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Reviewed by:
  • The Cambridge Companion to Elgar
  • Matthew Riley
The Cambridge Companion to Elgar. Ed. by Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton. pp. xix + 253. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, £50/£17.99. ISBN 0-521-53363-5/-82623-3.)

'From among the crudities which one of the many—why are there so many?—unbrilliant university men has used in reference to myself, the following comes to mind. I am said to have [End Page 654] "left the humdrum atmosphere of Worcester for" etc.' Even in his mid-seventies Elgar was still smarting at perceived slights about his origins, and was sufficiently resentful of the academic musical establishment in Britain to begin the Foreword to his boyhood friend Hubert Leicester's pleasant book Forgotten Worcester (1930) on a sour note. He was not altogether deluded, though. A storm was soon to blow up around the remarks on Elgar in the Handbuch der Musikgeschichte edited by Guido Adler when the second edition appeared in 1930. They were written by Edward J. Dent, by then Professor of Music at Cambridge, distinguished author and critic, and cosmopolitan President of the International Society for Contemporary Music. Dent devoted only a few paragraphs to Elgar, but in that short space uttered a handful of pungent phrases that have since become infamous and that rankle with Elgarians to this day. For instance: 'He was . . . a Catholic, and more or less a self-taught man, who possessed little of the literary culture of Parry and Stanford'; 'To English ears Elgar's music is too emotional and not quite free from vulgarity. His orchestral works—two symphonies, concertos for violin and cello, and several overtures—are vivid in colour, but pompous in style and of a too deliberate chivalrousness [Ritterlichkeit] of expression.'

But these two extracts represent only a single moment in a far longer history of ambivalence between Elgar and British university scholars. He began his musical career as a teacher and professional orchestral violinist; he lacked academic musical training and came to distrust the culture of Oxford and Cambridge and the London colleges. His brief stint as a university professor at Birmingham (1905–8) was troubled and controversial, not least on account of the barbs he directed at those very targets during his semi-public lectures. The ill feelings were reciprocated, and after his death Elgar's reputation in the academy remained low for many years, especially at Cambridge, where the legacy of his sometime adversary Stanford was subtly felt. British Ph.D. theses on Elgar were few and far between for most of the twentieth century, and research was left to unaffiliated scholars. Even in the mid-1990s, when, as a Master's student, I mooted the idea of a doctorate on Elgar to a potential supervisor, I was gently guided in other directions. Studying Elgar was not a good career move, it seemed. It was 'something you can always come back to later'.

In fact, by that time things were already changing. At the start of the twenty-first century Oxford awarded two D.Phils. on Elgar, and he will figure prominently in several forthcoming dissertations from other universities. English-language musicology journals began to publish articles on his music, while conferences, study days, and monographs—including one from an American author—added impetus to the academic revival (see Julian Rushton, Elgar: 'Enigma' Variations (Cambridge, 1999) and Charles Edward McGuire, Elgar's Oratorios: The Creation of an Epic Narrative (Aldershot, 2002)). Several more monographs and multi-author volumes are expected in the near future to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the composer's birth in 2007. By a strange irony, Elgar, who venerated the canon of German masterworks and fervently aspired to breathe new life into it with symphonies, concertos, and symphonic poems of his own, has benefited from the New Musicology's deconstruction of that canon and its re-evaluation of neglected or disparaged repertories. Scholars need no longer worry that his music is 'not quite free from vulgarity'. Indeed, the vulgarity might make it all the more interesting.

That insight has fortunately taken some of the immediate heat out of discourse on Elgar, for he has the power to rouse passions...

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