Jerrold Northrop Moore
is the respected author of probably
the finest biography of Elgar, Edward
Elgar, A Creative Life (Oxford University
Press – first published in 1984). He
has also written a number of other books
on the composer including the invaluable
Elgar – A Life in Photographs
(Oxford University Press 1972), alas
no longer available. Northrop Moore’s
new book, represents a half century
of thought and study. He asserts that
the English countryside fills Elgar’s
music (you only have to stand on the
Malvern Hills and let the music of the
Introduction and Allegro, for
instance, run through your mind, to
realise the truth of his assertion).
As Moore says in the concluding paragraph
of this analytical opus, "The country
had filled Elgar’s music as it had filled
the greatest English art. It is a pastoral
vision reaching back through Samuel
Palmer and Turner and Constable, through
Keats and Coleridge, Wordsworth, through
Shakespeare and Chaucer and the long
horizontal lines of English churches
and cathedrals, perhaps to the misty
heritage of King Arthur about Tintagel.
This was the heritage that shaped Elgar
and his music, and that touches his
music’s audience still."
Elgar had been a countryman
even from his boyhood when he would
slip out to study scores or dream by
the riverside. Later, the Worcestershire
countryside and Welsh borderland scenery
through which he cycled, the murmurings
of his Aeolian Harps in the breezes
of Malvern and Hereford, and during
the dark days of the Great War, the
woodlands of Sussex, would all influence
his music
Jerrold Northrop Moore
examines the first tune Elgar wrote.
This he calls the ‘Broadheath tune’.
He then shows methodically, meticulously
how this tune developed through childhood
hope and innocence to its final place
in the bleak, forbidding fifths opening
of the Third Symphony, left uncompleted
at Elgar’s death on 23 February 1934.
On the way he shows how that tune influenced
later works and led Elgar onwards with
growing confidence, through his mature
works like: Gerontius, Introduction
and Allegro, the two symphonies,
the Violin Concerto, Falstaff
to the chamber works and his last major
composition, the Cello Concerto; and
how so many of these works influenced
those that followed.
It is a fascinating
and remarkable feat of scholarship.
It should be said though that sometimes
it is scholarship worn heavily. The
book makes demands on its reader. It
requires concentration and commitment
and a grasp of technical fundamentals.
Often Northrop Moore’s flowery literary
prose style runs away with him at the
risk of clarity. Perhaps he might consider
committing his theories to a recording
with plenty of musical examples as an
alternative medium for those music lovers
who might find difficulty in grasping
all his ideas?
(In passing, and for
another view of the influences on Elgar’s
art, not to mention an absorbing and
controversial insight into Elgar’s personal
life and how that equally affected his
music, I would recommend readers to
Professor Brian Trowell’s substantial
and absolutely fascinating essay ‘Elgar’s
Use of Literature’ in Edward Elgar
– Music and Literature edited by
Raymond Monk (Scolar Press 1993) AmazonUK)
Ian Lace
