or Dream Interludes of a Knightly Character
Esoteric strands in a Nationalist composer with some new light on the text of the Nazarene Oratorios
version X, 2nd July, 2001
1: The Head in the Tree7: Opening Sesame and Awakening the Sleeping Kings
10: On Losing one's Head in an Overheated Court
12: How a Misbegotten Umbrella and a Turnip put on a Show at Twilight
13: Days of Reptiles, Nights of Dreams14: Das ist kein Mann!
15: Nobly he yokes
16: Further Sighs
17: The Shed-books
18: A Prisoner in Fairyland
19: A Visitor from the Golden Dawn
20: Blood hits the Fan
21: Circling with the Conders
22: The Devil, the Ass and the Spanish Lady
23: King Arthur and the Last Battle
The identification of Sir Edward Elgar with British Imperialism provided him with a mask which has sometimes served to repel those who would otherwise be sympathetic to his real nature. Land of Hope & Glory was one of those shots which penetrated every household. The suggestion of putting patriotic words to the first Pomp & Circumstance March is said to have come from the future King Edward VII and when Elgar carried the idea into practice it was in the context of the substantial Coronation Ode of 1902. Some have pointed to lines elsewhere in the Ode which can be given an anti-war meaning, though it is plain from the context that the Pax Britannica is to be imposed by military might: "Britain, ask of thyself and see that thy sons be strong". More intriguing are the corresponding expanding "mysterious avenues, Opening out to Light Divine" which are to stream from the poets and musicians of this happy land and "The Airy powers of Earth and Sky" which sound Miltonic but lack any Christian gloss. The words were by Arthur Christopher Benson, 1862 - 1925, one of the trio of confirmed bachelor brothers, sons of the Archbishop of Canterbury and all great dabblers in occultism, the youngest of whom was to cross over to Rome and became private chamberlain to Pope Pius X. Land of Hope and Glory, the final number of the Ode is a essentially no more than a paraphrase of the Apostle Tennyson's dedication to his collected poems, which celebrated Victoria's Empire at a time when half the globe was pink. Yet, when Elgar planned a heroic symphony in the 1890s, it was to celebrate General Gordon, the Bible-obsessed, boy-loving martyr of the British Empire, whose detached head was wedged between the branches of a tree for passers-by to stone. The success of Lord Kitchener, who had regained Khartoum by defeating the Khalifa at Omdurman in 1898, produced no musical stirrings in the supposed Imperialist composer. The face of Kitchener in its First War recruiting-poster incarnation took on ironic overtones when it became an icon of the swinging sixties, while over in America his name is still celebrated in knitting-circles, forever associated with a square-toed sock for the comfort of soldiers.
Elgar's liking for robes and medals, for the military moustaches which hid his sensitive mouth have long been discounted as disguises by anyone who listened to the works by which he set greatest store. Blank misgivings, fallings from us, a soul moving in about in worlds half-realized, a dreamer of dreams, he was essentially a very private man. His correspondence provides a different set of masks, often gallant and playful, sometimes emotionally naked, sometimes punning and ambiguous he never seems to be fully revealed and probably now cannot be. The music can speak very eloquently for itself and this short study will look at the literary background uncovering the nature of some of the texts which he set and some which he used as epigraphs.
The massive productivity of the Victorians was a problem for the twentieth century and the solution was to consign the bulk of it to the attic. The dislocations of Modernism tended to make the preceding century appear foreshortened and monolithic, a dead weight of dark matter. Ruskin and Carlyle did not appear to have much to say to the century of Eliot and Orwell. Now the Modernists are beginning to seem isolated in their own space and the old strands seem to have grown past them into a New Age. Some see them as sinister and fungal growths but, like an underground system they have often fruited in spectacular and unexpected ways. It is not a subject that can be tackled head-on or in a theoretical way as some of the stepping-stones are conspicuously missing and joining the dots is a hazardous game unless we know how many dots exist. The pictures suggested here may be no more than faces in the fire. Individual artists could have been sinking their buckets into a collective well and inventing the pyramids anew, each on his or her own continent. All a writer can do is describe the ghosts he has seen and let the rationalists chase after with their buckets of cold water.
Though Elgar's outsider status is often ascribed to his Catholic background, his most monumental conception was a trilogy of oratorios which celebrate a brand of Christianity somewhat more mysterious. The Last Judgment has never been publicly heard and is said never to have been written but The Apostles of 1903 and The Kingdom of 1906 have been kept alive under the auspices of the High Anglican Three Choirs Festivals. Although they have each been recorded more than once, they have never achieved the popularity of Gerontius, so even informed and sympathetic critics have not wanted to rock the boat by crying heresy.
We know that Canon Charles Gorton of Morcambe discouraged Elgar from using the Apocrypha but he had other religious advisors, among them the Dean of Westminster. The composer always explained his choice of texts by referring to his childhood in Worcester and especially to his memory of religious instruction lessons from one Francis Reeve, who stressed the human ordinariness of the Apostles before their calling. This may be true but it leaves out a literary inspiration to which Elgar never refers and which commentators appear to have missed. Before revealing this source, it may be helpful to see why the Apocrypha had been omitted from the English Bible by the second half of the nineteenth century but continued to flow, underground, as it were, in literature.
Christianity as a world religion was the invention of Saint Paul who turned it into a leading brand by leaving out the features which defined it as just another apocalyptic form of Judaism. Out went circumcision for a start. Then the texts have to be brought into line with this saleable religion: wholesale omissions serve to obscure the human aspects of Christ and create a series of mysteries around his birth and relationships. He loses his flesh and blood ancestry, his brother and his common-law wife who is turned into the harlot Mary Magdalene. The Church in Jerusalem continues under Christ's brother James for some years in conflict with the Church in Rome under Paul. The outward-looking Pauline sect thrives as it attaches itself like a burr to Roman civilization while the Church in Jerusalem wilts in the cauldron of Jewish sectarianism. During the nineteenth century, the Apocrypha is removed from over-much public exposure or discussion and reserved for scholars as a supposed repository of late, mistaken and potentially heretical writings. The diverted stream re-emerges into the world of Art apparently sponsored by a network of esoteric fraternities, broadly summed up as Masonic, though clearly little to do with the Craft Masonry practiced by ambitious shop-keepers and corrupt policemen. It is however more conventional to assume that poets, composers and artists of an antiquarian bent have periodically chosen to give heretical and gnostic views a good airing for the fun of it.
Elgar's Apocryphal Oratorios The Apostles and The Kingdom may have been conceived even before The Dream of Gerontius and the composer's major projects had a way of lying in quiet gestation for years before they saw the light of day. Gerontius was born first and the choice of Cardinal Newman's Dream of Gerontius suggests that, despite the evidence of some of his songs, Elgar, like Puccini, needed to engage with his subjects at a personal level. The success of Gerontius against all the odds emboldened the composer to venture even further into religious borderlands and he is generally, if mistakenly, credited with the compilation of his own texts from the Acts of the Apostles and the Apocrypha.
From the late 1830s, the Church of England was shaken by the eruption of the Oxford Movement within its ranks. It was an outbreak of enthusiasm equal and opposite to the dissenting churches and it held up for careful examination the Thirty Nine Articles with which The Church of England had split with Rome. One of the founders of the movement, John Henry Newman, after much wrestling with his conscience, finally converted to Catholicism, only to discover that the complacency of the Anglicans was more than matched by the intellectual sterility of Rome. Worn out by broken Catholic promises and Anglican accusations of selfish egotism, he rounded on his critics and late in life produced the Apologia pro vita sua. It is on this prose spiritual autobiography, rather than his mystical epic poem The Dream of Gerontius that his reputation as a writer rests today. The choice of a subject for a Birmingham Festival commission appears to have been arrived at by a process of horse-trading between the Festival Organizers, Novello's publishing house and the composer. The Catholic subject was not however unprecedented as the English oratorio tradition had already supplied a nest for a number of Continental Catholic cuckoos, notably Gounod and Dvorák. The copy of Gerontius from which Elgar worked was given him by a Father Night of Worcester; it contained General Gordon's markings of favourite passages. The General's Bible by this time rested at Windsor Castle on a white satin cushion.
In an essay on Newman's poetry, written around the time of Elgar's setting, Josephine Ward made the point that previous descriptions of the life to come, such as those by Dante, Milton and Bunyan, were filled with solid visual scenery. Though culminating in a lightning flash at the searing moment of God's presence, Gerontius is guided by angelic voices throughout his journey and there is very little physical description. "Thou livest in a world of signs and types", says the angel. Miss Ward went on to point out that the angelic choir has no saint or hero to alleviate the loneliness of Gerontius on his way. She sees it as "the culmination of a life-long love story, the love of the soul for the all-beautiful". For Miss Ward, "suffering is the secret of romance" and she quotes Catherine of Genoa's notion that the soul would not forego this agony of purgatory, even if it could.
The lack of visual detail frees Elgar to concentrate on supplying an emotional dimension to the intellectual words. It is nearly impossible for anyone acquainted with Elgar's piece to read Newman's words stripped bare of his music. The influence of Parsifal is now played down but Elgar's concept of Gerontius as a worldly man, an Everyman figure in the presence of great mysteries, is strongly suggestive of the Perfect Fool of Wagner's opera. The very tessitura of the part and the chromatic colouring especially recall the passages in Act Three of Parsifal, as the hero gropes towards an understanding of all that he has undergone.
There is a passivity in Parsifal and Gerontius so that the older, fuller meaning of suffering seems appropriate and is manifested in Wagner by the famous innovation of the rolling scenery. Parsifal undergoes instruction in the Palace of the Grail just as he undergoes temptation in Klingsor's Garden. For Gerontius, the scenery is withdrawn and the movement is vertical. Demons are "Cast Down" while the protagonist yearns towards the "Holiest in the Heights". His journey is shorter because he is no longer has the freedom of error or mistake; he cannot wander as his knightly quest is done.
In a very obvious sense, Gerontius is the story of direct apprehension of God in a moment of illumination. It is painful and momentary but for Gerontius it gives meaning to the agony of the depths. In the succeeding Nazarene Oratorios, Elgar built on Longfellow to produce a series of painterly scenes, as if the life of Christ provided the proof and example of a more continuing light on earth. There is an occult tradition, merely hinted at in the literature, that the Oxford Movement was a game of Masonic billiards, delivering Newman and others as a depth-charge into the pocket of the Vatican while creating schism and confusion among the Anglicans.
Gerontius was therefore a controversial subject but a central one and Newman was a household name. The composer's commitment to the subject is reflected in his quotation from another Victorian writer at the end of the score. "This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate and drank, and slept, loved and hated, like another; my life was as the vapour and is not; but this I saw and knew: this, if anything of mine is worth your memory." The writer was John Ruskin and it may be that the quotation came out of some anthology of purple patches. Or did the composer wish obliquely to draw attention to the lecture in which it occurs, the first of the Sesame & Lilies collection of 1868? If so, it is a startling choice for the composer, whose visible politics were crustily Tory.
Ruskin's talk is a very strange performance which circles around its subject in a way which may at first seem bewildering or just wild. First he claims the subject is "Reading" and speaks of the ideal company to be found in great books. It is here the passage comes which Elgar quotes, as Ruskin reflects on the way books contain the seeds which authors wish to survive them and flourish. We can awaken these Sleeping Kings by reading in the proper way. He moves on to the textual analysis of a passage from Milton's Lycidas which deals with good and bad shepherds and the corruption of Bishops. From this he moves abruptly to a contemporary newspaper report of a suicide. The inquest revealed the appalling poverty of a London family in harrowing detail. Ruskin's attack on capitalism is emotionally naked and seems to have burst into the lecture like an uninvited guest. Yet careful analysis shows how cunningly the talk is structured around the theme of the imagination. For Ruskin, the careful reading of a book or of a newspaper report is a moral act and the righteous indignation of the prophet will be awakened by imaginative education. To Ruskin, the written word is not an intellectual retreat but a storehouse of moral energy: properly read it must inspire action to redeem the fallen world. There is something eerie about releasing the spirit of John Ruskin from its gold-tooled leather tomb when we thought him to be a safely Sleeping King.
We will not find much sign of Ruskin's social concern in Elgar, though the score of Cockaigne also has a quotation appended to its evocation of an imaginary land of cakes, as if to suggest the Overture is the work of a Dickensian boy with his nose pressed to the confectioner's window of life. It is Piers Plowman he cites "Meteless and Moneless on Malverne hulles", dreaming of the golden and regenerated city. When success did come, Elgar's insecurity betrayed itself in his outward carapace of worldly success. He cultivated the air of a country gentleman but he could not forget that he was Trade by birth and only a gentleman by a fortunate marriage. As a personality, his instinct was always to withdraw into the private imaginative space of childhood. Without Alice Elgar's intervention, he may never have broken out of the world of provincial music-making.
Now that Elgar's major works are often performed, we do well to remember that his complaints of neglect during his lifetime and his falling silent were not an over-sensitive composer's exaggeration. Looking back through the literature it is hard to find an account of his work which does not imply serious reservations as to its value and staying power. Before the eruption of Modernism which made him seem old-fashioned, he was regarded as a dangerous progressive. His finding German champions made him an object of some suspicion to the island mentality. He was forty-two years old before the Enigma Variations established his reputation in 1899 and by 1911 he sensed the tide had turned with the cool reception of the Second Symphony. The question When was Elgar? arises.
Gerontius was in many ways his most direct and heartfelt piece, though written in his early maturity, it deals with a dying man. The composer famously remarked that writing oratorios was the price he paid for being an Englishman but the influence of Parsifal on Gerontius is plain enough. Both are explorations of the borderland areas of pain and joy that could hardly be further removed from the bluff and straight-forward caricature of John Bull. In many ways the ambiguities of Gerontius correspond very well with the mysterious literature of the eighteen nineties, the decade of Jekyll and Hyde and the Princess Salome. It was a difficult piece but its quality could not be ignored though its religious nature served to place it in a special category, removing it from the realm of common sense and daylight.
If this breakthrough work was inspired by Parsifal, the composer was emboldened by its success to attempt an oratorio trilogy which would be the English answer to the Ring. Elgar's account of the genesis of this planned trilogy is misleading in a way which does not appear to have been detected by commentators. Michael Kennedy, for instance, in the booklet accompanying the Boult recording, draws a distinction between these oratorios and The Dream of Gerontius, which he sees as the apogee of the series of Tales or Sagas of the 1890s: The Black Knight, King Olaf & Caractacus. He is talking of phases of Elgar's development but in one important sense The Apostles and The Kingdom can be related directly to The Black Knight and King Olaf at least. The fact is that for his most ambitious sacred project, Elgar turned back to the poet of his secular cantatas and drew heavily upon the Divine Tragedy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Elgar does not take the text exactly as he finds it, cutting a great deal and also adding to the characterization of Judas, but many of the most audacious dramatic or cinematic effects which have been praised as Elgar's own are essentially Longfellow's. I have not seen this mentioned anywhere.
The Divine Tragedy is an unpopular work by an unfashionable poet but it is not difficult to track down in the collected editions of the only non-English poet to be afforded a place in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. Like most of Longfellow, it is vivid and easy to read, the familiar story painted in bold and unfamiliar colours. It is here that Mary Magdalen gets herself a tower, somewhat after the lady of Shalott, where she can express her sense of ennui with worldly decadence and look out to witness Jesus walking on the waters. It is a Pre-Raphaelite picture in words.
Elgar is selective in his use of the poet, often choosing to go back to the language of the scriptures. He gets rid of the character of Menahem, who plays an important chorus-like rôle in the poem. Menahem is an Essene, a point which may not have meant a great deal to Longfellow's original readers but has some added piquancy for us now that the hermetic and apocalyptic Essenes are taken to be the creators of the rediscovered Dead Sea Scrolls. Longfellow's agenda may have been affected by his Freemasonry, the marks of which are everywhere in this unusual religious poem and elsewhere in his extensive works. It should not be supposed however that Elgar in any way seeks to normalize this strange viewpoint: the changes he does make, especially with regard to Judas who is promoted to a kind of hero, tend to take his oratorios still further away from any brand of orthodox Christianity.
To follow the suicide of Judas with lines about the crucifixion in such a way as to suggest that Judas died for Mankind is very strange. When we reach the scene in which Mary, the mother of Jesus, refers to Mary Magdalene as Daughter, we may find ourselves uttering words such as Nazarene.
The Mary Magdalene of the Bible is a shadowy figure. The references which are taken to refer to her are Luke 7:37, where a woman anoints Christ's feet, Mark 14:3, where a woman of Bethany anoints His head and John 12:3, where Mary of Bethany does His feet again. If she is identified with the latter, then she is the sister of Martha and Lazarus. Longfellow treats Mary of Bethany as a separate character but Elgar omits her. The Essene Gospel of Philip explicitly makes Magdalene the spouse of Christ but this Nag Hamedi text was not available to Elgar. More startling is the gnostic Gospel of Thomas in which Salome and Mary Magdalene become male in order to join the disciples. Salome's dance and the overheated atmosphere of Herod's court feature in Longfellow's drama, though the grisly climactic scene is kept off-stage and is narrated by the Essene outside the palace walls. Towers, gates and walls feature prominently in the drama, framing the sacred drama in heavy masonry. The more luridly sexual treatment of this episode by another Freemason, Oscar Wilde would reach the operatic stage in Richard Strauss's setting in 1905. John the Baptist and John the Apostle are the twin patron Saints of Freemasonry, their Feast-days falling on the Summer and Winter solstices and the disembodied head of the Baptist is said to be a disguised figure of the baleful Baphomet.
Longfellow's taste for apocryphal material is further displayed in his 1851 dramatic poem based on Voragine's Golden Legend. Arthur Sullivan had set it as an ambitious cantata in 1886 with great success but he concentrated on the Faustian aspects, omitting the scenes from the childhood of Christ, for example, where the Christ-child animates birds out of clay. The Sullivan piece is essentially secular, opening with a vivid battle of devils and angels around the steeple of Strasbourg Cathedral, whereas Elgar's oratorios, dealing with the person of Christ and his closest circle were an intimate statement of Faith rather than a rousing entertainment.
There is another half-forgotten Christus, that of Franz Liszt. Written between 1855 and 1867, it was not performed complete until 1873. Like Elgar's Apostles and Kingdom, it features the Beatitudes and the scene of Jesus Walking on the Water. The First Part had been performed in Rome in 1867. Among Liszt's many visitors in the year 1868 was fellow Freemason Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who gives the name Christus to his 1872 Collection, a trilogy comprising The Divine Tragedy, The Golden Legend and The New England Tragedies. A curious miscellany on the surface, it appears to deal with the eternal drama of Good versus Evil through the ages and ends with Longfellow's interpretation of the story of the Witches of Salem. Within two years of its publication, Liszt makes his setting of The Bells of Strasbourg Cathedral from The Golden Legend some twelve years before fellow Freemason Arthur Sullivan's. Like so much of Liszt's music, it remains virtually unknown and largely unperformed.
Apart from the Longfellow connection, the unorthodox aspects of Elgar's oratorios are not a new discovery. Discussions can be found in the standard writings but in a muted way as if discussion of religious difference was not exactly cricket. It may be useful to extend this study with a detailed account of the use Elgar makes of Longellow's poetic drama but anyone interested should be able to see for themselves. The Divine Tragedy is freely available in e-text form from a number of sites.
As Elgar grew older he seemed to part company still further with established beliefs and made numerous nihilistic statements which startled friends and acquaintances. His late works, however accidental they may appear in their inception, can be seen as a flight as far as possible away from Christianity into a Gnostic and Pagan twilight. But there were signs of things to come as early as 1901, a year before the young Arnold Bax discovered Yeats and became an Honorary Celt, Elgar was touched by the potent mists arising out of Ireland's Nationalist ferment.
The Celtic Twilight is usually dated from 1891 when Parnell, driven from leadership by the discovery of an extra-marital affair bereaved young aspiring Nationalists of any clear political agenda. Energies were diverted into the cultural business of forging a National Identity. Old Celtic Gods and heroes were evoked to put heart into the subject Irish race and there was a renewal of interest in the Irish language, even if some of the main players were not themselves Irish-speaking. The Irish Literary Theatre was a movement explicitly devoted to the revival of ancient idealism but there were tensions within the group. The young William Butler Yeats took every opportunity to oppose what he saw as Ibsenite Social Realism and to create a theatre which would be visionary, legendary and prophetic. The greatest successes however were the plays of Synge which made poetic music out of the hard lives of the Irish peasantry. A few years later the famous Abbey Theatre would be established with the backing Yeats charmed out of the Rosicrucian English tea-heiress Annie Horniman. Again his own poetical dramas were overtaken, this time by the vibrant and earthy working-class idiom of Sean O'Casey, leaving the aristocratic and idealistic Yeats to his late and exotic coterie plays which drew on Oriental models. At the start of the twentieth century, however, Moore and Yeats were non-Catholic aristocrats determined to drag a reluctant Kathleen ni Houlihan up the steps of a literary Parnassus to be wedded to Art with themselves as High Priests.
"I think that the young man should be put back and fucked for again," was the blunt reaction of William Morris to the young Yeats. Perhaps by the time Diarmuid and Grania was brought to the stage of the Gaiety Theatre Dublin in 1901, the aristocratic poet looked less like "an umbrella left behind at a picnic" to cite George Moore, himself "a man carved from a turnip, looking out of astonished eyes" according to Yeats. The play was the poetic child of these two odd fathers and the result was a flop. It had been intended at some point to translate the play into Irish, instead its title got anglicized further as Grania and Diarmid in the list of Elgar's works.
Grania and Diarmid have been compared to Tristan & Isolde and the warrior chieftain Finn corresponds to the betrayed King Mark. Guilty passion erupts as a consequence of the handsome young Diarmid retrieving Grania's dog. The ambiguous sexual tensions of the Yeats-Moore version were made more explicit in Lady Gregory's 1910 drama, unperformed at the time, which makes Grania appear the interloper in a prolonged male love duet. It is interesting to speculate how aware Elgar would have been of the politics, sexual or otherwise, of the Irish Literary Theatre. Yeats's Countess Cathleen, written in 1892 but not staged till 1900, had been condemned as heretical and blasphemous.
Elgar's Grania music consists of three pieces: The Incidental Music, The Funeral March and the song of Laban "There are seven that pull the thread, " an elegiac spinning-song after the death of the lovers. It is very seldom played but Elgar's contact with the Celtic Twilight and Irish Nationalism at the height of his first maturity is significant. In the Summer of that same year, 1901, the first two of the Pomp and Circumstance Marches were heard at Liverpool. It seems unlikely that any such contact with Irish Nationalism would have been possible after Pomp and Circumstance Number One turned into Land of Hope and Glory, and escaped from the context of the Coronation Ode of 1902 to run amuck as the perfect jingo song. Elgar's hitherto historical and nostalgic dreams of Nationhood seemed to have been wrenched into the present tense. Words and music struck a chord with the national mood and the composer broke through into the awareness of the man in the street. The blatant populism of this loved and hated second National Anthem with its material agenda could hardly be further removed from the aesthetic and refined art of Yeats but it was such gathering spectres of discontent within the Empire which had brought on this self-conscious mood of British Nationalism. Though Elgar publicly took the stance that he was proud to have written the greatest folksong of his day, it is telling that he resisted any moves during his lifetime to make another patriotic song out of Pomp & Circumstance March No.4.
© James Beswick Whitehead, 2001
version X, 2nd July, 2001
Return to Elgar's Enigma Unveiled