Why is it suddenly fashionable to knock Elgar, our greatest composer?

13 April 2012

So the great composer Sir Edward Elgar has been banished from our banknotes in favour of the 18th century free marketeer Adam Smith.

Not that I've anything against Adam Smith, the founding father of economics, a man who believed passionately in free trade and who was, after all, one of Lady Thatcher's heroes.

But to add insult to Elgar's injury, a number of critics have taken the opportunity to kick him while he is down.

Now that he's no longer on the £20 note, they have been deriding him as insular, parochial and a second-rate composer whose music is jingoistic and should not be taken seriously.

Well, I, for one, beg to differ. Elgar to me is an icon of Great Britain and, above all, of England. His music runs like a thread not only through my life - I live in a house on the Welsh Borders which, I am told, he used to visit, and he was said to pinch the maids - but also through our national life.

Both in my county of Herefordshire and the neighbouring ones of Worcestershire and Gloucestershire, he's a sacred figure whose works like the oratorio, The Dream Of Gerontius, are the mainstay of the Three Choirs Festival which rotates annually around the three cathedrals.

It is all too easy for the "cultured classes" to sneer at the man who brought us Land Of Hope And Glory, but Elgar knew, when he wrote it, that he had hit a nerve with the English people: "I've got a tune that will knock 'em - knock 'em flat!" he said of it. "A tune like that comes once in a lifetime."

In this age when it is fashionable to pour scorn on patriotism, anyone can make a cheap soundbite knocking Elgar. But even if his music is not played in the salons of the chattering classes, it is as popular today throughout this country as ever it was.

Elgar's influence is so strong that he has become part of our national psyche.

What other British composer can you say that of? His works breathe with a celebratory pride in being part of a nation that, in Elgar's day, ruled over an Empire upon which the sun truly never set.

Ever since they were composed, his great marches have been the centrepiece of our national ceremonial music, certain to be played at every coronation and celebratory national event such as the Queen's Silver and Golden Jubilees, to accompany some regal procession in Westminster Abbey.

They've become part of our musical mythology, stirring our minds to remember the heroism and service that has inspired our nation.

But because so much of Elgar's music encourages us to wave the Union Jack, his brilliance and subtlety are often overlooked.

When we listen to Elgar he conjures up in our imagination the English countryside in all its glory, a dream which moves in and out of sunshine and shade in a succession of complex moods. Sometimes we feel bathed in a pool of warm sunlight. At other moments we are engulfed in the shadows.

"This is what I hear all day," Elgar once wrote to his friend, A.J. Jaeger, "the trees are singing my music - or have I sung theirs?"

Here, he suggests he makes the landscape of England speak through his compositions. And how true that is! He also once described himself as penning nothing more than English folk music. No wonder his work has such powerful resonances for English people.

In his symphonies, you can almost see the grass swaying in the wind on the rolling hills of England's landscape - especially that of his native Worcestershire, home of the beautiful Malvern Hills.

Wonderful walks are to be had there with views across the great vale below which stretches like a verdant tapestry into the misty distance.

Elgar's music floods through my mind as I stride across them. He achieves for our landscape in music what Constable does in painting.

The Enigma Variations, written in 1899, are recognised as a landmark in the rebirth of English music-making which had been in the doldrums for virtually the entire 19th century. It was at once hailed as a major masterpiece. This is a work which still has a potent hold on the public - as listeners to Classic FM will know, for it is rare to pass a day without all or part of it being played.

The solemn and moving movement Nimrod has become almost an organ cliche; for funerals, but however often it is played, nothing can eradicate the beauty of this pen-portrait in music of Jaeger, the man who encouraged Elgar when he was trying against all odds to establish his reputation.

Elgar's career was extraordinary, for he was very much an outsider who fought the musical establishment.

Born in 1857, he was the son of a Worcester organist and music dealer who had married a farm labourer's daughter and his family was so poor that they could afford no music lessons.

In that class-ridden period he was shunned for being from the wrong background and he suffered from religious bigotry because he was a Roman Catholic. Yet Elgar was to overcome all this to become a knight of the realm and, finally, in 1924, Master of the King's Musick.

To achieve that, the debt he owed to his wife, Alice, was incalculable. She came from a far higher class of society, being a major-general's daughter, and was eight years older, but her life was dedicated to nurturing the man she looked upon as a great musical genius.

And genius he undoubtedly was. His masterpieces until the outbreak of World War I superbly capture the spirit of Edwardian England, its splendour and confident, unashamed patriotism.

This is when he composed the famous Pomp And Circumstance Marches. But then the war came and he produced the most extraordinary elegiac and mournful music - works such as his haunting Cello Concerto. Gone is the pomp and swagger, for Elgar was horribly depressed by the loss of life.

As Elgar's biographer, Ian Parrott, says: "It is a work apart, by a lonely man in wartime who sees that artistic criteria have altered irreversibly."

After 1918 Elgar was living out of his period, an anachronism surviving into the era of jazz and Stravinsky.

His music fell abruptly from favour and it was only in 1957, the year of his centenary, that it was rediscovered. Since then it has been on an ever-ascending curve upwards in popular esteem and appreciation.

What rescues his music from being solely a monument to a vanished imperial era is its overwhelming power to tug at the human emotions.

It is romantic and chivalrous. It is a vision of England which is proud and pastoral, magnificent, generous-spirited and gracious and yet, at the same time, haunted by ghosts of doubt and introspection.

He captures so many of the qualities which we observe in the English character, being at times light and sparkling, almost zany, and at other times buttoned-up and repressed.

There is a huge streak of melancholy there, too, as though his works are in one aspect a requiem mourning a visionary England which has gone forever.

I feel no shame when the tears come to my eyes during the Last Night Of The Proms as I look at the sea of young faces of every shade and kind holding aloft their flags and singing with fervour Land Of Hope And Glory.

It makes me at least cherish the belief that we are yet a country where there is still some hope and still glimmers of glory. The music of Elgar is there forever to remind us.

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