For an organization noted for giving financial support to a man walking around East Anglia with a pole on his head, and another kicking an empty curry carton down a street, its refusal to stump up funds for the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sir Edward Elgar should come as no surprise.

The English Arts Council exists after all within the cosy, politically-correct confines of the current British public sector. Maybe they should reflect that Elgar came from very humble origins and pulled himself up by his bootstraps by teaching himself composing.

Mainly known for the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, Elgar was born in 1857 in Lower Broadheath near Malvern. His links with nearby Birmingham were celebrated with an anniversary concert at the Symphony Hall in April.

The Dream of Gerontius will also be performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in another concert in June.

Elgar helped found the orchestra which began its Elgar celebrations in March with a performance of his cello concerto.

Elgar died in 1934, which also saw the death of two other great English composers — Gustav Holst and Frederick Delius.

No, I didn’t say that. It was a German, Oscar Adolf Hermann Schmitz, way back in 1904. Not so long ago that it doesn’t still wound.

Schmitz — or Fritz, as Sun readers would cry — had this to say of the land that bore Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Purcell, Parry and Holst :

England, he said is “Das Land Ohne Musik” — the land without music.

Thankfully, the country now has a champion. A man of many parts, a journalist and former editor of one of our top weekly magazines; a Member of Parliament and Shadow Minister for Higher Education, no less.

Step forward Defender of the Faith (musical variety) … (drum roll) : Boris Johnson.

A little late, we might murmur into our gins and tonic. And is he the best man for the job? After all …

But don’t look a gift horse in the mouth … even if Boris’s foot is already in it.

Enough of prelude and overture. Read Boris in his own words Here.

A short introduction by Steve Newman for a much longer piece on the composer…

Buy the Choral Works

As a composer Ralph Vaughan Williams is still one of those constants of English music, and although he has been dead now for the best part of fifty years his presence and his magnificent music haunt us still.

I remember, in the late 1970s buying two huge box-sets of his work - one contained the nine symphonies, plus a collection of smaller orchestral pieces, with the other a collection of all his choral compositions, something like twenty LPs in all. The majority of both collections were recorded in the 1950s and conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, with VW close at hand throughout the sessions. They are without question definitive recordings with very few later ones coming anywhere near. These recordings have real depth as if somehow Vaughan Williams is putting his musical thoughts and passions (and his music tells us what a passionate man he was) straight from his heart to the disc, that the orchestras involved - the London Philharmonic, and the New Philharmonia - were part of his heart and brain - in other words there is an immediacy. Obviously it is Sir Adrian Boult’s conducting ( and that of David Willcocks on some of the choral pieces) and his own intuitive scholarship and love of the music, and great friendship with and love of VW, that helps bring out this feeling ( he did the same with Elgar’s work), creating a sense that the music is simply part of the air we breath, and of the pulsing of our own hearts. It is very very personal music fashioned out of love, memory, hurt, danger, and the violence of the 20th century which, with the genius of the man, is writ large for those of us who want to share not only his music but something that is now as much a part of our heritage and culture as Shakespeare and Barbara Hepworth. And I use those two examples because Vaughan Williams was both traditional and extremely modern, he is a continuation of the emotionality and melodic and ochestrating genius that was Sir Edward Elgar, and one of the greatest inspirations for the atonal red-bloodedness of Sir Harrison Birtwistle.

Original box-set recordings: HMV SLS 822 ( The Symphonies)
” ” HMV SLS 5082 ( The Choral Works)

To Be Continued…

In this series of five posts, Steve Newman looks at three giants of English music: Elgar, Delius and Holst. The posts run consecutively:

In re-reading my previous piece about Sir Edward Elgar at Tiddington House I am reminded that 1934 saw not only Elgar’s death but also the deaths of Frederick Delius and Gustav Holst. There can be no doubt that with their deaths England and the world lost three of it’s most distinctive and emotional voices, and until the later recognition of Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippet, and William Walton, left only the wonderfully idiosyncratic Ralph Vaughan Williams - and more about him in the future - to represent English music.

Elgar, Delius, and Holst all came from very different social, professional, and academic backgrounds that ensured they would create music that is - one compared with other - wholly different in structure, yet pulsates with a similar richness of orchestration which, when combined with its often deep melancholia, can readily reduce even a casual listener to genuine tears. Just listen to ‘Venus‘ from Holst’s suite The Planets (1916); Delius’s ‘The Walk to the Paradise Garden’ from his opera A Village Romeo and Juliet (1901); and the final moments from Elgar’s oratorio The Dream of Gerontius (1900) to hear what I mean.

All three men were born in the socially turbulent second half of the 19th century - and into the ethos of self-advancement that went with it. Each was hugely influenced by German, Russian, and Scandinavian music; energised by the explosion in industry, science, art, and literature, and the heated debates that surrounded, for instance, Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Astrologically speaking (and the inspiration for Holst’s The Planets was astrological, not astronomical) the three composers were very different too, with Elgar a charming, yet depressive Gemini; Delius a taciturn and intellectual Aquarian; and Holst a humorous, workaholic Virgoan.

It is also one of those ‘what ifs’ of history that had penicillin been clinically available in 1934 Elgar might have had time to finish his 3rd Symphony, Holst complete his non-choral 1st Symphony and perhaps even allow Delius (although he had absolutely no trust in doctors, or drugs) to write, with the continuing help of Eric Fenby, even more of his minimalist and beautifully elegiac chamber music? Instead all three died within six months of each other and in a world increasingly dominated by military dictatorship, where music at best was a social distraction, and at worst, a soundtrack to destruction and mass murder. I feel our composers would have found the Second World War almost impossible to endure?