Elgar and academicism 2: practice beyond theory

Musical Times, Autumn 2005 by Newbould, Brian

What else did Elgar have to learn for himself, without textbooks to guide him? Of all musical textbooks, those on form are possibly the least oriented towards the needs of a composer. If one has any insight into form and the compositional process, one knows that form is to a large extent a product of material. True composition was and is, in this sense, the reverse of what Elgar's modelling of a symphony on Mozart's Fortieth had entailed. There, the form was inherited and the material was devised to lend itself as well as possible to that form. The true creator must let the conceived ideas, be they melodic or rhythmic or harmonic or whatever, work themselves into a complete structure they largely determine, with more or less deference to whichever historic precedents may seem helpful.

Every movement by Beethoven interprets formal conventions in its own way, because its material demands that. Theory was always trying to catch up on practice, but theory focused on common denominators, which meant that the individuality of a piece tended to remain outside its purview. The only truly accurate and exhaustive way of learning about a musical form is to know every piece of a type ever composed. No-one can be so exhaustive, but Elgar - by setting such store by the study of other people's music - built his resources in the best possible way. If he was a conservative composer and one so indebted to models such as Mozart, Schumann and Brahms may fairly be called that - he was none the less innovative in everything he wrote.

As an admirer of Schumann, he knew of the cyclic possibilities in symphonic writing. But the cyclic structure he evinced in his own First Symphony is something quite different from what one will find in Schumann or Franck or any other cyclic symphonist of the 19th century. Not unconnected with the cyclic method, yet distinct from it, is something we may call 'thematic evolution'. The way in which a theme evolves, either through the movements of a cyclic work or in the course of a single movement, may give a work much of its distinction: yet no textbook could offer but the most generalised principles, and a familiarity with specific cases would be of more use. The analyst Rudolph Red coined the term 'thematic resolution' in the light of the practice of certain composers to shape a theme into an ultimate form close to and appropriate to the culmination of the piece.' He based this theory partly on his study of Beethoven, but could have gone on to isolate later examples, such as that in the finale of Brahms's Fourth Symphony, where the chaconne-bass, rising scalewise to the dominant and then falling, finally reaches upwards by further half-steps to the upper tonic (bars 297301, first violins): thematic resolution indeed (ex.2).

Thematic evolution in Elgar's Violin Concerto amounts to a series of thematic part-resolutions, climaxing in a complete resolution in the last bars of the finale. Ex. 3 illustrates the stages of this process, (a) and (b) provide a point of reference in Beethoven (not examples from Réti). In the first movement of the Cello Sonata in A op.69 the first theme comes to rest via (a) on the dominant. Only at the end of the recapitulation does this cadential cell home in on the tonic (b); and Beethoven repeats this a few times to confirm what is resolved. Elgar's first theme moves from and back to the dominant (c). The first entry of the solo violin (d) proposes one part-resolution, pulling to the tonic only by the addition of an extra note. The last orchestral tutti of the movement presents a truer resolution, in that it is a literal transposition up a fourth, thus moving from and to the tonic (e); but, sufficient as it is to close the first movement, it introduces a new element that itself requires resolution, the dissonant C[natural] ('Neapolitan' to the key of B minor). Only at the end of the finale (f ) is that dissonance resolved (in the C#), while the turning to B major brings an extra degree of resolution. (The final tonic is already present in the bass, so that the last two notes of the original cell can here be felt as redundant.)