This weekend, as the orchestras of England celebrate the 150th anniversary of this country’s most celebrated composer, is an appropriate time to review the national monument that is Sir Edward Elgar. Does he continue to speak of and for England? Or was he merely a late-romantic nostalgic, whose music was hopelessly outdated when he died in 1934, and which now offers even less value — or ‘significance’, in the weedy, trivia-obsessed language of our age?
If one takes notice of the public pronouncements, it hasn’t been a good year for Elgar. When in March his profile was replaced on the £20 banknotes by that of Adam Smith, some people rejoiced. According to Stephen King, the managing director of economics at HSBC, his appearance on the notes represented ‘a peculiar celebration of mediocrity’. You may as well put Noël Coward on them, he sneered. Actually, that’s not a bad idea.
King’s less than regal rebuke served as a prelude to the foghorn riff that followed from Norman Lebrecht, who sandbagged Elgar for his ‘antediluvian Little Englishness’.
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