Elgar and academicism 2: practice beyond theory

Musical Times, Autumn 2005 by Newbould, Brian

IT IS FASCINATING to picture the young Elgar at work on the textbooks briefly reviewed in the first article of this series (Summer MT), and to imagine the more stimulating textbooks he himself might have written in later life. But his (far more important) legacy of works provides a richer and more potent source of technical pedagogy to the enlightened listener and reader of his scores than any textbook could have done.

Much of what Elgar as composer put into practice went well beyond what was available to him in the textbooks or what could have been derived from an institutional academic course on music. It stemmed from the observation of practice in the works of others, and extended that practice to the point of individuality. The individuality of his mature compositional voice is, for better or worse, not something on which one finds much illumination in the Peyton Lectures he delivered in the University of Birmingham in 1905 and 1906. The topics of these lectures included English composers, English executants, and critics. More concerned with the composer's workface were the three lectures on Brahms's Symphony no.3, Mozart's G minor Symphony, and orchestration. One would not necessarily have expected him to talk about his own music in lectures on Brahms or Mozart; but in a lecture on orchestration? In fact this lecture was largely historical and occasionally political: it was also practical up to a point, with some rather general comments on strategy and technique. But there were few clues as to the fact that the speaker was a highly gifted orchestrator himself (much of the talk could have been given by a competent academic), and there was no detail offered on his own distinctive scoring style.

We might usefully precede our quest for the distinctive in Elgar with a quick review of one of his attempts to use another composer as a model. The apt starting-point will be Elgar's own words:

I once ruled a score for the same instruments and with the same number of bars as Mozart "s G minor Symphony, and in that framework I wrote a symphony, following as far as possible the same outline in the themes and the same modulation. I did this on my own initiative, as I was groping in the dark after light, but looking back after thirty years I don't know any discipline from which I learned so much.

There is a frustrating mismatch between these words of recollection and the actual surviving legacy of ink and paper. 'I wrote a symphony' suggests that the task was completed. All that survives, it seems, is a set of fragments, at most one for each of only two or three movements. The only fragment which can with certainty be aligned with Elgar's statement is that of a first movement. Some commentators have accepted Elgar's statement at face value, retailed its message as gospel, and not drawn attention to the paucity of germane material. It could be, of course, that hundreds of bars of a completed or nearly completed symphony have been lost. Is it not equally possible that the composer - in interview a quarter of a century after undertaking this venture - either had a hazy memory of what he had attempted and achieved, or thought economy with the truth harmlessly served his present purpose in this impromptu account of his self-instruction?

The first movement fragment bears out Elgar's statement of method. He adopted Mozart's framework and keys, devising themes and textures of his own not dissimilar to Mozart's. The original scoring was followed to the extent that the later addition of clarinet parts is allowed for, and horns crooked in G and B[musical flat] are used. On a spare stave Elgar notes 'N.B. these are awful keys for horns.' He was evidently not used to coping with the limitations facing composers of Mozart's time.

The opening paragraph of music well illustrates the modelling procedure. The first theme more or less follows Mozartian principles, and incorporates motives akin to some in Mozart's theme, though one motive is metrically shifted (strong to weak instead of weak to strong). Some freedom of phrasestructure is observed, and the harmonic plan within the paragraph is freely varied: but Elgar has completed his first modulation to the dominant and reached his caesura in preparation for the second subj ect in that key at bar 42, just as Mozart did. Thus he honours Mozart's 'framework', retaining the dimensions of larger spans, but modifying details within them. Exercises of this type were and still are given to students in academe. They certainly have their uses, as Elgar divined. At the same time the challenge they pose is to invent material different from the original composer's yet sufficiently compatible with the framework, and this presents a problem of stylistic identity since both the detail and the framework are facets of a single style-matrix. If Elgar did fail to finish his symphony, it could have been because he eventually shirked this challenge, or simply lost patience.

If one way of learning about composition was to take the G minor Symphony as a template, another was to make a critical study of the score, by ear and eye. Elgar's Peyton Lecture on this work makes it clear that this is what he did. Although in his lecture notes and in his comments on the score he never used the term 'economy', he clearly admired the work's economy. He referred to Mozart's 'small, attenuated orchestra', describing it as 'a pitiful array of instruments'. 'We may wonder how it is possible that a great artwork could be evolved from such sorry material. However, "a sculptor does not test the beauty of a figure by its bulk", as Gilbert makes Pygmalion say.'2 This admiration of economy lies clearly enough behind many of the detailed comments on the score, which touch mainly on matters of harmony and orchestration. Where Mozart uses divided violas at the opening, he applauds 'the care with which the harmony is disposed so as to avoid doubling the notes of the theme in the violins'. In another note, he reminds himself to analyse the last chord of this movement. In the finale he enjoys the role of the wind instruments at bb.101-08, reminds himself to analyse the 'brilliant unison' at the beginning of the development, and finds 'no dead weight' in the final tutti.