A few thoughts from a violinist on Elgar’s violin concerto.

When we talk, think, or write about those feelings of deep affection we call love, we think of people especially dear to us and our connections to them; perhaps the way they speak, or move; what they’ve said to us, where and when, and so on. We see them, we hear them, and even in their absence we can recall them in an almost real way; we feel their presence. And as with any piece of music about love - be it any of the songs in all genres from around the world that every day increase the stock by a few dozen; or, as in this work, an almost hour’s journey with a solo violin and full symphony orchestra, it is these direct feelings about particular people which drive the creation and breathe into it that essential sincerity, so that it can be received and recognized as a token of true love. 

Certainly, Elgar knew this when he composed his violin concerto, and the feelings he managed to capture in the notes of this epic work are indeed an opening of hearts; his and ours.

A favourite among his creations, of it he said,

‘…It's good! Awfully emotional! Too emotional…but I love it.’

His placing of a cryptic dedication at the head of the score has always been understood to mean that the concerto is about a deep and hidden love. But this dedication has meant too a maddening search for a definitive answer to his riddle. The concerto’s great length on the other hand – performances last around fifty minutes – gives Elgar’s other overlapping theme, that of the passage of time, the greatest chance of being felt. Other violin concertos had been long, even epic, in scale; those by Beethoven and Brahms each last well over half an hour, but in both cases and in different ways, the last movement is a celebration of life and an opportunity for the soloist to give voice to earthy virtuosity in conjunction with something symphonic; exhilarating and celebratory. Elgar does something rather different.
‘Aquí está encerrada el alma de …..’

which might be translated as:

‘Herein is entombed (enshrined) the soul of…..’

So when Elgar appended those words - taken from a French novel of the 18th century - to the finished score, he seemed, with some mischief, to be unequivocally signalling that the next hundred pages of score would be about a particular person. The five dots to be filled by a name. And there would seem to be several candidates for the target of this dedication; each five-lettered claimant has been in fashion for a while only to give way to another as time and research moves on. Is it Helen, or one Alice or another, or Julia, or Elgar himself? Or is it a combination of all of these and others known or unknown to us? I think it was a radio broadcast by the biographer Claire Tomalin (the exact details of which I cannot now recall) where she intimated that if there exists a clinching piece of evidence – a letter, a diary entry – that explicitly tells us what the answer to a personal matter like this is, you may be sure that it will have been destroyed; and the more likely where the subject is anything like a public figure. 

Yet I’d suggest that it is this very mystery which signals this work’s widest appeal; and why, gloriously, the concerto is really about us. It is our most private, most intimate, perhaps only fleetingly acknowledged selves, that Elgar takes by the hand and leads in this odyssey of love. And it’s why, if we’re able to stay with him for its near hour-length course, we feel that we have lived, and intensely relived, half or more of our lives when we reach that strangely uplifting sense of acceptance in those final moments. 

The concerto was premiered on November 10th 1910 at a Royal Philharmonic Society concert at the Queens Hall in London. The composer conducted and the soloist was Fritz Kreisler, outwardly and officially at least, the dedicatee. It was Kreisler to whom we owe the greatest debt in pushing for this work to come into being. He had written very publicly about Elgar being the torch-bearer of the most radical path in European music, and he wanted something from Elgar that would embody this but also be in the great tradition of the violin concerti of Beethoven and Brahms. Having got the project moving he worked with Elgar closely towards the end of the composition process, though by far the greatest input as to the violin part and the greatest help in many other ways came from a violinist of much more humble standing; WH ‘Billy” Reed, later to become a really close friend of the composer.  It is tempting to see in his relationship with these two violinists Elgar’s two lifelong but competing quests: Kreisler a world celebrity, being that towards fame and fortune, Reed representing the longed-for retrieval of a golden childhood and a simpler life away from the cares of being a public figure.

The premiere was a great success, and the concerto immediately became a ‘must play’ with all the top violinists of the time. Elgar never again tasted such undiluted triumph at the premiere of a new work. Indeed, he was very soon to be hopelessly out of fashion – especially so after WW1. Further, I’d suggest that even as his concerto was being premiered things were on the turn; Virginia Woolf said this about the advent of modernism; "On or about December 1910 human character changed". Well, with its premiere on 10th November of that year, this places Elgar’s concerto as the very last gasp of undiluted pre-modernist expression.  It takes no refracted or clever slant on the human condition, nor does it place irony, detachment, or any of the other fragmentations with which we are now so used, in front of direct transmission of human feeling.

One might say that the evening of the 10th November 1910 was the high point of Elgar’s career, at least as measured by public acclaim. Though his rise had been incredibly steep, his problem by the time of the concerto’s premiere was certainly not lack of profile.  And, whilst in a sense he revelled in this success he must also have felt that his private world was under threat. Perhaps this is not an uncommon tension in creative artists coming upon success and recognition after long struggle; the need for the world to endorse their work pulls against that more essential need to retreat into a private realm – one from where the real creative sparks come. So, at the height of public acclaim, Elgar pours out the most secret recesses of his heart; every last scrap of his intimate and private world is revealed. Little wonder that he needs to send us down a rabbit hole with those five dots, to keep something of himself for himself.

His sense of time is masterful. It is how we know so well that, when at 40’22” in the last movement we hear a theme not heard for nearly fifteen minutes and in a previous movement, half a lifetime has elapsed. When we are then ushered into a whole world of memory in the accompanied cadenza and dare to open, what? - a box of long-lost letters and faded photographs, and relive an intimacy and a parting that is so heart-rendingly touching, we know we are looking back over a very long span indeed.

And the key is what happens in the finale. Firstly, it is disproportionately what gives this piece its great length. Elgar was aware of this and concerned by it as it took shape.

‘I am appalled at the last movement and cannot get on: – it is growing so large – too large I fear, and I have headaches…’ 

The first few moments signal some important change immediately. We are no longer in the unfolding narrative of the first two movements but in an entirely different and unsettled place. The storyteller of the first two movements now turns to us as and we are addressed more directly.  ‘After all that, this is where I am now’, the music seems to be saying. This is a world of uncertainty and nervous energy, of only incomplete victories despite the thrusting chivalric atmosphere and the comfort offered by the reassuring warmth of the theme at 33’58”. And is there reference here to young Edward’s battle with the violin? His driving ambition as a young man had been to become a great violinist. I have always felt that the motif heard at 35’30” is too reminiscent of Brahms’s violin concerto to be an accident. I can’t help seeing and hearing the young Edward at this point struggling to play Brahms’s titanic concerto with its great need of an overpowering tone and command of a big technique; ‘chops’ the young Elgar had had to admit he was never going to have.

This is why Elgar’s music for the violin is always especially confidential; it is absolutely his voice. 

‘…the violin reflects your heart…it will just give away your feelings…’.

So said Nigel Kennedy in a recent interview.  As every violinist knows; from the quivering student giving their first serious recital, to the seasoned and accomplished veteran, there is nothing like this small wooden box to reveal innermost feelings.

After a momentary convulsion of supreme frustration (40’03”), life’s challenges unconquered, we feel all energy drain away, the central puzzle of life and love unsolved and unredeemed. What then? The music hesitates; and after a hovering trill from the violin and a call from the horns, the tenderest motif of the second movement calls back to us. Something long held in tension has shifted. But despite a sense that now at last the concerto can and will be resolved and rounded off, we are further ushered into Elgar’s profoundly touching ‘accompanied cadenza’ (42’31”) - and a whole life’s-worth of memory. This is the private centre of the work and to where, without knowing it, we have been headed for all of the searching and questing years that are implied in the preceding eleven minutes. Book-ended by two subtly altered statements of the whole work’s opening motif – what one might call its ‘call to life’, and scored for strings and horns and a solitary muted roll on the timpani - this is music too poignant for any meaningful dissection, reaching the very confines of ‘bearabilty’ with what always reads to me as a final parting at 49’21”.

In his wonderful memoir of their friendship the violinist WH ‘Billy’ Reed writes tellingly of how, deep into the process of composition, he was summoned again and again to play for Elgar the music at 47’40” when the violin is finally playing with no accompaniment, and how at every hearing Elgar, tears welling, entreated him to play with more and yet more feeling as this moment of parting approached.

How then to recover and end the work?  Surely, any attempt to manufacture a grandstand finish would be doomed to hollowness. Or, was he to maintain the nullity and despair to the end? 

Somehow Elgar does conjure something rousing as we re-enter the mode of the finale’s opening and re-join the living and the present. Using that same call that had brought us out of the world of dissatisfaction before the cadenza, outrageously he becomes - giddily jaunty! How well I remember this kind of cheerfulness from my own grandfather – a survivor of four years warfare from WW1 and an inheritor of many of those Victorian and Edwardian sensibilities that are from Elgar’s world; a world where cheerfulness and a certain careless sense of fun can be the answer to life’s sorrows. (My grandfather suffered from shell shock and yet was determined to be cheerful and to muck around with us his grandchildren. He was alive and so glad to be so.) Thus, Elgar leaves us with a sense that all our loves, those lost or incomplete, those that have wounded and scarred us, broken us even, also make us, and that life is there to be lived.

T.B. April ‘24