PhilPaine.com

Edward Elgar fell out of fash­ion after World War I, and his exis­tence was bare­ly acknowl­edged by music his­to­ri­ans for the next fifty years. He was so firm­ly asso­ci­ated with British Impe­ri­al­ism, that his music became the sub­ject of sneers. This is par­tic­u­larly sad, because Elgar him­self was a gen­tle, sen­si­tive soul whose pri­mary inspi­ra­tion was nature, and he grew to loathe every per­for­mance of “Land of Hope and Glo­ry”, the bom­bas­tic anthem that had been made from one of his march­es. In the 1890’s he had been a very patri­otic Empire boost­er, along with every­one else. But he was bit­terly dis­ilu­sioned by World War I and sought solace in his beloved Eng­lish coun­try­side. He nev­er much cared for his role as Britain’s Offi­cial Composer.

But despite all the scorn heaped on him, the First Sym­phony, the Cel­lo Con­certo, and the Enig­ma Vari­a­tions con­tin­ued to be per­formed in seri­ous con­certs, while the Pomp and Cir­cum­stance March­es lived on in the Pop Clas­sics reper­toire. The Sec­ond Sym­phony, not at first suc­cess­ful, slow­ly came to be played as often as the first. At his death, he left sketch­es for a third sym­phony, and in 1998, these were trans­formed into a com­plete work by the respect­ed com­poser Antho­ny Payne.

The two com­plete sym­phonies have a num­ber of influ­ences, but that of Beethoven over­whelms all oth­ers. They are com­plex works, some­what hard to fol­low unless you spot the (some­times not obvi­ous) vari­a­tions of ear­lier the­matic ele­ments as they pop up again and again. The mood in both sym­phonies tends to alter­nate between a bear-like growl­ing and a wist­ful, ele­giac dreami­ness. But unlike Beethoven, who occa­sion­ally inter­rupted the thun­der for a brief med­i­ta­tive spell, Elgar was at heart a con­tem­pla­tive soul. You have a feel­ing that the blasts of brass and thump­ing drums were only there as a pal­isade to pro­tect the ele­giac passages.

The first sym­phony is one of the few suc­cess­ful sym­phonies in A‑flat. You might rec­og­nize its most promi­nent theme, as it was used in the movie Wal­lace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rab­bit. The sec­ond sym­phony is very sim­i­lar in orches­tra­tion and tech­nique, but it ends in a mild, dis­si­pated ele­gy rather than the tri­umphant cli­max that Edwar­dian Eng­lish audi­ence were accus­tomed to, so in dis­ap­pointed Elgar’s descrip­tion, the audi­ences “sat around like stuffed pigs”. But it is now just as well-played and record­ed as the first.

Payne’s recon­struc­tion and fill­ing out of the unfin­ished third sym­phony fol­lows Elgar’s prin­ci­ples, and I think his under­stand­ing of the com­poser was suf­fi­cient to com­plete the work in a way that resem­bles what he had in mind. The orches­tra­tion strikes me as spot-on. The whole thing feels like Elgar, all right, but I think it feels a bit too much like the young, healthy Elgar. He was a lone­ly and sad­dened man in his old age, mourn­ing the loss of a wife who had been a par­tic­u­larly close and spir­i­tual part­ner. If he had been able to com­plete the third sym­phony, it would prob­a­bly have tak­en a dif­fer­ent, more painful turn. I don’t know whether the last bars were explic­it in Elgar’s notes or not, but that trans­for­ma­tion is def­i­nitely well-expressed in the end­ing as Payne presents it.