This week’s theme is…Shuffling Off! Musicians are human, and humans die, often with works in progress. These unfinished works form a tantalizing “what would have been”. Sometimes they are finished by crafty folks who aim for the double bar. Sometimes it is interesting to listen to them as they remain, a fascinating window into the creative process of a genius, cut short by the mortality we all share.
Shuffling Off, Day 1 – Symphony No. 3 by Edward Elgar
Classical music is susceptible to what might be termed the “monument syndrome”. What I mean by this is that it is very easy to regard the music and musicians who created it as somehow different and separate from you and me, different in historical era, different in worldview, and different in human potential. While some of this is true, we should remember that the facts of human potential have not changed, and all of these musicians were human, grappling with the world into which they were born just as we are today. But the quality of their work can seem intimidating, superhuman with regard to technique and, perhaps ironically, human expression. And it seems so long ago doesn’t it? The veil of the past feels heavy and opaque, the music materializing through it, offering tantalizing clues regarding a way of life we can’t really comprehend.
But it wasn’t that long ago, nor was the culture terribly far removed from ours. I’ve recently gotten to know a Chinese family. The husband and wife hail from different provinces and speak with different dialects. I get the impression that this is a more pronounced and dramatic difference than comparing a speaker from Maine and Alabama, two states in the United States which feature rather different dialects. The provinces of China are massive, and geographically diverse with their own dialects (or even languages) and cuisine. Mandarin was eventually promoted as a lingua franca in order to unify the nation and remains so to this day. In the United States our history extends back a mere 250 years before merging with the history of another nation. For other Western nations the scale is longer, but the age of even the oldest European nation (with the exception of Greece, a special case), San Marino, founded around the year 300, is best measured in centuries rather than millennia. As with the geography, the history of China is on a different scale, with scant evidence of its first clear dynasty predating the Bronze Age. Since then there has always been some kind unifying line within Chinese history, be it dynasty or political state. Can you conceive of all this? I daresay it is impossible, and Americans take excessive pride in their mere three centuries.
In relief to the phenomenon of Chinese history, the scope of Western art music is dwarfed, literally occupying the final 5 minutes of the proverbial clock face of temporal comprehension. It isn’t as old as we usually think or feel that it is, nor is the veil that separates us from their minds and conceptions of the world as thick or opaque as it often seems. And some stories demonstrate this to us, bringing the glory of classical music to our temporal threshold, effectively bridging the generations and closing up the gap. Edward Elgar was Great Britain’s greatest post-romantic composer, emerging as the first native figure to dominate British musical history since the Renaissance (see this post) and Baroque periods, just a few hundred years ago. His lush, melodic gift, mastery of orchestration and impeccably British sensibility managed to capture his nation’s attention and heart, as well as exporting it to the rest of the Western world.
His incredibly fertile period of composition was rather cut short by the death of his wife; he was one of those rare handful of composers, along with Rossini (see this post) and Sibelius (see this post) who, at a point in their lives, long before their deaths, decided that their previous creative statements were sufficient, and essentially stopped, although their personal reasons for doing so were certainly diverse. Elgar’s reasons seem to be the death of his beloved life and a falling off of public demand for his music. His cello concerto of 1919 is often recognized as his last major work. But he lived 15 years beyond this and still picked away at things. During this time he started a third symphony, left incomplete at his death. Accounts of his feelings about the symphony seem to conflict regarding his opinion of its legacy, as to whether his remaining sketches should be left alone or brought to fruition. This was barely a century ago.
His surviving family proved indecisive about the best course, but realized the sketches, having been published in a biographical work in 1936, would eventually enter the public domain, allowing anyone to have a go, and so the Elgar family, in conjunction with the BBC, permitted the English composer Anthony Payne to reconstruct an authoritative version, which you can listen to here:
I am always impressed by reconstructions such as these, in which someone of modern sensibility must so thoroughly inhabit the mind of a bygone era.
Incidentally, there is another example of Payne performing a similar function, but on a much small scale. Elgar left five complete marches in the series known as Pomp and Circumstance, including the famous first march, ubiquitous at graduation ceremonies. The other 4 are less well-known, but certainly worth hearing. He also left sketches for a sixth, which Payne also realized:
I must confess that I am less convinced by his realization of this than the symphony; in listening to the marches in order I feel he does not quite capture the nuances of Elgar’s orchestration and lush nobility and he does for the Third Symphony. Not that I could do better though 🙂
Elgar died in 1934, barely a century ago. There are people alive today who were alive then. Just 40 years later, Anthony Payne became interested in completing the Third Symphony; my parents were alive at this time. The completed work premiered in the late 1990s, when I was in high school, and just beginning to become interested in music history. This history is still being written. While we often regard classical music as having ended long ago, it hasn’t, and the truth is that none of it was all that long ago, even if the great figures seem to us as gods. The story is still being written, for stories never end, only their telling. The history of the Western world is not as vast as we often feel, and we are very much a part of it ourselves, even if we don’t realize it. How will your chapter read?
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