Elgar’s Violin Concerto opus 61 - Tom's programme notes

I once met a composer (English, I might add), who told me he liked
to think of all music as being either French or German. This seemed
odd,
but once I tried it out, I found I knew fairly immediately what he
meant. It was especially interesting with English music. Vaughan Williams
and Delius told me straight away that they were “French”,
whereas Elgar was of course a “German”. It wasn’t
too difficult to see why either: his use of leitmotif, chromaticism,
and the music’s general flavour feels Germanic. Indeed, Elgar
openly acknowledged the inheritance of Schumann, Brahms and Wagner.
How then, can we explain the paradox of his being regarded as so quintessentially
English?

Partly perhaps, through the English being all too aware that, since
the time of Purcell, no Englishman could really have been said to have
contributed
to the European mainstream. Partly too, by the English being curiously
unable to let him be part of it. His character is also confusing. In
most of the images of him we see the classic Edwardian establishment
figure. The moustache, the tweed; all seems secure and solid. But scratch
this veneer ever so slightly and a deeply insecure personality emerges,
all too aware of the social heights he has scaled. Not a product of the
musical establishment, but self taught; not part of the established church,
but a catholic outsider; not an aristocrat or from the genteel middle
class, but a humble shopkeeper’s son. And so it is with the music.
Beneath the skin of Edwardian gesture and the pomp of Empire, (so much
a manifestation of his need to be accepted,) flows a deep river of raw
emotion, which, when it breaks the surface, affects the listener in ways
no other music can.

For many years Elgar had harboured hopes of becoming a real violin virtuoso
and though this ambition did not materialise, the instrument remained
the natural recipient of his most intimate thoughts. Difficult to overstress
this; we are, when we hear the sound of the violin in this work, really
hearing Elgar’s voice.

So what then is this Violin Concerto all about? If it can be about anything,
it must be about love, and about the effects of time; and if Elgar were
to have written only one work, it would probably have been this Violin
Concerto. Like all his best music, it appears to come from a need to
confess; indeed, it seems to carry the whole story of a private world.
Written at the apex of his short lived celebratory status, this work
can be nothing
less than a coded love song. A love lost to a man approaching the disappointment
of late middle age who is yet enjoying, at last, some worldly success.
He inscribes the Concerto, “Aquí está encerrada el alma de …..”;
- “Herein is enshrined the soul of …..”. It is extremely
unlikely that we shall ever know definitively the identity of the soul
entombed, but with Elgar, no accident that he has us guessing. He balances
his need to let out his secret feelings with a contrary need for the
facts themselves to remain secret. Michael Kennedy, in his wonderful “Portrait
of Elgar”, feels that Elgar’s deathbed remark to his friend
Ernest Newman had a direct bearing on this puzzle as it did on that other
Elgarian puzzle, the Enigma Variations. Ernest Newman never divulged
what this remark was, saying only years later, “…It explains
a good deal in him that has always been obscure or puzzling to us; it
has a particular bearing, I am convinced, on that passion of his for
public mystification…”

The first movement begins with an extended tutti. Elgar allows us to
hear all the material, though in truncated and compressed forms. The
work’s opening phrase is wonderfully wrong-footing harmonically
and apart from a few moments of repose when we hear the clarinet offering
up the second subject for the first time, nothing settles. That first
phrase - a sort of motto for the whole work - is at last answered with
the soloist’s entry by way of the first full cadence; the solo
violin, (or Elgar himself), agreeing to step out and meet life’s
challenge.

The second movement must be a portrait of the loved one so enigmatically
conjured in the works dedication. Whereas, in the first movement, her
effect is felt through the second theme and can only influence to an
extent upon life’s headlong rush, here, she and the feelings she
arouses, result in a touching vision both of great innocence and of deep
love.

The long finale commences, and largely remains, in the present tense;
a present tense of unhappy turbulence and uncertainty. Though at times
consoled with a secondary theme of tender comfort, this impression is
never really shaken off until we start to hear a theme from the second
movement. But its call summons not a triumphant dash to the end, as at
first seems likely, but a winding down into the world of memory. This
strange and unique accompanied cadenza is the work’s masterstroke
and as Elgar finally re-emereges from this world of shadows and remembrance
the future can at last be faced.

Thomas Bowes
April ’05