On June 2nd, 1857 - 150 years ago next Saturday - Edward Elgar was born in a tiny, remote village of Worcestershire. He was to become the greatest English composer since the days of Henry Purcell two centuries earlier.
While interest in Elgar's music has increased considerably in America and continental Europe in recent years, in Ireland the situation is different. Elgar has not featured very often in the programmes of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra since the death of the conductor Bryden Thomson more than 15 years ago. But for the advocacy of Proinnsías
Ó Duinn and Our Lady's Choral Society, who have performed most of Elgar's choral works in this period, the picture for Elgar enthusiasts would be bleaker still.
The Dublin choir and its music director will mark this week's anniversary with a performance of Elgar's great oratorio The Dream of Gerontius at the National Concert Hall, for which they will be joined by a fine German youth choir, the Landesjugendchor Rheinland-Pfalz, as well as leading English and German soloists. The concert will be repeated in Limburg, Germany on September 1st.
Perhaps the comparative indifference to Elgar's music in Ireland is based on a misunderstanding. The last time an Elgar symphony was played by the National Symphony Orchestra some years ago, The Irish Times's reviewer wrote that "the British Empire is the swelling theme with all its pomp and circumstance". If this were fair comment, then the neglect of his music in Ireland would be understandable, indeed justified!
Admittedly, Elgar is still probably best known for the tune of Land of Hope and Glory. And there is undeniably a note of lofty grandeur to some of his music, which may have been in tune for a time with the spirit of the Edwardian age. But Elgar was a complex personality, and confidence vied with self-doubt and pessimism, in both himself and his music. The strong emotionality of his music, which opens the hearts of many listeners, was indisputably a mark of the man and not the times, an age of "the stiff upper lip". He often conducted his music with tears running down his face, so moved was he by it and, I suppose, the memories it brought.
But there is a further side to his musical personality, and this stems from his native countryside and his experience of childhood there. This side, indeed, could be described as the quintessential Elgar, for it is here that his musical roots lie, and from this source derives some of his most attractive music. His deepest wellsprings were personal and pastoral, rather then patriotic. In 1921, looking back over his life as a composer, he remarked: "I am still at heart the dreamy child who used to be found in the reeds by Severn side with a sheet of paper trying to fix the sounds and longing for something great."
The Worcestershire countryside was the location of a nostalgic idyll beginning with his earliest years in Broadheath, his native village three miles north-west of Worcester. It was a world of imagination, susceptibility to beauty, and artistic sensibility. In this the key figure was Edward's mother Ann, the daughter of a Herefordshire farm-worker, who transmitted to her son her love and knowledge of nature and literature. There were also musical evenings organised by Elgar's father. William Elgar was a piano tuner by trade and later owned a music shop in Worcester, where young Edward taught himself music by studying scores of the masters, especially Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn. In 1869 Edward and his brothers and sisters wrote a play about children and grown-ups, for which Edward also composed music.
That his pastoral childhood idyll left a lasting mark on Elgar's music is clear from a typical comment by the composer in 1917: "I was dreaming yesterday of woods and fields, or some remembrance of long ago idylls. Well, I have put it all in my music."
For several years, beginning in 1898, Elgar and his wife rented a cottage on a wooded hill at the north end of the Malvern Hills, commanding wonderful views of the Severn Valley. This was Birchwood Lodge in Herefordshire, where he composed his cantata Caractacus (1898), the Enigma Variations (1899) and The Dream of Gerontius (1900), which takes its text from a well-known poem by Cardinal John Henry Newman about a soul's journey towards heaven. Even in this work, it is clear that Elgar's conception of the afterlife owes much to an earthly idyll, notably in the beautiful prelude to Part Two, when Gerontius awakes after death to "a strange refreshment. . . an inexpressive lightness".
A little later, the soul of Gerontius likens the sound of the angelic choirs to "the rushing of the summer wind among the lofty pines". It was around this time of his career that Elgar wrote in a letter to AJ Jaeger: "The trees are singing my music - or have I sung theirs? I suppose I have."
In 1904 the Elgars moved farther west to Hereford. From here, "in this sweet borderland where I have made my home", Elgar would cycle along the winding Wye Valley to the east and south of the town. When they left rural western England in 1912 and moved to London, he soon came to regret the move. Only one of his very best works, Falstaff (1913), was composed in London. It was in the countryside once more, at a remote cottage in west Sussex, that the final flowering of Elgar's musical creativity took place. Here, in 1918 and 1919, he produced in quick succession his three chamber works and his Cello Concerto.
"There is ever a breath of the West Country invading Elgar's music," as fellow composer Arnold Bax put it. Not long before his death in 1934, the ailing Elgar managed to hum a tune from the first movement of his Cello Concerto to a friend sitting by his bedside. He added: "If ever you're walking on the Malvern Hills and hear that, don't be frightened. It's only me."
The Dream of Gerontius will be performed at the National Concert Hall on Saturday, June 2nd at 8pm by Our Lady's Choral Society and Landesjugendchor Rheinland-Pfalz, with soloists Justin Lavender, tenor, Ulrike Schneider, mezzo-soprano, Ian Caddy, bass, and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Proinnsías Ó Duinn.