A very parfit gentil knight of music

One of the many things which makes me love Edward Elgar is that both the man and his music are so tremendously unfashionable. No wonder tax-funded quangos set up to ‘promote culture’, and run by New Labour bureaucrats, are refusing to mark his 150th birthday. He does not correspond with their criteria of approval at any point. He was white. He was English. He was middle class. He was a patriot, he loved his country and revered its monarchy: his second symphony was dedicated to Edward VII, who was kind to him and chose him as the first musician to receive the Order of Merit. He found the appalling losses we suffered in the first world war unbearably painful, and his agony is reflected in his music, notably the tragic cello concerto, to my mind his finest work. He identified himself wholeheartedly with the English people, their past, their nobility, their humour, their courage and resilience — yes, their follies and weaknesses too. For a summation of his Englishness one must turn to his great symphonic study Falstaff  Opus 68. Donald Francis Tovey, in his superb article on the subject (Vol. IV in his Essays in Musical Analysis), points to the extraordinary fertility of musical invention in this work, an ‘enormous mass of definitely different themes’, which he compares to the richness of material in Beethoven’s Eroica or even the Ninth Symphony. Elgar is describing a man but also a people and a country, even a concept. It is a greater piece of musical thought than Verdi’s Falstaff, fine though that is, because in order to write an opera Verdi had to turn to The Merry Wives of Windsor, a piece d’occasion which Shakespeare wrote at the command of the Queen, taking little trouble over it and (I think) despising the result.