Musical Kipling

The English-speaking peoples have yet to produce an enduring giant among composers. Edward William Elgar came close, though not very. Perhaps the best that can be said for him is that he admirably expressed his era. A discerning friend once wrote him: "You have translated Master Rudyard Kipling into music." For long, palmy decades, the world heard Elgar's brassy paddles chunking from Rangoon to Mandalay to Aldershot. When the trooper was on the tide, my boys, or when Tommy Atkins returned from defending dominion over palm and pine, or simply when the poor little street-bred people clustered around the bandstand at Brighton, Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance must ring out. Yet for all its imperial bombast, Elgar's best known composition also conveyed a sort of sweet innocence; compared to some of the marches it was soon to contend with--Communism's booming International or Nazi Germany's gutter hymn, the Horst Wessel Song--it lacked steel. It was really a recessional.

This week a Britain that had receded a long way from Kipling paid affectionate if slightly embarrassed tribute to Sir Edward Elgar on the centennial of his birth. Extravagantly overpraised in his own day, Elgar is now in the shadows. The colder airs of Benjamin Britten rule Britannia-- so much so that critics are taking pains to point out that Elgar, after all, was a skilled and inventive composer who opened a whole new musical tradition for his musically backward country.

Lace & Mendelssohn. The wonder of Elgar's career (he died in 1934 at 76) was not that he failed to become a great composer but that he accomplished as much as he did in the stale, lace-curtained musical atmosphere of mid-Victorian Worcester, where he grew up. The fresh gusts of new music blowing off the Continent never stirred Worcester, and Elgar did not venture as far as London until he was 22. His father was a church organist and sometime piano tuner, and Elgar was raised on warmed-over Mendelssohnian oratorios and cantatas. He played the bassoon, violin and piano in amateur groups, conducted the Worcester Glee Club's orchestra and the County Lunatic Asylum's band.

Elgar might have remained an obscure provincial composer if he had not been encouraged by his wife, a general's daughter. At 43 he won fame at last with his thunderous oratorio, The Dream of Gerontius. As Edwardian England wandered toward World War I, his reputation rose on a great wave of public nostalgia.

Beef & Beer. Elgar became Master of the King's Musick. He fitted the public picture of clubman and country squire, complimented himself that he neither looked nor dressed like an artist. It was this pompous Elgar who turned out the first Pomp and Circumstance march (its trio is also known as "Land of Hope and Glory"), along with The Crown of India, The Banner of St. George, Imperial March --all marked by bombast, contrived orchestral climaxes, syrupy sentiment. "I want to write something as typically and thoroughly English as roast beef and beer," Elgar said, and he succeeded.

But there was another, less roast-beefy side to Elgar ("I must go out and buy some strychnine," he said in a moment of self-criticism), and from that side came his best music--The Dream of Gerontius, Enigma Variations, the Falstaff symphonic poem, his two symphonies. Such pieces have few of Elgar's faults and most of his virtues: the imaginative orchestration, the mystical harmonies, the broad, marching orchestral drive, and the peaceful lyrical passages, which rise and fall as gently as the rolling English countryside Elgar used to roam for inspiration.

Most of Elgar's works have vanished from the repertory and the minds of audiences as completely as the faraway world they echoed. But his better compositions still speak for the England of fields and hedgerows as surely as the martial pieces spoke for the fading empire.

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