Symphony No. 1 in A flat major, Op.

55 (19078)

1 Andante. Nobilmente e semplice Allegro

2 Allegro molto
3 Adagio
4 Lento Allegro

Elgar was in the habit of describing works he hadnt yet written. He

mentioned a symphony as early as 1898; it was to be a sort of Eroica
inspired by General Gordon, the popular, idealistic hero killed in the siege of
Khartoum in 1885. By the end of 1899 Elgar had actually written a theme,
and his wife Alice mentioned hearing scraps in 1901. But some of these
early ideas probably ended up in Elgars Second Symphony rather than his
First, and without a commission fee to allay his persistent anxieties about
money (I can only get commissions to write rot, he said), he didnt get down
to work until the summer of 1907; he finished the score by the end of
September the following year.

For a long time Elgar had promised to dedicate a work to the conductor Hans
Richter, who had made a poor job of the first performance of The Dream of
Gerontius and wanted to make amends. Richter was conductor of the Hall
Orchestra at the time, and gave the symphonys first performance at one of
their concerts in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, on 3 December 1908. In
those days, it was usual to clap between movements, but after the slow third
movement, the response was especially warm, and Elgar was called on to the
platform to take several bows. The press were there in force, and
unanimously celebrated a triumph. Under the heading The Musical Event of
the Year, the Daily Mail wrote: It is quite plain that here we have perhaps the
finest masterpiece of its type that ever came from the pen of an English
composer. (One wonders what Stanford and Parry thought of that.) The
Birmingham Daily Post invoked Gerontius a Gerontius who instead of dying
has continued to live and is all the better for the agony of spirit he has been
through summing up: It is a work not merely of English but of European
significance.

Richter, the champion of not-long-dead Old Masters like Wagner and Brahms,

took the same view. When he was about to rehearse Elgars symphony just
three days after the Manchester premiere, he addressed the London
Symphony Orchestra with these words: Gentlemen, let us now rehearse the
greatest symphony of modern times, written by the greatest modern
composer, and not only in this country. Elgar, incidentally, thought Richard
Strauss the greatest composer of the day, but then Strauss never wrote a
symphony without a programme, the sort which Elgar held was the highest
form of art.

In contrast with Manchester, the first London performance, at the Queens

Hall in Langham Place, was packed out, and Richter had to repeat it later in
the month. The American premiere followed in January, and within a year
there were nearly 100 performances worldwide. The great Arthur Nikisch,
who conducted the symphony in Leipzig, told the press: When Brahms
produced his first symphony it was called Beethovens Tenth, because it
followed on the lines of the nine great masterpieces of Beethoven. I will
therefore call Elgars symphony the Fifth of Brahms.

Comparisons with Old Masters may do more harm than good, but Nikisch had
a precise reason for referring to Brahms; for while Elgars orchestral
exuberance and flamboyant melodic style come close to Richard Strauss, the
finale of the First Symphony is, albeit sporadically, a homage to Brahms,
whose Third Symphony Elgar particularly admired. Brahms never asked for a
cor anglais, nor for two very active harps, in any symphony he wrote, and the
more one thinks of Brahmsian parallels in Elgars finale, the more personal it
seems. I am really alone in this music, he wrote.

In the first movement, the long opening theme (an unusually daring way to
open a symphony!) is a motto for the whole work, with the distinct feeling of
a procession that passes by, is glimpsed now and then from afar, and
eventually returns. The main action of the first movement starts, after 50
bars, with an abrupt change of tempo (Allegro), as well as mood
(appassionato) and key (D minor). The theme is terse and promising, just the
thing for future passages of development. But Elgar also allows for a strong
rhapsodic element, as ideas roll forth one after the other, and the pulse
swings between duple and triple, even before the sweet and slightly sad
second subject, in which the first violins are garlanded decoratively by a flute.
When the processional motto returns at the end of the movement, it does so
faintly, played by the last pair of players only in each string section, so that it
is just about heard, but hardly seen. (Instead of perceiving what is there, said

Elgar, you dont see that something is not there.)

From A flat major, the home key of the first movement, the second shifts to F
sharp minor. Its a scherzo, scurrying along at a brisk one-in-a-bar. Its also a
quick, rather self-important march, and theres a more relaxed playful
contrast that Elgar told an orchestra to play like something we hear down by
the river. Touches of lyrical sweetness enter even this movement. At the end,
the march theme is recalled, slower and softer, to prepare the way for the
Adagio, which follows without any break in continuity, the violins held F
sharp providing a hinge to turn into D major.

Their new theme is actually a slowed-down transformation of the scurrying

pattern at the start of the scherzo/march. Richter hailed Elgars Adagio as the
sort of slow movement that Beethoven would have written. He was paying a
compliment, but Elgars luxuriant melancholy and iridescent harmony are
worlds away from Beethoven.

The final movement begins stealthily, with recollections (played only by the
back desks of cellos and violas) of an angular motif from the first movement,
followed by spooky hints of a march theme to come later.
A clarinet stretches a short phrase (its almost a yawn!) that is going to be a
driving force later, too, and theres an intriguingly slantwise reference to the
processional motto from the first movement. The main Allegro is launched in
a spirit of Brahmsian belligerence and the chief, though by no means the
only, theme, when it arrives, is a strutting little march. (When he recorded the
symphony in 1930, Elgar significantly speeded up at this point.) It enters
quietly but takes on tremendous swagger as its repeated.

The Brahmsian business eventually works off its energy, and a feeling of
reconciliation supersedes. The march is smoothed out into something broad
and serene, and then, in all its glory, the processional motto from the first
movement returns, against which all the other players, united, hurl
themselves, like breakers on the sea-shore, though at irregular intervals an
unforgettable effect.

Programme note Adrian JackSymphony No. 2 in E flat major, Op. 63 (1910

11)

1 Allegro vivace e nobilmente

2 Larghetto
3 Rondo: Presto
4 Moderato e maestoso

Following the spectacular success of his First Symphony, performed almost

100 times within a year of its premiere in 1908, Elgar must have felt
encouraged to write another. After all, he still had plenty of unused sketches
(he took a musical sketchbook with him on his country walks, and jotted
down ideas even in company). But the next major project was the Violin
Concerto, one of his most overtly emotional works, which had its first
performance in November 1910. He got down to work on the Second
Symphony almost immediately afterwards and finished it, amazingly quickly,
in early March 1911.

Oddly enough, the first performance, in which Elgar himself conducted the
Queens Hall Orchestra, was far from the triumph the First Symphony had
been and the audiences response was somewhat muted. What is the matter
with them, Billy? Elgar asked the orchestras leader, W. H. Reed: They sit
there like a lot of stuffed pigs.

But gradually, almost as if by way of compensation, writers about Elgars

music have tipped the balance in the Second Symphonys favour, describing
it as more complex and more personal than the First.

Trading one work against another is pointless and both Elgars First and
Second symphonies have an equal claim to our esteem. The Second, though
written for the same size orchestra with the addition of a high E flat clarinet
and tambourine, certainly does have more complicated textures, and sounds
more opulent. It requires the orchestral strings, in particular, to be athletic. As
a violinist himself, and also a conductor with considerable experience, Elgar
knew what he was asking. In both symphonies, the two harps make a very
important contribution, sometimes cushioning the ensemble, sometimes

giving it a pearly, luminous quality. In the Second Symphony, the way in

which themes migrate, transformed, from movement to movement is
particularly subtle, and very natural. The work as a whole is also more
mellow, less dramatic, than the First Symphony, whose sharp contrasts of key
from movement to movement, or section to section, are avoided, although in
the Second Elgars harmony is very mobile, chromatic and, for short periods,
deliberately bewildering.

The new symphony was dedicated to the memory of Edward VII, who had
died in May 1910; yet despite the fact that the second movement is sombre,
and rises to a searing expression of grief, Elgar claimed it had nothing to do
with any funeral march. But he did point out a passage in the same
movement, which he had sketched back in 1903, after the funeral of his
friend Alfred Rodewald, the dedicatee of the Pomp and Circumstance March
No. 1. At the top of the score, Elgar quoted the first two lines of a poem by
Shelley:

Rarely, rarely comest thou,

Spirit of Delight!

Which refers, almost certainly, both to the presence and absence of delight.

At the end he printed Venice Tintagel and said that the beginnings of the
second and third movements respectively expressed the contrast between
the interior of St Marks and the Piazza outside. However, Tintagel, the ruined
castle on the Cornish coast that was to inspire Arnold Baxs sumptuously
picturesque tone-poem a few years later, hasnt been identified with any
particular part of Elgars score. These labels are surely no more than
circumstantial, and dont offer deep insights into the music.

Elgar himself summed up the first movement as tremendous in energy,

which it certainly is, with wide melodic leaps and lolloping syncopations in
12/8 time, occasionally relieved by 4/4. Elgar thought it was a composers job
to invent melodies, not take them ready-made (he didnt use folk tunes, for
instance), and they appear in profusion here, so that the effect is of rhapsodic
flow rather than hard and fast contrasts. As a symphony intended, at least

nominally, to be a tribute to a larger-than-life monarch, its opening could

hardly have been more appropriate. But the first movement is far from all
swelling pride, since, by way of development, it retires into a sort of
nocturnal, dreamlike state, before struggling back (strepitoso) to reclaim its
original confidence.

The slow second movement (in C minor) begins with an echo of that
dreamlike episode second violins briefly taking the top line, above the firsts.
Then it settles down into the blackest of cortges. If this isnt a funeral march,
what is? The passage Elgar sketched after Rodewalds funeral comes some
way into the movement an intricately fluttering, shimmering, ascending
sequence, not far distant, in its sound-world and even its spirit, from Isoldes
Liebestod at the end of Wagners opera; it occurs twice, the second time
pitched a tone lower in order to lead to the climax.

The Rondo (in C major, much modified with chromatic notes) is a real
scherzo, rhythmically playful, so to begin were not sure if were counting
threes, twos or ones, before a sonorous second theme bounces in and settles
the matter. But again, darkness intervenes in the form of a nightmarish
recollection of a passage from the first movement (originally with a theme for
the cellos straining in their higher register) over a throbbing E flat pedal. The
spectre passes and the ending is noisily playful.

The final movement sets out in a purposeful way with a theme marked con
dignit. Perhaps Elgars demons have been exorcised, for the second theme,
bounding healthily in the strings, is positive, too, and soon waxes grandioso
and nobilmente.

The development beginning with desiccated contrapuntal exchanges turns

into a quasi-battle scene, with a trumpet call whose top target note, a high B,
orchestral players make it a point of honour to sustain longer than Elgar
dared ask. Once calm is established, we are on course for a return to the
starting-point and an effulgent climax which subsides finally into a quietly
glowing ending.

Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85 (1919)

1 Adagio Moderato
2 Lento Allegro molto
3 Adagio
4 Allegro Moderato Allegro, ma non troppo

The Cello Concerto was the last important work that Elgar wrote. Its first
performance, in October 1919, with the composer himself conducting,
opened the first post-war season of the London Symphony Orchestra at the
Queens Hall. Most of the time available for rehearsal was taken by the other
works in the programme, which were conducted by Albert Coates, and as a
result the Concerto suffered. Ernest Newman wrote in The Observer: The
orchestra was often virtually inaudible, and when just audible was merely a
muddle. No-one seemed to have any idea of what it was the composer
wanted'.

How the light tread of the music became a shamble can be imagined. Yet
Newman himself did have an idea of what Elgar wanted: Some of the colour
is meant to be no more than a vague wash against which the solo cello
defines itself. He went on to speak of that poignant simplicity that has come
upon Elgars music in the last couple of years, by which he was referring not
to patriotic and topical pieces such as The Spirit of England, but to three
chamber works a string quartet, a violin sonata and a piano quintet which
had been given their first performances at the Wigmore Hall the previous
May.

Yet the Cello Concerto also harked back to Elgars last symphonic work,
Falstaff (written in 1913), even though that was on a much more expansive
scale. Falstaff contrasts bluff rhetoric and wistful reverie in a similar way, and
the Times music critic H. C. Colless perception in it of a mind that can think
on a big scale, but loves to play with children far more could apply equally to
the Concerto. Elgars portrait of Falstaff was one of contradictions, but
throughout, he wrote, runs the undercurrent of our failings and sorrows.
Falstaff was a man left behind by events, and by the end of the 191418 War
Elgar felt the same had happened to him.

In Falstaff, Elgar had perfected the manipulation of episodes, the ability to

change the subject without losing sight of it, and in the Cello Concerto he
applied that mastery to a four-movement symphonic plan and gave it a sense
of fluidity and caprice.

In the Concerto, the solo cellist doubles as narrator and protagonist,

introducing and interrupting the course of events by way of linking them. His
opening recitative is sketchily recalled at the end of the first movement, then
cast aside as he scribbles ideas for the scherzo; after the first orchestral
flourish of the finale he extends, in a sort of cadenza, a line connecting the
shape of the original recitative to the finales main subject. The slow third
movement, in its distant key of B flat major, remains apart, like a brief dream
that reaches no conclusion. But Elgar does not leave it at that: towards the
end of the finale the music broadens in a tide of lyrical passion which brings
the mood of the Adagio back. It does not have the final say, for however
strong the elegiac strain may be in the Concerto, it is, in the classic sense of
the word, a comedy.
Violin Concerto in B minor, Op. 61 (190510)

1 Allegro
2 Andante
3 Allegro molto

The violin was Elgars own instrument and his Violin Concerto is almost like a
personal confession: it was too emotional, Elgar admitted, adding that he
loved it nonetheless. The Spanish inscription he wrote opposite the title-page
Aqu est encerrada el alma de . . . . . (Here is enshrined the soul of . . . . .)
offers an Elgarian enigma, to which the most popular solution is that the
soul belonged to Alice (five letters, corresponding to the five dots) StuartWortley, a friend for whom Elgar invented the name Windflower (a wood
anemone, one of the first signs of spring), which he also attached to two of
the gentler themes in the opening movement.

Elgar sketched a number of ideas in 1905 after reading a newspaper

interview with Fritz Kreisler, in which the 30-year-old violinist said highly
flattering things about Elgars music, and wished he would write something

for violin. Elgar eventually got down to composing the concerto in earnest in
1909, and Kreisler gave the first performance at the Queens Hall in London
on 10 November 1910, with Elgar himself conducting. Later on, Kreisler
seems to have lost his initial enthusiasm for the work, made cuts, and
resisted all attempts to persuade him to record it.

The solo part is one of the most exhausting in the repertoire a veritable
compendium of bravura violin techniques, in which Elgar, despite all his
inside knowledge, sought the help of W. H. Reed, later to become Leader of
the London Symphony Orchestra. Reed and Elgar (at the piano) gave a runthrough to a select group of listeners before the first performance proper.
Kreisler also made small suggestions that were incorporated in the published
score.

In his interview, Kreisler had ranked Elgar with Beethoven and Brahms. Elgar
met the challenge, and his Violin Concerto combines the singing quality of
Beethovens with the symphonic drama of Brahmss. The fantasy-like
elaboration of the solo part is underpinned by tough argument.

The opening theme (one of those first jotted down in 1905) is a typically
robust utterance, pursued, in a continuous flux, by two less forceful
Windflower themes, the second tenderly picked up by a solo clarinet. The
solo violins entry at the end of the orchestral prelude settles the argument
by resolving the first theme in B minor. Then it takes wing in a flight of
ecstatic elaboration, laying claim to its own restatement of the themes heard
previously. The climax of the movement with the second Windflower
theme plunged suddenly, maestoso, into a new key passes, through some
storm-tossed adventures, to a becalmed restatement of the first theme and,
later, a triumphant apotheosis of the second Windflower theme. The soloist
outruns the orchestra in a race to the close.

The second movement slips down a semitone into B flat major another
world, pastoral and serene, until passions are stirred and the soloist waxes
eloquent. It was the nobilmente theme from this central part of the work that
Elgar once said he would like inscribed on his grave.

The finale sets off in a dizzy whirr. The first main theme is march-like, though

quite where the barline comes is (to the listener) a deliberate point of
ambiguity. The sense of urgency is relieved somewhat when a broader tempo
brings in an expansive theme, shared by soloist and orchestra, typical of
Elgar in its sweeping energy, and soon afterwards a delicate third theme for
the soloist with lightly scored accompaniment.

The most striking feature of this movement is the extremely atmospheric

(fully composed) cadenza, in which the soloist muses on the three most
important themes from the first movement, beginning with the first
Windflower theme, over a shuddering orchestral backdrop. Just after the
eerie opening (with some of the strings muted, the rest shivering on the
bridges of their instruments) the orchestral violins, violas and cellos have to
thrum a tremolo with the soft part of their fingers across the strings a
novel effect. Only a short passage near the end of the cadenza is left to the
soloist unaccompanied, who once again closes the curtain by returning to the
opening theme of the first movement. The coda then picks up the initial
tempo of the finale and, with one stretched-out restatement of its march-like
theme by the soloist, it brings the concerto to a brisk, brilliant conclusion.
Serenade for strings in E minor, Op. 20 (1892)

1 Allegro piacevole
2 Larghetto
3 Allegretto

Elgar was a string-player, a violinist of considerable ability the concerto and

the sonata he wrote for the instrument are some of his most characteristic
and personal works. Two works for string orchestra have both become firm
repertoire favourites. The Introduction and Allegro, which he composed for
string quartet and string orchestra in 1905, is in effect a Romantic
enlargement of the concerto grosso principal. But the Serenade for strings
which we hear tonight is altogether simpler. It is the earliest work by Elgar to
have become well known it preceded his Enigma Variations by six years
but it is utterly characteristic.

The opening movement (piacevole, as marked, means pleasing) has the

same lilting rhythm as Hugo Wolfs Italian Serenade (the orchestral version of
which dates from the same year), but also a gentler, more dusky atmosphere
of its own, in which the desire to please in the rise and fall of its phrases is
expressed, at first, with a certain shyness. The melodic shapes of the slow
middle movement (in C major) are typical, too, and intensify briefly to a
central confession of feeling before sinking back into a threefold reminder of
the opening phrase. The final movement returns to the alfresco character of
the first, with some discreet reminders of its lilting rhythm.

The slow movement was heard first, on its own, in Hereford in 1893, and all
three movements were eventually performed in Antwerp in 1896. Much later
in life Elgar singled the Serenade out as his favourite work and described it as
really stringy in effect; he included it as one of his last gramophone
recordings the year before he died.