle, or perhaps their spoiled nature, is found in the following Cincinnati Post article:

Cincinnati, the city to which members of the Sheffield (Eng.) Choir set their faces as the musical mecca of their pilgrimage, brought chagrin, wrath, and even tears to members of the famous company half an hour after their arrival Tuesday.

The first symptoms of trouble showed when the 220 members of the party were informed they could not be given rooms with baths at the Burnet House. [See Figure 5.2]

At Music Hall, where the company went for rehearsal, men and women gathered in groups and discussed the situation. It was plain that an insurrection was brewing. Dr. Henry Coward, conductor of the choir, consulted with Manager Hawley, of the Symphony Orchestra. Even Mrs. C. R. Holmes, President of the Orchestra Association, was taken into consultation, and it was finally decided to change quarters as far as possible to the Havlin Hotel.

“My word, no bath! Did any one ever hear such a thing, you know,” muttered the angry English choristers.14

These articles place the British persona into the category of a brusque superincumbency, and they also demonstrate a perceived class distinction between the two countries.

England is a supposedly opulent land full of aristocrats while Cincinnati is the cultured city of the steamboat and middle-class. While these assumed distinctions are inaccurate, they permeate the coverage of the choral festival.

13 Ibid.

14 Cincinnati Post, 18 April 1911, 1.

75 Fig. 5.1 Hotel Sinton

Elgar stayed in this Cincinnati hotel during the 1911 Sheffield Choir Tour. It was located on the southeast corner of 4th and Vine St, and was demolished in 1964 for the construction of the Provident Tower.

76 Fig. 5.2 Burnet House Hotel

Some members of the Sheffield Choir stayed in this Cincinnati hotel, which was located on the northwest corner of 3rd and Vine St. The hotel was built in 1850 and had 342 rooms, many without baths. It burned to the ground in 1926, but the great mirror from the hotel lobby is now installed in Music Hall.

77 The reviews noted many similarities between this series of three concerts and the atmosphere of the May Festival. The Cincinnati Enquirer made the comparison in its review of the opening concert:

For the first time in its recent musical history, Cincinnati was given the opportunity last night to hear a visiting choral body of international distinction present a concert of the proportions we are accustomed to hear at our May Festivals. Last night Music Hall assumed the appearance which is typical of our own great musical events. The boxes were elsewhere located to be sure, and the stage did not look quite as crowded as usual; but the general atmosphere was there and the appreciation was as hearty as if our own choristers, the pride of the Queen City, were giving their best efforts to sustain the high standard which prevails here.1

These similarities, however, presented none of the previous themes found in the criticism of the 1906 performances. In fact, Elgar, his mysticism, Britishness, and modernity, are rarely mentioned in the 1911 articles, but when they are, the article often includes a reminder of his May Festival success, which helped bring forth a new era in the musical life of Cincinnati. Ultimately, nothing was at stake in Cincinnati’s musical establishment in 1911, and Elgar’s celebrity was no longer necessary. The May Festival was now re- established, and the Sheffield Choir Tour was for the glory of Britain—not Cincinnati.

The 1911 tour served one stated function: to promote the Empire throughout the

English-speaking dominions. The leg of the tour that took place in America is curious because it is outside of the scope of orthodox imperial studies, but recent scholarship provides a new aspect of empire that manifests itself in this tour. Historians are becoming increasingly interested in the role of business in the decline of the British

Empire, and new categories have been established:

It is possible to scrutinize paradigms which have postulated a close relationship between British businesses and British governments during the end of empire. Neo-Marxist, neo-colonial analyses view decolonization as a pre-emptive strategy

1 Cincinnati Enquirer, 19 April 1911, 7.

78 in which British governments, serving the interests of metropolitan capitalism, cynically anticipated and outmaneuvered colonial radicalism by prematurely transferring political sovereignty to “moderate” nationalists.2

While scholars believe this happened in the 1920s and 1930s for the colonies, they believe it began earlier in British policy with the United States. The most important idea comes from P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, who describe their idea of “gentlemanly capitalism” as the link between businessmen and policymakers in late nineteenth-century

Britain.3 Under the flag of capitalism, the empire was able to extend beyond its political boundaries into sovereign nations.

One particular problem that England would have to overcome was the American resentment of imperial policy. Writing in 1944, Emily Ehle found that these sentiments began in the 1890s and 1900s, distinguishing that “there is no doubt that the Empire, rather than the United Kingdom itself, is the focus of many anti-British attitudes.”4 The portion of the Sheffield tour crossing the northeastern and mid-western United States was as a bridge between the business culture of Britain and America rather than a mere educational tour for imperialism or political pageantry.

Elgar factored little in the reception of the choir tour because he was no longer a novelty in Cincinnati and the musical performances were less intriguing than the off- stage behavior of the choir and the charismatic qualities of Charles Harriss, who inspired

2 Nicholas J. White, “The Business and the Politics of Decolonization: the British Experience in the Twentieth Century,” Economic History Review 53 (2000): 544.

3 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism (New York: Longman Press, 1993).

4 Emily L. Ehle, “American Opinion of Great Britain,” Far Eastern Survey 13 (1944): 168.

79 “good fellowship that was contagious.”5 In Cincinnati, he met with the Chamber of

Commerce and gave a talk on music and business:

Dr. Harriss early in his address made clear that he believed music can be made the soul of business, and that by means of it English and American business men could be inspired to a higher degree of reciprocity in their business relations. He spoke of the tour of the Sheffield singers as an effective means of cementing into indisoluble relations the English-speaking people of the world.

Harriss continued to clearly define the goal of his tour in the same talk, stating:

My job is musical reciprocity. We are not singing for money, but singing because we love to sing and are on a mission that is but the commencement of a continuous movement for greater things. We are on a tour for business making and peace making. Music is a lever to bring business men together. Sheffield business men want to get in touch with you. We have made arrangements for the next five years to bring parties of singing Englishmen here to mingle with you. These people are factory owners and business men with extensive interests, who want to know you better.6

Whether this plan succeeded is unknown, but any analysis of the criticism surrounding the 1911 tour and the 1906 festival must use different categories of criteria because of the different motivations of the sponsoring organizations for the two events.

The May Festival Board of Directors brought Elgar to Cincinnati in 1906 to revitalize a troubled program. The Enquirer claimed that he was to bring forth a “new order of things” in the May Festival, which was attempting to return to its former popularity.7 At the close of the Festival, Krehbiel wrote, “This festival has come nearer the ideal thing than any of its predecessors for a long time.”8 In listing reasons for the rejuvenation, he wrote that a primary explanation was Elgar’s presence. However, the composer was more present in the press than he was in person. If Elgar was part of the

5 Cincinnati Enquirer, 21 April 1911, 7.

6 Ibid.

7 Cincinnati Enquirer, 6 May 1906, 3.

8 Ibid.

80 initiative of the Festival, it was through the Cincinnati critics and their reports of his dress, activities, and music that the public discovered the Englishman.

81 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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82 Gregory, Alexis. The Golden Age of Travel, 1880–1939. London: Cassell, 1998.

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______. Providence and Art: A Study of Elgar’s Religious Beliefs. London: Elgar Society, 1979.

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83 Miller, Brandon Marie. Dressed for the Occasion: What Americans Wore 1620–1970. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1999.

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86 McVeagh, Dianne. “Mrs. Edward Elgar.” Musical Times 125 (1984): 76–8.

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Newspapers

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87 APPENDIX

Performance Schedule for the 1906 May Festival Elgar conducted the entirety of the second concert and where noted by an asterisk. All other works were conducted by Frank Van der Stucken

First Concert (Theodore Thomas Memorial Concert) Tuesday, May 1, 1906

Bach’s God’s Time Is Best Soloists: Mme. Louise Homer, Mr. John Coates, Mr. Herbert Witherspoon, Mr. Charles W. Clark

Wagner’s Die Götterdämmerung “Siegfried’s Death” “Brünnhilde’s Immolation” Soloist: Madame Gadski

Brahms’s German Requiem Soloists: Madame Gadski, Mr. D. Ffrangcon Davies

Second Concert Wednesday, May 2, 1906

Elgar’s The Apostles Soloists: Mrs. Corinne Rider-Kelsey, Mme. Louise Homer, Mr. John Coates, Mr. D. Ffrangcon Davies, Mr. Charles W. Clark, Mr. Herbert Witherspoon

Third Concert Thursday, May 3, 1906

Beethoven’s Leonore Overture, No. 3

Mozart’s Don Giovanni “Non mi dir” Soloist: Madame Gadski

Schumann’s First Symphony

Elgar’s In the South Overture*

88 Marschner’s Hans Heiling “An jenem Tag” Soloist: Charles W. Clark

Loeffler’s La Mort Tintagiles

Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde Prelude “Isolde’s Love-death” Soloist: Madame Gadski

Fourth Concert Friday, May 4, 1906

Liszt’s Les Preludes

Boughton’s Three Songs “Fair Is Our Lot” “Song of the Dead” “The Price of Admiralty” Soloist: D. Ffrancgcon Davies

Strauss’s Serenade for Wind Instruments

Benoit’s Into the World

Dvořák’s Husitzka

Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Delilah “Amour viens aider” Soloist: Mme. Louise Homer

Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3

Handel’s Israel in Egypt “The Lord is a Man of War” Soloists: Ffrangcon Davies, Herbert Witherspoon

Van der Stucken’s Pax Triumphans

89 Fifth Concert Saturday, May 5, 1906

Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony

Weber’s Oberon “Ocean, Thou Mighty Monster” Soloist: Madame Gadski

Strauss’s Feuersnot

Weber’s Euryanthe “Wo berg’ ich mich” Soloist: Herbert Witherspoon

Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro*

Wagner’s Tannhäuser “Dich, theure Halle” Soloist: Madame Gadski

Wagner’s Die Meistersinger Vorspiel

Sixth Concert Saturday, May 5, 1906

Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius* Soloists: Louise Homer, John Coates, D. Ffrangcon Davies

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony Soloists: Mrs. Rider-Kelsey, Janet Spencer, John Coates, Herbert Witherspoon

90