GENIUS OF ELGAR

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21414, 11 February 1933, Page 10 (Supplement)

GENIUS OF ELGAR

: PLACE IN ENGUSH ART ■■ MUSIC DISPLACING POETRY It ia not improbable that the historian of the future commenting on English life in the early twentieth century will find that music had taken the place of poetry not only in the heart of the people but as reflecting the mood and mind of the nation, remarks an English writer. There is nothing far-fetched or impossible in the suggestion. The course of every art varies. At times a great school of painters flourishes while music languishes, or poets become national prophets while painters and musicians have to be . content with inferior positions. . There was little music in England while painters like Gainsborough or when poets like Wordsworth or Browning reigned. Just now the situation is reversed, and while musicians are slowly but very surely coming into their own, contemporary poetry can hardly be -said to express the national life and thought., If this should be so, the greatest figure in the art of our time will be Edward Elgar. Of him alone it can be said with truth, as has been said of the dramatists of the English Renaissance, that he lived and worked in full sympathy with the whole people. One could reconstruct many years of English life simply by following Elgar's compositions. The Imperial March for the jubilee year; the Coronation ode and the Coronation march; the Carillon, Polinia and Le Drapeau Beige, inspired by war events like the noble ode, For the Fallen the nursery suite for the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret; the touching hymn written for the unveiling of the tablet to the memory of Queen Alexandra; these are all connected with events which stirred the heart and imagination of the nation. The spiritual side is equally well represented. " Cockaigne," for instance, is London, and as true to London as Henley's London Voluntaries or Wordsworth's sonnet on Westminister Bridge—indeed, truer and. wider in scope, for music cannot give us the definition, the logic of words, but it can pass from one aspect to another without inconsistency. Or take the sea songs, written nominally under other skies, yet inspiration and text, setting and idiom are essentially English. In this age of folk-song revivals no one has invested a folk-melody with such magic as Elgar has in the Introduction and Allegro for Strings. Most English of all is "Falstaff," where modern music catches the very echo of that' Elizabethan era musician have long but not often successfully sought to evoke. What other art can put forward so continuous and so noble a record ? And if -it is true that some of his greatest works, the oratories, the symphonies and the violin and 'cello concertos are individual, rising beyond time and occasion, the list does comprise some of the finest music of our time. While at the present moment Continental composers seem to put their faith in outward form and presentation, Elgar has never sought any form other than that which best suits his present thought; he has been suspected of being a reactionary because he refused to give up the right to be true; to himself, to ! be always and above all else sincere. The first Elgar festival of 1904 celebrated thb renaissance of English music .as well as : its prophet. The present festival finds Elgar nearly 75 years of age, and the uncrowned laureate of England. 'r " ■ : " 5 . •