Arousing a love of England

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 Or was he merely a late-romantic nostalgic, whose music was hopelessly outdated when he died in 1934, and which now offers even less value — or ‘significance’, in the weedy, trivia-obsessed language of our age?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’. He went on: ‘In a multicultural age, he represents a country we no longer recognise except by way of apology.’ He then praised Sibelius (as he should), though it is hard to see how another white European fits into Lebrecht’s brave new multicultural world simply because he was the greater composer.

Lebrecht credited Elgar with three masterpieces: the concertos for violin and cello, and the Enigma Variations. He could have mentioned the two symphonies, the tone poem Falstaff, the oratorio The Dream of Gerontius, the piano quintet, the sonata for piano and violin, the song cycle Sea Pictures and some delightful shorter pieces like In the South and the Serenade for Strings, but he chose not to. Such omissions reveal either studied eccentricity or ignorance.