Edward Elgar

*  Cockaigne (In London Town) - Concert Overture, op. 40
*  Symphony No. 1 in A flat, op. 55

Philharmonia Orchestra/Sir John Barbirolli
EMI CDM 7 64511 2 Total time: 68:26

Summary for the Busy Executive: Glorious, glorious, glorious John.

Barbirolli had a long history with Elgar's music. For one thing, he was
the third cellist to take up the composer's concerto.  He championed
Elgar at a time when the music needed it, as, for some very strange
reason, it seems to every few years.  Indeed, this sort of ebb and flow
of interest seems to afflict just about every British composer, excepting
Britten, at least so far.

One nice thing about the spate of recordings of 19th-century British
music in general is that they allow us to see that scene closer to the
way Elgar's contemporaries saw it.  There are some fine composers about:
Sullivan, Parry, Stanford, Coleridge-Taylor, Stainer, even Mackenzie.
In comparison, however, Elgar's a being from another world, or the
hominoid who touched the 2001 monolith.  He plays the game at such an
obviously higher level.  Furthermore, given his contemporaries (including
Sullivan, a bona fide genius), you couldn't have predicted him.  The
music is so much more complex - technically as well as psychologically
- so much more deeply worked and fully finished.  Compared to Elgar, his
contemporaries' orchestras sound thin and a little dull.

The Cockaigne overture provides us with a case in point.  It's the
composer's musical valentine to London, the city of cockneys and kings.
He wrote it during 1901 and 1902, a comparatively fallow year.  Besides
the overture, he completed only two of the Pomp and Circumstance marches
and the Coronation Ode.  The whiff of "Elgar lite" has hung around this
brilliant piece ever since it premiered.  However, it captures, like no
other score I know - including Vaughan Williams's second symphony - the
energy, bustle, and shove of the city.  The music lets you see grand,
glittering processions as well as singing and dancing buskers - the
pearly kings and queens - side by side.  I think this Mahlerian juxtaposition
of grand and vulgar confused the first audiences.  What is Elgar's
patented nobilmente doing beside the evocation of harmonicas and ocarinas?
A big nature takes everything in.  Furthermore, Elgar's nobilmente is
never as straightforward as the marking implies.  Here, it brings in a
strain of yearning, perhaps for an impossible love.  It's seems as if
Elgar needs to adore the city even more than he does.  The composer - a
very complex personality indeed - loved the countryside (in fact, lived
there much of the time), but he also loved moving in high society.
Despite his fame and honors, he always saw himself as an outsider looking
in, with his nose continually pressed against the window glass.  London
represented, among other things, a never-reachable grail.  That too comes
out in the work.

Elgar's first symphony appeared in 1908.  Many - including its dedicatee
and first conductor, Hans Richter - considered it not only the greatest
English symphony to that point, but the greatest symphony of modern
times.  Elgar characteristically seemed of two minds, mostly brought
on by his habitual fear of the evil eye, like a dog who expects to get
kicked, which would never allow him to fully enjoy success.  His letters
are full of both self-disparagement and a kind of shy pride.  Most of
the early commentary - and not just flag-waving British commentary,
either - put this symphony alongside the Beethovens, particularly the
slow movement, which Richter singled out and which Elgar's friend Jaeger
("Nimrod," of the Enigma Variations) compared to its counterpart in the
Ninth.  Within a year of its premiere and before the age of mass radio
communication, this symphony had over a hundred performances, most of
them outside Britain.

The Bright Young Things after World War I -- among them, the composer
and critic Constant Lambert -- dismissed the symphony as yet another
example of theme music for Col.  Blimp.  "Smug" was one of the kinder
epithets.  They consigned Elgar's music to the same rubbish-bin as the
minor poetry of the Edwardian and Georgian era.  They seriously misheard
it.  Elgar doesn't laud empire.  In fact, most of the work runs a fairly
unsettled, nervous course (and Elgar's second symphony goes even further
in that direction).

Furthermore, for all the comparisons to Beethoven, Elgar's music differs
too much from that composer's.  Elgar lacks Beethoven's classical clarity.
Beethoven talks to you directly.  Elgar continually alludes to things.
The famous motto-theme of the first symphony provides a case in point.
Elgar rarely states the motto in full, and yet its presence haunts the
entire work.  One can see straightforward variations of it throughout,
but less clear is Elgar's use of it as an archetypal "shape." This comes
down even to the placement of climaxes in various themes and the very
scale-degree of the climactic note, in themes that have otherwise little
to do with the motto.  Elgar identified the motto with the spiritual
quality of charity - a thread running through experience and coloring
it. There's plenty of what Shaw called "head-work" in the symphony, but
much of it comes across as "felt" rather than "thought." Although I don't
deny the music's emotion, Beethoven always impresses through his logic
or his deliberate messing-up of logic.  At any rate, the music almost
always seems to have a logical referent.  Elgar seems like a "spirit
radio," drawing strands of thought out of the air and bundling them.
His method of composing scraps at a time and then forging them together
bears this out.  Unlike Beethoven (or Brahms, for that matter), he wasn't
particularly systematic about his composing.  One can't imagine him
leaving around, as Brahms did, a notebook labeled "Good Second Subjects."
On the other hand, he once wrote in a letter to a friend that the themes
of the symphony came "from the same oven."

The symphony begins with one of the rare statements of the motto in full.
It always reminds me of the Kipling poem "Recessional." It has the sound
of armies fading away in the distance.  Once done, Elgar leaves it for
a rather turbulent, fevered theme. Much of the movement plays out the
drama of whether the motto will win out over the fever.  The motto
attempts to come back several times, sometimes in "shreds and patches,"
to be beaten back by the despair.  As you would expect, the motto comes
back at the end, but with a difference.  There's no triumph in it.  It's
sad and tired.  I don't understand how listeners could have heard
self-satisfaction in this work.

The fever runs through the main theme of second-movement scherzo.  However,
you also hear humor as well as a particularly Elgarian wistful lyricism.
The motto comes in, but only by extreme allusion, at the end.  And it's
a matter of "symbolic orchestration" more than an actual quote - pizzicato
basses in a slow march.

The adagio follows without a break. It's Beethovenian in the depth of
feeling it provokes, but not really in any other way.  It has much Wagner
in it as Beethoven.  The main theme, again, alludes to the motto without
ever quoting it.  It's almost a counter-melody to the motto.  It sings,
even soars, beautifully, with a great deal of regret.  For me, as for
generations of listeners, this is the most miraculous movement of the
four.

Finales - at least since Beethoven - often concern themselves with
transformation.  Given what's happened so far, we can safely bet that
Elgar wants to end up with the motto, blazing triumphantly.  Elgar doesn't
disappoint.  The movement, however, opens with a down-beat equivalent
to the motto (it turns out, a variant of the motto, but the relationship
isn't obvious right away).  As in the first movement, the motto tries
to break through, only to be shouted down by yet another angry theme,
similar in function to the main idea of the first movement.  Still, the
overall mood is heroic, rather than angry and restless, perhaps because
just about every major idea relates very strongly to the motto.  When
the motto finally does break through the struggle, it seems a necessary
outcome, rather than something tacked on.  For me, it's one of the great
modern endings, thoroughly convincing.

I've simply not heard a better recording of Cockaigne than Barbirolli's.
It's almost manic in its energy.  The account of the symphony is undoubtedly
one of the four best - Barbirolli with the Halle, Elgar's own recording,
and Boult the other three.  I happen to prefer Boult, mainly as a matter
of temperament.  I like a little distance.  Barbirolli is just too
exciting.  The finale especially suffers from an excess of enthusiasm.
Rhythm often deteriorates in the quicker passages.  On the other hand,
I don't really care. It's still a great account, and the slow movement
in particular lets you know why you listen to music in the first place.

Steve Schwartz