Was there a golden age of English music a hundred years ago? From today’s vantage-point there probably was.
Was there a golden age of English music a hundred years ago? From today’s vantage-point there probably was. The years 1910 and 1911 still excite the imagination as one contemplates the extraordinary richness of the new works that were being introduced to audiences in London and at festivals at that period. If you believed in the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, there was plenty to support you. The spirit was changing — ‘Rarely, rarely comest thou, spirit of delight’ was the ambiguous line by Shelley that Edward Elgar inscribed on the score of his Second Symphony. If a single work of art could be said to epitomise the years from 1900 to 1914, this great symphony must be a leading candidate.
Industrial strife with violence, a gaping divide between classes, pomp and circumstance on an imperial scale and the folly of the Boer War — these were the principal motifs in English life in the Edwardian era. None of these events is programmatically described in the symphony, which is a deeply personal work. The strife and turmoil of the first movement are a guilt-ridden and torn expression of love for another man’s wife and of the anguish it brings. The symphony is dedicated to the memory of King Edward VII, who died in 1911, and its funeral march is fit for a monarch, but its inspiration was as a lament for a musical friend who died young. So the swift and cruel severance of friendship is there, too.
The scherzo recalls an episode of civic unrest witnessed by Elgar in Rome. In the finale, disquiet again subverts the calm of the symphony, which ends quietly in a glow of Wagnerian splendour. We hear this music now as an unequalled evocation of the times in which Elgar lived and, as the finale hints only too eloquently, which might not last much longer. Each of Elgar’s two previous works — the First Symphony (1908) and the Violin Concerto (1910) — ended with exuberant fortissimi which brought the audience to its feet to yell its approval.
Such a demonstration after the Second Symphony would have been incongruous, but Elgar thought the muted reception meant it had not been liked. It was to be eight years before it received a truly understanding performance. He remained very touchy about it; its success has been a post-1945 development.
The First Symphony and the concerto on the other hand were in demand everywhere. Hailed as masterpieces from the first, neither suffered the period of neglect which afflicted many of Elgar’s works towards the close of his life. But one composer doesn’t make a golden age. The year 1910 brought forth Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, a sombre, glowing fusion of Tudor and Edwardian times which a century later finds itself voted ‘favourite classical piece’ by listeners to a radio station. It was followed three months later at Leeds by Vaughan Williams’s large-scale Whitman setting, A Sea Symphony, which saluted Elgar and the new century simultaneously.
Other names were replacing those of Parry, Stanford and Mackenzie while a clutch of young composers — Bax, Bridge, Holst, Foulds and Goossens among them — were proclaiming their presence. They have not faded into oblivion today, as is clear from the many centenary performances around the country that celebrate not only Elgar and VW but also Delius, who was singled out by Sir Mark Elder in Manchester for revival of a rarely played and delightful work over 120 years old and as fresh as any cuckoo in spring.
It was not music alone that was touched by gold at this time. In poetry and prose and on the artist’s easel, exciting adventures were afoot, and not only in Britain. But music led the way. Has there been a richer period than the five years leading up to the first world war? Mahler’s Ninth and Tenth Symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde, Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and literally dozens more (Debussy, Ravel, Bartók). And all those dying closes — Mahler, Elgar’s Second; were they really anticipations of the wrath to come, as some have maintained? Doubtful. Is Ochs’s waltz a prophecy of the fields of Flanders? Even more doubtful. Because the young men in the trenches played it on their gramophones in 1915, it has acquired an extra dimension of nostalgia, but it’s nonetheless an old lecher trying to get a young girl into bed.
My thoughts go out in sympathy to my successor in 2110, who may be asked by the editor of The Spectator for a piece about the golden age of 2010. Impossible to guess who by then might have composed the equivalent of A Sea Symphony. Mark-Antony Turnage is a candidate. There will be a series of concerts of music by Luke Bedford, and the names of Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies will of course loom large. But the very thought of trying to imagine music-making in 2110 is too much; the instruments and vocal techniques will defy understanding by the singers and performers of today. Will there be conductors? Will electronics have totally replaced the orchestras and instrumental ensembles? What will replace electronics? Will anyone still be writing music? I don’t think I want to know.