Few Pieces in Elgar's Œuvre Are Considered As Unproblematic As His
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Elgar and the City: The Cockaigne Overture and Contributions of Modernity Thomson, A. J. (2014). Elgar and the City: The Cockaigne Overture and Contributions of Modernity. Musical Quarterly, 96(2), 219-262. https://doi.org/10.1093/musqtl/gdt015 Published in: Musical Quarterly Document Version: Peer reviewed version Queen's University Belfast - Research Portal: Link to publication record in Queen's University Belfast Research Portal Publisher rights © 2013 The Author This article has been accepted for publication in The Musical Quaterly Published by Oxford University Press. Figure 1. Title page of Cockaigne (London: Boosey and Hawkes, c. 1901). © The British Library Board, h.3930.d.(1.). Reproduced by permission. This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Musical Quarterly following peer review. The version of record Thomson, AJ 2014, 'Elgar and the City: The Cockaigne Overture and Contributions of Modernity' Musical Quarterly, vol 96, no. 2, pp. 219-262 is available online at: http://mq.oxfordjournals.org/content/96/2/219. General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Queen's University Belfast Research Portal is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The Research Portal is Queen's institutional repository that provides access to Queen's research output. Every effort has been made to ensure that content in the Research Portal does not infringe any person's rights, or applicable UK laws. If you discover content in the Research Portal that you believe breaches copyright or violates any law, please contact [email protected]. Download date:29. Sep. 2021 TITLE PAGE Title: “Elgar and the city: some new lines on Cockaigne” Author: Aidan J. Thomson Institutional affiliation: Queen’s University, Belfast Address: School of Creative Arts, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom Telephone no.: +44 (0)28 9097 5208 Fax no.: +44 (0)28 9097 5053 e-mail address: [email protected] Contribution intended for regular section: Music and Culture, or Texts and Contexts. It might also belong in a special British music volume, such as that in volume 91, nos. 1-2 (2008). Elgar and the city Few pieces in Elgar’s œuvre are considered as unproblematic as his 1901 concert overture, Cockaigne (In London Town). A sonata form movement with an episodic development (see Figure 1 for a thematic analysis of the work), it is not explicitly programmatic; but, from the time of its composition, certain themes and episodes have become associated with particular non-musical images, and thus one can discern a narrative of sorts.1 The opening theme (Example 1(i)), often perceived as an expression of the bustling city of London itself, quickly gives way to a nobilmente theme (Example 1(ii)) that first came to Elgar “one dark day in the Guildhall: looking at the memorials of the city’s great past & knowing full well the history of its unending charity, I seemed to hear far away in the dim roof a theme, an echo of some noble melody.”2 Following this “citizen” theme (as Edwin Evans described it in his analysis of the work in the 1942 Hawkes pocket score), the music returns to the opening material to end the first subject group.3 The key and mood then change, and we hear a cantabile second subject in E-flat major, “commonly associated with a pair of lovers in a London park” (Example 1(iii)).4 The exposition closes with a diminution of the “citizen” theme, generally held to represent a cheeky cockney (Example 1(iv)), and a further reprise of the city theme. The development begins with a pianissimo rendition of the citizen theme, followed by a series of episodes: a military band marches by with a new theme, heard first faintly and then fortissimo (Example 1(v)); an off-key echo of that march is then heard as if depicting a Salvation Army band; and an episode in a church follows, in which new material is combined with phrases from both the cockney and lovers’ themes. The recapitulation includes a reprise in the tonic not only of the lovers’ theme but also of the military march. A short coda, consisting of the citizen theme (in E-flat major) and the city theme for five final measures (in C), brings the piece to a close. So runs a rudimentary, “programmatic” analysis of the piece, one that generally emphasizes the positive in London, a view with which Elgar himself, it appears, was sympathetic. To August Jaeger, he described the work as “cheerful & Londony—‘stout and steaky’”; to Hans Richter, he claimed that there was “nothing deep or melancholy—it is intended to be honest, healthy, humorous and strong but not vulgar.”5 This view was echoed by Elgar’s friends and critics: Jaeger commented to Alice Elgar that he was glad Elgar had “done something jolly after the serious & awsome [sic] Gerontius”; Joseph Bennett, reviewing the premiere of the piece on 20 June 1901, wrote that “There is no suggestion here of a city of dreadful night”; and Ernest Newman, in his monograph on the composer, claimed that the overture was “unflecked by any suspicion of care or ‘problem’. It is not the harassed London of Mr. Charles Booth, but the happy-go-luck London of Phil May… that Elgar dwells upon.”6 The London of Cockaigne, then, would appear to be straightforward, jolly, even affectionate, and without any hint of social problems. Such optimistic sentiments contrast with Elgar’s own experience of the capital. After their marriage in 1889, the Elgars had moved to London, partly so that Edward might establish himself as a composer; but in that respect their sojourn was unsuccessful, and by 1891 they had returned to Worcester. Henceforth, Elgar’s relationship with London was somewhat uneasy: his provocative comment in 1903 that “the living centre of music in Great Britain is not London, but somewhere further North” attracted plenty of criticism in the leading music periodicals, while his suggestion in 1905 that Leipzig (rather than London) might prove the most appropriate model for music-making in Birmingham can be viewed as an anti-metropolitan snub.7 During this period, perhaps prompted by Bennett’s review of the premiere, Elgar considered writing a companion overture to Cockaigne based on James Thomson’s famous depiction of urban dystopia, The City of Dreadful Night (1874).8 The overture would remain unwritten, but material from the sketches was reworked into the chromatic central section of the slow movement of the Second Symphony (figure 74ff). Whether the angst of that famous passage is specifically urban, rather than simply personal, is debatable: both Brian Trowell and Diana McVeagh interpret Elgar’s interest in Thomson’s poem as a reflection of the composer’s despair at his threatened loss of faith.9 But the fact that Elgar considered writing a “Dreadful Night” overture at all indicates that he was aware of the unpleasant side to urban living, and perhaps sympathetic to the plight of those who found it a struggle. The existence of a pessimistic successor to Cockaigne would seem to confirm the optimism of the earlier work. But Elgar’s ambivalence towards London is reflected even in the composition of Cockaigne itself. The final page of the score, completed on 24 March 1901, is inscribed with a transliteration from William Langland’s Middle English poem Piers Plowman: “Metelees and monelees on Malverne hulles.” Following the disastrous premiere of Gerontius in September 1900, Elgar had become particularly drawn to this poem; indeed, he described it to Jaeger as his “Bible, a marvelous book.” It thus provides an insight into his mindset during the period that he wrote Cockaigne, for Piers Plowman is not a happy story. A wanderer falls asleep on the Malvern Hills and has a vision of the Severn valley full of many people, including musicians. The vision extends to London “where flourish the seven deadly sins: pride, lechery, envy, wrath, avarice, and the rest.” Piers Plowman then arose, a “‘People’s Christ’ of the countryside ‘who tills for all’.” He wins God’s pardon for those whose works match their faith, but his triumph is denied by a priest who stands for the Church’s monopoly of pure faith. The quarrel penetrates the dream and the sleeper wakens to an empty and darkening world, “meatless and moneyless on the Malvern hills.”10 There is no doubt that Elgar felt dejected like the wanderer of the poem; in a letter to Richter on 1 April 1901 he wrote that Cockaigne was “not tragic at all—but extremely cheerful like a miserable unsuccessful man ought to write.”11 But his connection with Piers Plowman may well have gone beyond shared despondency with the wanderer to identification with Piers himself. If Piers was a “People’s Christ” from the Malverns “who tills for all,” then Elgar, who saw his vocation as a popular “bard,” was surely a “People’s composer” from the Malverns “who writes for all.” Piers, the savior of his people, had travelled to London only to be reprimanded by clerical orthodoxy; Elgar, the putative savior of his country’s music, was denied his triumph by the London-based high priests of the English musical renaissance, some of whom regarded his music with the utmost suspicion.12 Whereas Piers viewed London as a vice den, however, Elgar desperately wanted to be part of its establishment. In the same letter to Jaeger where he referred to Cockaigne as “stout and steaky,” he lamented the “commonplace ass-music” in Worcester: “the bucolics are all right when they don’t attempt more than eat, drink & Sleep but beyond those things they fail.”13 Elgar’s desire to transcend the limited horizons of provincial music-making through success in the city reveals him to be a well- established phenomenon in late Victorian society: the countryman who came to the city to “transform his mediocrity… into the highest talent.”14 Until he achieved such success, however, he would remain an outsider not only socially (as a lower middle-class autodidact within an upper middle-class London musical establishment), but also geographically.