Three English Masters

Three English masters

50 years after the deaths of Elgar, Holst and Delius, John Warrack gives his view of their changing positions in English musical history.

For anyone whose first records went round 78 times a minutes and broke when you dropped them, Elgar, Holst and Delius were, if not quite modern music, the great English masters of the immediate past. They were dead less than ten years when I bought my first records, the wartime Boult set of The Planets. This was famous in its day for setting new standards of recording fidelity, and my delight in it came to cause some domestic annoyance. Delius was at least quieter, on the whole. Beecham's Delius Society volumes had to be specially ordered, and saved up for, but they brought the discovery of In a Summer Garden, of the Hassan music, above all of Sea Drift with John Brownlee (incomparable at "O past, O happy life", as years later I tried to say when I met him in his Manhattan School of Music). Intoxication with the music was not lessened by stories, sometimes ribald, of "old Fred" from my two godfathers, Balfour Gardiner and Patrick Hadley, who had been close friends. Elgar I had already heard by way of some hefty brown albums of his own recordings which had been bought as they came out by my grandfather, an amateur composer and assiduous collector. My father, a decent Elgar conductor in his day, approved of this more than of my enthusiasm for Holst. Listening to these works now, I still hear where the ends of the 78rpm sides came.

In 1984, half a century after their deaths, the shelves bulge with recordings of their music. Thanks to Jerrold Northrop Moore, we have an Elgar archive of impeccable thoroughness and scholarship. Thanks to Imogen Holst, we have a vastly greater understanding of her father's extraordinary originality by way of her books but also her recordings and her encouragement of others' recordings. And the gloomy prognostications that with the death of Beecham, Delius would die too, have not been borne out. Works that even Beecham could not persuade the companies to take up are now available, or have been. Appreciation of each of the three composers has changed greatly, and in at least two cases has deepened greatly.

Edward Elgar (1857-1934)

At school, in wartime, the gramophone resounded to Elgar played by one of my friends, whose taste I deplored. He was right, and I was wrong. At the time, the gestures in the Second Symphony seemed overblown, however magnificent the orchestral sound, the rhetoric pompous. Not even a fine performance of the First Symphony by the visiting London Philharmonic (conducted, to their great admiration, by our music master, Sydney Watson) could persuade me of what I later came to believe, that here was one of the greatest works in the whole of English music. But I sought out other records, Elgar's own restrained, beautifully understated performance, later Barbirolli's expansive, lyrical, rhapsodic version with his own Hallé playing as if they were an extension of his mind. In the grave opening melody, with its uneven phrases and its uncertain attempts to lift from the repeated falling halfscale, there was revealed nobility not as something unearned but the very reverse – a quality, fragile and vital, which had to be earned, and which survived throughout the symphony to triumph in the final bars only by virtue of an heroic struggle.

Elgar conductors who have seen this are not many. He himself had it, of course, and like so many composer-conductors tended to understate the emotion. Boult's many Elgar recordings are in the same mould; Barbirolli's can overstate but still touch on an Elgarian magic. The next generation of conductors has included those who sense perhaps still more acutely the pain and the precarious quality in Elgar's statements of nobility. Colin Davis is one; and a few years ago I was seized with the beauty of a performance of the First Symphony caught half-way through a broadcast. It proved to be by Norman Del Mar; and his record of the Enigma Variations is also one of the most sensitive and moving of all, a record to set beside Elgar's own.

It is the same with the concertos. To compare the boy Menuhin's original recording of the Violin Concerto under the composer, one of the great documents in the history of the gramophone, with his later version under Boult is to regret the loss of that golden effulgence in the playing, but to appreciate a certain ruefulness that comes with greater consciousness of all that lies at the heart of the music. I remember, some 35 years ago, an expansive, striding performance of the Cello Concerto by the famed Suggia that really said rather little. The simplicity, innocence yet sense of courage in Jacqueline Du Pré's performance touched more nearly on the sorrow in the music; and this is not something to do with nationality, for a few years ago I invited Lynn Harrell to play the work at a Leeds Festival, and after a breathtaking rehearsal run-through the orchestra broke into prolonged applause while Benjamin Luxon, sitting with me in the stalls, buried his head in his hands and asked how he was supposed to sing Sea Drift after such a performance (in fact he sang it wonderfully).

There are currently in the catalogues versions of the Violin Concerto by Perlman, Zukerman and Chung, of the Cello Concerto by Fournier, Tortelier and Harrell, of the Enigma Variations by Monteux, Jochum, Solti, Mehta and Bernstein; and though the symphonies have proved more resistant, recently Svetanov has interested himself in the Second, Haitink the First, and Solti and Barenboim have recorded both. Elgar's universality had first to be understood in his own country, perhaps; but now that it has, we have much to learn from what artists of other countries have found in these works. And this can hardly be nostalgia for the splendours and miseries of Edwardian England. When Elgar marks a passage with his favourite nobilmente, it is usually to draw attention to the presence of some loftier element; and this quality, this nobility, was something he knew never to be easy of achievement and always to be vulnerable to assault. Over and over again, his music concerns the ennobling qualities that dignify life, and grief at their loss or decay. There are no sadder pages in symphonic literature than the close of the First Symphony's Adagio, as horn and trombones twice softly intone a phrase of utter grief. So profound is the emotion that the finale cannot shrug it off with some empty boldness: this extraordinary passage shares with the Prelude to Act 3 of Parsifal a sense of deep experiences undergone and of trials and difficulties that yet hold the hope of peace. "As a wave is a force and not the water of which it is composed, which is never the same, so nobility is a force and not the manifestations of which it is composed, which are never the same." The words are those of an American poet, Wallace Stevens, but the voice might be Elgar's own.

It is surely an enhanced appreciation of this in Elgar which has given him new stature, in what are now the closing years of the century whose opening years saw his greatest work. It has, certainly, taken a long time for the accretions to fall away; and a composer who deliberately masks his inner nature with an outer aspect quite at odds with it must to some extent take the blame himself. Elgar's bluff exterior and his Establishment manners do have a correlation in the music, but this and a certain sentimentality are much more superficial and much rarer than used to be thought. For the millions who know the First and Fourth Pomp and Circumstance Marches, there can be barely hundreds, if that, who could identify Nos. 2 and 3, with their strange, minor-key tonality and odd construction: they have a sombre content, and even No. 1, when shorn of the "Land of hope and glory" words that distort both its opening phrase and its nature, has grandeur but not aggressive grandeur. For the scarcely fewer millions who enjoy Salut d'amour and Chanson de matin, in swooning interpretations, there can be few who have listened to Elgar's performances: he always insisted that he didn't want his lighter pieces played sentimentally but quite directly, and they have infinitely more charm like that.

Even the controversies that once surrounded Gerontius now seem flimsy. Newman's words may in places still be unspeakable, if not unsingable, but the work's originality shines more strongly than ever through whatever influences may be detected in it. There is, certainly, a good deal of Parsifal, though what the two works have in common was more obvious when they were less fully understood. If Gerontius occasionally seems to echo the anguished tones of Amfortas, the differences between them are more striking than the similarities; and there is little else that can accurately be laid at the door of Parsifal in Gerontius apart from a sense of pilgrimage and the enduring of trials. The Roman Catholic atmosphere tends nowadays, I find, to put Catholics off more than it does those of other faiths or none, and in any case is largely confined to Newman's dreadful phraseology: what could be more heartily Anglican than the great hymn "Praise to the Holiest in the height", which can still send a shiver down the spine as it bursts in on a C major chord with, unexpectedly, the G in the bass? Perhaps Vatican II and ecumenism have caught up with Elgar, as well.

Frederick Delius (1862-1934)

In these as in many other ways Elgar has the self-renewing quality of greatness. Though Delius can hardly claim this, his music has shown much greater tenaciousness than was once believed possible. Attitudes to him have not, in fact, changed very much over the five decades since his death. In the case of the concertos, in particular the Violin Concerto, there have been sustained efforts to demonstrate their mastery of form, in the face of the old charges of formlessness: Deryck Cooke was the master exponent of this view, skilfully argued in his posthumous book Vindications (Faber & Faber: 1982). One may sympathize with the premise that a form may be selfjustifying rather than relative to precedents, while remaining unconvinced that this is indeed an example of a strong and effective form. And although among the 60-odd works listed in the Gramophone Classical Catalogue there are versions of the Violin, Cello and Double Concertos, these works have never really seized the public imagination to anything like the extent that Elgar's concertos have – even when Jacqueline Du Pré's version is actually coupled to Elgar's.

As for the operas: not long after the war there appeared a complete recording of A Village Romeo and Juliet with Gordon Clinton, Frederick Sharp, Margaret Ritchie, Rene Soames, Lorely Dyer, Dorothy Bond and Dennis Dowling – a real Beecham line-up. It has long since vanished from the catalogue, and currently the only Delius operas available on records are, surprisingly, Margot la rouge and The Magic Fountain, which were organized by the Delius Trust but which few even among Delius's most loyal admirers, surely, will regard as masterpieces. For the rest, the long. shadow of Beecham shows in the survival on records of various versions of the old warhorses – the Fennimore and Gerda Intermezzo, the Irmelin Prelude (Beecham's dogged production in Oxford in 1953 did not really make out a case for much more of the music, as far as I can remember), the pretty "La Calinda" from Koanga and of course the evergreen "Walk to the Paradise Garden" from A Village Romeo and Juliet. Exploration of these works, when stage experience allows, suggests that Beecham judged well in his selection.

The larger concert works have also suffered-or benefited from-the winnowing of time. The Mass of Life remains popular with choirs; many will also remember the work with particular vividness for the 1951 Beecham performance that brought before the British public a hitherto unknown young German baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. It has been taken up by Charles Groves, who has recorded it, and by Norman Del Mar, but remains a rarity. Fischer-Dieskau's own subsequent view is reported as being that the text is too much for the music, and it is difficult not to disagree. Appalachia is an awkward work with some beautiful if self-indulgent variations; and neither Eventyr (the work with the entertaining shout of "Heil" from the orchestra) nor Over the Hills and Far Away really hold their places in the repertory. Paris nowadays sounds a little too small for its Straussian boots.

Of the larger concert works, it is Sea Drift which continues to hold its position as Delius's masterpiece. The reasons, surely, are not far to seek. Whitman's poem has exactly the mood of pantheistic nostalgia which drew the best from Delius, with the small tragedy of the sea-birds seen through the eyes of the watching child suggesting a double regret, for lost love and for lost youth. The poem's formlessness and lack of overt rhythmic structure or rhyme suited Delius well, for he could build his form around the changes of mood, which are clearly defined, without being constrained by technical demands in the verse. There is no better illustration of how skilfully he responded than the moment at "O past, O happy life", when the simple, magical slip into the major key serves to place the events in the distance, no longer enacted but seen down the long tunnel of time. It is one of the great moments in music when a turn from the minor to the major actually intensifies the grief.

For the rest, it is in the short mood pieces, whose titles define their atmosphere before the music has started, that Delius's genius resides. Summer Night on the River, In a Summer Garden, A Song before Sunrise, A Song of Summer – he was at his most characteristic when invoking this eternal singing of the summer warmth before pain descended on his wracked body and darkness clouded his eyes. In them, his exquisite scoring and his delicate chromatic harmony could be applied to a moment held in the memory, with haunting effect.

Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

If Delius's place in history seems most secure as the poet of nostalgia, Hoist's must be that of prophet. Even now, we have not caught up with all his ideas. lmogen Hoist herself has said that she finds younger musicians reproaching her for underrating some of his music in her book, and her release for publication and performance of some hitherto unknown pieces is an acknowledgement that the time has come when we can accept what would once have seemed merely crude. But even so familiar a work as The Planets has taken time to establish its true originality. Its tunefulness, its orchestral virtuosity, the appeal of its ideas have long secured it a regular place in the repertory, but it is clearer now that Holst was also trying to find ways of constructing large-scale music that did not rely on German symphonic methods. "Mars" remains a truly original piece of construction out of little more than an insistent rhythm and a bitonal tug; "Jupiter", much less successfully, tries to make a piece out of a big tune that is-the centre of the piece but does not develop; "Mercury", "Saturn" and "Neptune" all turn Holst's command of using two keys at once to different expressive effect, in the case of "Neptune" actually achieving a piece that is virtually without melody, rhythm or harmonic progression, embodying purely in unmeasured, timeless texture the sense of infinity.

Holst's boldness in seeking ideas and methods that get away from sonata form and traditional symphonic thinking is still astonishing. Once he had got rid of his Wagnerism, he seems to have felt free to try almost anything, decades ahead of anyone else. With Sâvitri, he turned to India with a proper respect far removed from the Hindu Love Lyric kind of tourism which was then the best most composers could manage. Sâvitri is the fruit of intelligent study of Hinduism, and the technical solutions are brilliant. Even the idea of performing it in the open air turns attention away from proscenium arch expectations; and the effective slenderness of the resources was something few composers were to appreciate until Britten's chamber operas. Holst's beloved bitonality serves a new expressive purpose as Death approaches Sâvitri and each sings in a different key, he pacing forward inexorably, she unconnected to him, not part of his musical being, yet unable to escape the occasional pull of his tonality as she flutters ahead of and around his melodic line.

The boldness of Holst's religious attitudes is evident here and in The Hymn of Jesus. In contrast to Elgar's Catholicism and Delius's fierce atheism, Holst was willing to seek religious experience in so unlikely a source, for 1917, as the Apocryphal Gospels. The work is, in fact, barely Christian, though it connects Christianity to the experiences of other religious traditions; and as such, it has found a new appeal among a later generation for whom traditional Christianity has little attraction but who look for some kind of religious experience. It is also a work that makes a remarkably original expressive use of space, so I believe: a few years ago I arranged a performance at Ampleforth Abbey in which we had orchestra and chorus at the high altar, the monks singing the plainchant from the back of the church, and boys singing the semichoruses from the transepts. It was a powerful experience to take part in, for the separations emphasized the tentative, seeking nature of the work, in which the nature of time in music is called into question by the circling Amens, the out-of-time chants against 'infinite' ostinatos, the rhythmless Gregorians set against the barbaric emphasis of the 5/4 dance.

No wonder that Britten was to find so much in Holst. He once said that he was less interested in Belshazzar's Feast at an early London performance than in another work in the programme, Hoist's Hammersmith. It is easy to see how that work's original structure, and its use of bitonality to suggest the cool passage of the river and its contrast with the city gaiety, would appeal to Britten, who was later to be a fine conductor of Holst's music. His own bitonality owed a lot to Frank Bridge as well, but there was much in Holst's exploration of opposed keys to interest Britten; and the initiative to use bitonal pulls as the harmonic basis of whole operas, as with Peter Grimes and Billy Budd, might not have come so readily without all that Holst did.

His music sounds, with the passing of the years, less and less 'awkward', less clumsy, as his ideas come to be measured less against the former preconceptions and his idiom is seen to have true consistency. Both his ideas and his techniques, which are not properly distinguishable from each other, have a modernity that it was often forgivably difficult to assimilate in the early years of the century. But such passages as "For life and joy" in The Hymn of Jesus have now lost their associations with the duller type of choralism, since we are less subject to it, and fit into place if we try to hear them with the fresh mind that Hoist himself possessed.

Of the three composers, Holst is the one who remains the most unpredictable. If Delius was, on the whole, understood fairly at the time of his death, and Elgar has grown in stature as misunderstandings have fallen away, Holst is still the one with yet more to reveal. In another 50 years, dare one hazard, listeners will still enjoy Delius's short orchestral pieces and warm to Sea Drift; and the qualities to which Elgar gave musical utterance are unlikely to mean any less. But what that generation will find in Holst is likely to be something different again from what we now find. He is still the prophet of the three.