Elgar and academicism 2: practice beyond theory

Musical Times, Autumn 2005 by Newbould, Brian

The principle was well understood by the composers of the Classical period, though apparently not written about by them. Of the many situations in which it is applied by them, it will be worth mentioning three. There seems to have been a tacitly-understood convention, frequently but not invariably observed, that a slow introduction should begin over a falling bass. The fall may be chromatic, generating exploratory harmony, the spirit of adventure being held in check by the logic of the stepping bass. Examples are Mozart's 'Linz' Symphony and 'Dissonance' Quartet, Beethoven's First and Seventh symphonies, Schubert's Third and Sixth. A second application is sometimes found in first movements, where an ascending step-bass may underpin part of - or all of - the process by which a composer modulates 'upwards' to the second key for a 'second subject'. The result can be a neat, seamless transition, as in the two piano sonatas of Beethoven's op. 14 (E major, G major) where the entire transition is achieved by this means.

A third situation in which the stepwise bass effectively serves in Classical scores is in what we may call the 'excursion' - a short move away from and back to the home key in the coda of a long movement, devised to add a frisson of excitement near the end of the piece and permit a fresh and confirmatory homecoming. Though short, the excursion may be psychologically not-soshort, as the stepwise bass may provide an anchor for radical, distanceimplying harmonic deviation within a few bars of music. Ex.4 shows the excursion in the first movement of Beethoven's second Symphony, where the upward-pushing bass occasions glimpses of remote harmonic/tonal vistas before it widens its strides into pre-cadential leaps. It is in the nature of things that all trace of thematic content evaporates in the face of this bassimpelled drama.

There are plenty of examples of conspicuous (and less conspicuous) scale basses in later 19th-century scores. Elgar would have been familiar with these. A notable case is the powerful climax of the song 'Ich grolle nicht' in the Dichterliebe of his admired Schumann.

IT IS, of course, not possible to say which specific works or composers may have suggested to Elgar the value of stepwise basses. It is clear, however, that the textbooks available to him will have given no obvious pointers to their virtue, that he will have absorbed his awareness of them from the repertoire known to and heard by him, and that he made distinctive use of them. A brief exploration of the scores in his library, and of those works he conducted or on which he lectured at Birmingham, would reveal ample evidence of their use. As we have seen, he both lectured on Mozart's Fortieth Symphony and used it as a model for a prentice symphony of his own. While many a listener may not have noticed that the second idea within the first subject-group of Mozart's first movement is built upon a descending scale, this is just the kind of detail Elgar's inquisitive mind would store away. Having a score of Schubert's Fifth Symphony in his possession, he may well have sensed the kinship between that Mozart passage (in Schubert's favourite Mozart symphony) and the first theme of Schubert's Fifth: both passages are in Bl?, both have the descending scale in the bass, and Schubert's upper theme is, consciously or no, a nostalgic embodiment of the essentials of Mozart's.6