Spirit Of England Research Articles

Canonizing remembrance: music for Armistice Day at the BBC, 1922–7

Broadcasting was one of the principal means by which the affective, social, and political meanings of Armistice Day were constituted in British culture, and music programming was crucial to that process. In the years leading up to its nationalization in 1927, the BBC was inventing itself; and its varying approaches to the selection and scheduling of specific musical repertoire for 11 November over that period have much to tell us about changing responses to the Great War, as well as conflicting notions of national identity, modernity, and tradition. Building on recent historical and musicological scholarship, this article examines the basis of Armistice Day programming decisions at the BBC; reconstructs the internal dialogue surrounding specific works, genres, and composers; and illuminates processes of canonization whereby Elgar's wartime cantata The Spirit of England emerged pre-eminent over works such as John Foulds's A World Requiem.

The Mower: New and Selected Poems by Andrew Motion

The Mower: New and Selected Poems by Andrew Motion

Edward Elgar and His World (review)

Edward Elgar and His World. Edited by Byron Adams. (Bard Music Festi - val.) Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. [xxi, 426 p. ISBN-10: 0691134456; ISBN-13 978-0-691-13446- 8. $22.95.] Illustrations, music examples, index. 2007 was the sesquicentennial of Elgar's birth, and-as may be expected in anniversary years-there has been a surge of publications and events related to the honoree. That Elgar would be the subject of the celebrated Bard Music Festival is noteworthy, especially given his rather marginal status in American concert life. In recent years the festival title has included the first and last names of its subject-perhaps shying away from the canonic look of the household name. This postmodern move not - withstanding, by its nature the festival is canonizing, and Elgar's admission to this selective list may be his most important achievement since being awarded the Order of Merit in 1911. It is greatly to the credit of Byron Adams that, amid the plethora of Elgar material published in the last few years, Edward Elgar and His World is a vital contribution. The organization of Elgar and His World as outlined in the introduction is attractive; conceding to the two Elgars trope that pervades much of the literature, Adams settles on a version of the trope articulated by Percy Young-private Worcestershire versus London. As Adams emphasizes, nearly all of Elgar's and populist compositions, including all five of the Pomp and Circumstance marches, were composed in the West Midlands, and his anguished and, in spite of the large orchestral and choral forces employed, intimate reaction to the war, The Spirit of England . . . [and] the most nakedly autobiographical and most of his scores, The Music Makers, . . . was finished in the city (p. xvi). Thus there may indeed be a correspondence between what Elgar was writing and where he was writing it, but the correspondence is not what we might expect; indeed, this may reveal something about the wistfulness and nostalgia that have often been cited in discussions of his music. There are four essays under the heading and five under London, although naturally the writers have not restricted their discussions only to works composed in their assigned locale. The geographical metropolis/periphery organization facilitates distinctions among works often jumbled together-namely the miscellaneous low art repertoire that Elgar produced in a variety of genres. Daniel Grimley's offering on Elgar's populism is a Worcester essay, and gives a fairly broad overview; the London essays on salon life (Sophie Fuller), The Crown of India (Nalini Ghuman) and its Music Hall origins (Deborah Heckert), are rich contextual treatments. It is refreshing to see so much space given to the serious treatment of the popular aspect of Elgar's oeuvre-as distinct from public and private and what Grimley rightly labels an authentic mode of Elgar's compositional voice (p. 100). At the middle of the book Adams has carved out space for annotated primary sources: Aidan Thompson's extensive survey of early British reviews of The Apostles and Alison Shiel's edition of Charles Sanford Terry's previously unpublished Notes on Elgar's Violin Concerto, together with related correspondence. Additionally, Thompson's brilliant essay on Elgar's critics illuminates much about the obfuscation (as defense mechanism) that the composer employed in later years. Perhaps the most important contribution of this book is the nuanced discussion of Elgar's Catholicism and its significance for his music (and for subsequent biographical and critical treatments). It is a complex subject, and it is a focus in many of the essays-particularly that of Adams himself, as well as those of Charles Edward McGuire, Rachel Cowgill, and Leon Bot - stein, and the early reviews of The Apostles. With so many contributors exploring the subject, there are inevitably several interpretations, and one particular strength of this volume is that it allows contradictions to stand without the usual oversimplifications, recognizing that even if we were to believe that the enigmatic Elgar always spoke as he felt, his feelings changed a good bit from context to context and time to time. …

Rosina Buckman’s press-cuttings and the first complete performance of Elgar’s The Spirit of England

The Blenheim-born soprano Rosina Buckman (1881-1948) had a distinguished career as an opera singer, and as a concert artist and teacher. One of the greatest Isoldes of her age, an outstanding Aida and Butterfly and a touching Mimi, she sang with Melba and Martinelli at Covent Garden and during the years of the First World War became principal dramatic soprano of the Beecham Opera Company. Most of Buckman's collections of press-cuttings are already known and their contents have been disseminated by biographers and historians (Simpson 105-119). However, another volume of these has recently come to light in a Wellington basement. Among the clippings it contains, those of particular interest here are the reviews of the first complete performance of Edward Elgar's The Spirit of England on 4 October 1917 in Birmingham with Rosina Buckman as soloist. The Spirit of England is a three part song cycle, comprising settings of three war poems by Laurence Binyon (1869-1943) taken from his The Winnowing-Fan, which had been published in 1914 with considerable success. Elgar began work on the cycle in 1915 at the suggestion of a mutual friend, Sydney Colvin. Knowing of Elgar's extreme distress at the slaughter of the war, Colvin had written to him on 10 January 1915: 'Why don't you do a wonderful Requiem for the slain -something in the spirit of Binyon's For the Fallen . . .' (Moore 288). Elgar chose three of Binyon's poems, adding 'The Fourth of August' and 'To the Women' to Colvin's suggestion of 'For the Fallen', but as he began work on them he learned that a Cambridge composer, Cyril Rootham, had already set 'For the Fallen' and his manuscript was with the publisher Novello. Elgar felt he must withdraw. Binyon wrote, urging him to proceed. 'Think of the thousands who will be craving to have their grief glorified & lifted up & transformed by an art like yours . . . Surely it would be wrong to let them lose this help & consolation' (Moore 288-89). He pointed out that Rootham had purposely planned his work 'on simple lines so as to be within the compass of small local choral societies: so I cannot see why his should clash, or why both settings should not be published'.

Joseph Andrews as Exemplary Gentleman

Joseph Andrews as Exemplary Gentleman TREADWELL RUML, II In its representation of an exemplary gentleman, Joseph Andrews demonstrates not only the influence of theories of exemplary historiography in the development of the English novel, but the tensions that complicated mid-eighteenth-century notions of gentility.1 According to eighteenth-century theory, the novel, like traditional exemplary biography , performs an educational function by presenting "valuable Patterns" of conduct to the reader. Fielding makes very clear in Joseph Andrews, however, that readers of fiction and history cannot passively accept the models presented to them, but must learn how to distinguish (even in admirable models) which kinds of conduct deserve imitation and which should be shunned. In part, Fielding's quarrel with Richardson's Pamela is that the epistolary intimacy of the serving girl's narrative disarms the very critical faculties that it is the mission of exemplary literature to sharpen. The ironic historian of Joseph Andrews, on the other hand, constantly draws the reader's attention to the problems of interpretation and judgment that complicate learning in literature and learning in life. This procedure makes Fielding's version of exemplary fiction a particularly apt vehicle for the presentation of models (like that of the "gentleman ") that represent complex and troubling problems of social interpretation and judgment. Joseph Andrews is designed as much to teach its 195 196 / RUMLII readers how to recognize gentility in others as to teach them how to behave genteelly themselves. Here, too, Richardson provided a negative stimulus. Pamela paints Mr. B.'s violence, weakness, and arrogance far more vividly than she can his good qualities, and a reader need not be very cynical to suppose that the reward of her virtue lies less in the quality of his character than in the gentleness of his birth and the extravagance of his wealth. In Joseph Andrews, however, Fielding's hero appears at the outset to lack all of the external trappings of gentility, a circumstance that allows the narrator to pose this complexly ironic question: "Would it not be hard, that a Man who hath no Ancestors should therefore be render'd incapable of acquiring Honour, when we see so many who have no Virtues, enjoying the Honour of their Forefathers?"2 Joseph is restored to the honorable rank of gentleman only after he has demonstrated his "Virtue"—a term which Fielding seeks to restore, from its reduction to chastity in women and to birth and wealth in men, to its proper function as the external sign and the inward spirit of England's social and political elite. Fielding is not arguing for progressive social mobility; his final recourse to a traditional family romance plot (which confirms Joseph's emergence from lower class status through the revelation of his gentle birth) reaffirms the importance of lineage. Fielding seeks rather to resolve the tensions between intrinsic virtue and extrinsic honor, first by seeming to alienate merit from birth and then by reconciling the two in his hero. Like traditional exemplary history, Fielding's new species of writing is designed to teach readers, not how to cross status boundaries, but how to behave properly in the status to which providence has assigned them. Indeed, by focusing his narrative upon the exposition of an exemplary gentleman, Fielding seeks to appropriate for his new species of writing the authority and prestige of gentility.3 In a sense, the discovery of Joseph's parentage, elevating him from footman to gentleman, corresponds to the elevation of his story from satiric mock-biography to comic fiction. Joseph Andrews seems to imply that, while the heroes of fictional private histories may lack the exalted rank of figures in traditional public histories (kings, queens, generals, and the like), they should be members of the gentry, at least, not footmen or serving girls. The term "gentleman," however, was highly unstable in the eighteenth century and could be used in a variety of senses: as a general term of distinction (based on birth) from the commonalty; as the title of someone with the right to bear arms; as the honorific of someone whose income did not derive from physical labor, or whose income depended on land rather than trade; or...

'The Spirit of England': Edward Elgar's New Choral Work

'The Spirit of England': Edward Elgar's New Choral Work