Kevin Sutton seeks to correct me:

>These songs of Elgar, although generally sung by choirs today, are part
>songs, intended to be sung one to a part or by some unspecified number
>of singers, more for their own pleasure than for a performance.

Merci, mon ami.  Of course, I over-simplified in order to make a point:
but his reply is also over-simplified.

The unaccompanied songs are naturally all part-songs, usually written for
anything between four and eight parts.  There are indeed a few short songs,
for example the songs from 'The Greek Anthology', which were written for
such as the Worcester Glee Club, where Elgar as a young man had been
accompanist.  But in 1902 Elgar accepted a commission from the Morecambe
Festival, generally considered the finest and certainly the largest in the
country at that time, and was persuaded to attend the Festival and
adjudicate some of the competitions.  He wrote the part-song 'Weary Wind of
the West' to be used as a test piece:  it starts easily, becomes more
demanding and contrapuntal in the middle section, proceeds to a climax, and
declines to a ppp (with sopranos on a top G on the word 'all') - a testing
piece indeed.

Choirs at the Morecambe Festival were usually over fifty strong, with some
of the largest approaching eighty.  To a conference of choral conductors
at Morecambe in 1904 Elgar said:  "You can get a better, broader and more
emotional effect out of eighty voices than you can out of fifty, however
finished the fifty might be." At the 1907 Festival, Elgar conducted the
combined male choirs totalling more than two hundred voices in his 'Yea,
Cast Me From Heights', which he had written as that year's test piece.  In
a letter to Canon Gorton, Elgar wrote:  "I wish you could have heard the
combined men's chorus sing ' Cast Me' on Saturday evening:  not because it
was the best thing to hear but because it was a new idea, unpremeditated
& effectual." In 1912 Elgar conducted the 320 voices of the Leeds
Philharmonic Society in 'The Reveille' and 'Go, Song of mine', which had
been premiered at the 1909 Three Choirs Festival in Hereford.

These songs have indeed been performed/recorded in more recent times
by small ensembles:  this is probably due partly to modern ideas of
'authenticity' suggesting smaller forces, and partly to the decline in
popularity of large choirs singing unaccompanied (and the decline in
popularity of large choral societies generally).  Some confusion may also
have been caused in part by Elgar's publisher Novello tending to classify
many of the songs as 'part-songs', sometimes for what seem to be purely
marketing considerations and against Elgar's wishes.  For example, he asked
Novello to publish 'Go, Song of mine' separately under the heading of
Chorus, Unaccompanied, Six Parts, but Novello decided to include it in
a book of part-songs.

One of the reasons for large choirs not tackling these songs in recent
times is the fact that a number of the songs are really very challenging.
For example, the setting of Tennyson's 'There Is Sweet Music' (which Elgar
called "a clinker & the best I have done") broke new ground by being
written in two keys at the same time, the men singing in the "sharp" key
of G and the ladies in the remote "flat" key of A flat.  This beautiful
song remains an extreme test of difficulty for any choir, but for a large
unaccompanied choir the difficulties of intonation are all the greater,
especially since a large choir is almost inevitably going to be an amateur
choir.

I could go on about these songs, which as with other aspects of Elgar's
music have over the intervening years become surrounded by misconceptions,
but the fact is that there is plenty of evidence that large forces were
routinely used during the composer's lifetime with his enthusiastic
participation and undoubted approval.

Alan Moss
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