Elgar's Hillside

[Elgarian Redux]

You do realise what an apt discussion this is for a thread titled Elgar's Hillside............ 

Brilliantly spotted! We could go on and on, showing images of the Malverns, and never going off topic!

[Elgarian Redux]

@Elgarian Redux and @Luke, I find the connection you have with Elgar very striking indeed, and admire the passion you pursue it with. Much enjoyed reading your ensuing tales too. 

The second classical LP I ever bought, at the age of 16, was the Enigma Variations (see the illustration by my name), and I became haunted by the picture on the front. Where was this place? How did it inspire this music? Could it be reached somehow?

A few years later, older, and having listened to a lot more Elgar, I found it. We camped in a field nearby, one warm summer evening, with the Malverns silhouetted against the sky, and listened to Introduction & Allegro for Strings playing quietly. I was never quite the same again, I suppose.

[Luke]

Once again I wish for the option to 'like' a post multiple times. What a lovely memory

[Luke]

The first Elgar LP to give me this sense of place - the first I remember,anyway - was Hugh Bean's lovely recording of the Violin Concerto. This was the cover; I remember losing myself in it as I got to know the concerto, perhaps my favourite Elgar piece:



...an image also used on this disc:



Perhaps the designers of these LPs are a little unimaginative, but there's no denying how apposite such images are. This in particular is appropriate: it's the Malverns as one approaches from Elgar's birthplace at Broadheath. Here's a slightly glitchy screenshot I just took from Google maps; Broadheath a short distance to the north; the Malverns in the direction indicated on the map:

[Luke]

(I feel another book coming on ...recreating favourite LP covers!)

[Elgarian Redux]

The first Elgar LP to give me this sense of place - the first I remember,anyway - was Hugh Bean's lovely recording of the Violin Concerto. This was the cover; I remember losing myself in it as I got to know the concerto, perhaps my favourite Elgar piece:

It took me a few years to be able to enjoy the violin concerto (perhaps not too surprising in a teenager), but when I finally managed it, it zoomed to the top of my personal Elgar chart. The transition came when I fully understood the background, and so could respond to the windflower themes, and their aching poignancy. Hugh Bean is so very very sensitive in this recording.

What I hadn't recognised was that whereas I'd tended to gravitate to the Elgar pieces that most inspired images of landscape, the violin concerto was different. Or so I thought. I soon found myself able to 'hover' between the specifically feminine presence implicit in the windflower themes, and the landscape presence that pervaded the Elgar I knew and loved.

One consequence of this is that I gradually found myself regarding landscape as having a feminine aspect. So when, much later, I encountered the Persephone myth, I was quite overwhelmed by it as an experience I already knew by another name...

[Elgarian Redux]

(I feel another book coming on ...recreating favourite LP covers!)

Do it. I'll buy a copy!

[Luke]

It took me a few years to be able to enjoy the violin concerto (perhaps not too surprising in a teenager), but when I finally managed it, it zoomed to the top of my personal Elgar chart. The transition came when I fully understood the background, and so could respond to the windflower themes, and their aching poignancy. Hugh Bean is so very very sensitive in this recording.

What I hadn't recognised was that whereas I'd tended to gravitate to the Elgar pieces that most inspired images of landscape, the violin concerto was different. Or so I thought. I soon found myself able to 'hover' between the specifically feminine presence implicit in the windflower themes, and the landscape presence that pervaded the Elgar I knew and loved.

One consequence of this is that I gradually found myself regarding landscape as having a feminine aspect. So when, much later, I encountered the Persephone myth, I was quite overwhelmed by it as an experience I already knew by another name...

Beautifully put, the whole post. Re the violin concerto, though it wasn't one of my destination pieces, it ended up rather surpassing all of them in importance, for a number of reasons having to do with 'windflower' and with Aeolian harps.

As for your final paragraph , yes, absolutely. Couldn't agree more. This may be part of why hills seem to be so important to the creative imagination, too.... Here's another - this was the view from the house RVW was staying in as he wrote Flos Campi (with all its erotic and sensuous associations):

[Elgarian Redux]

Beautifully put, the whole post. Re the violin concerto, though it wasn't one of my destination pieces, it ended up rather surpassing all of them in importance, for a number of reasons having to do with 'windflower' and with Aeolian harps.

Will you say a bit more about your relationship with Aeolian harps? I presume you'll have seen the one of Elgar's in the Birthplace Museum? Music made by the wind/breath of a god (or goddess). Music caught from the air. His interest in them was inevitable, wasn't it? 

As for your final paragraph , yes, absolutely. Couldn't agree more. This may be part of why hills seem to be so important to the creative imagination, too.... Here's another - this was the view from the house RVW was staying in as he wrote Flos Campi (with all its erotic and sensuous associations):

Thanks for showing the photo. Very striking. This is really ancient stuff, isn't it? I mean, seeing the feminine form in the landscape is a prehistoric preoccupation, and it's not surprising that some of this comes in under our radar, without us, sometimes, ever noticing the cause.

[Luke]

Will you say a bit more about your relationship with Aeolian harps? I presume you'll have seen the one of Elgar's in the Birthplace Museum? Music made by the wind/breath of a god (or goddess). Music caught from the air. His interest in them was inevitable, wasn't it?

Absolutely, with his interest in the sound of the wind, through the reeds, through the trees, etc, from childhood (have you readMatthew Riley's great book on Elgar? - there are some fine pages on this). The idea of nature revealing itself through unconscious, non-human but musical sounds, as in an Aeolian harp, is clearly connected to the fundamental theme of my book, of composers finding inspiration in the mysterious auras of a place. And then, at the end of Elgar's VC, what else do we hear but a giant orchestral Aeolian harp, thrummed across the body of the orchestral  strings in a manner strikingly similar to the workings of the wind-powered instrument, whilst the violin's inconceivably poetic cadenza unwinds until all that is left is Windflower, with the accent on wind... It's really the heart of Elgar, this unique and heart stopping cadenza, IMO.

Thanks for showing the photo. Very striking. This is really ancient stuff, isn't it? I mean, seeing the feminine form in the landscape is a prehistoric preoccupation, and it's not surprising that some of this comes in under our radar, without us, sometimes, ever noticing the cause.

Wrt the prehistoric, one more image, and see Birtwistle, Silbury Air:

[Elgarian Redux]

have you readMatthew Riley's great book on Elgar? - there are some fine pages on this).

Well now it's my turn to be embarrassed. I've just checked my Elgar bookshelves, and there, tucked away in a dark corner, was Matthew Riley's book. I didn't know I had it!! I mean, how crass is that? I used to buy anything that newly appeared in the Birthplace Museum's bookshop, and this was clearly one of those. But I've never read it, and that's absurd, because it's so obviously my sort of thing. Looking at its publication date, I think its arrival probably coincided with a horrible 'life event' which happened shortly afterwards and pushed it firmly out of mind. Well, better late than never - thank you for the reminder.

Lots to say (Silbury! You know all my favourite mythic places!), but no time this morning to say them. More anon.

But anyway, at least I've dug the book out now and will try to educate myself.

[Roasted Swan]

Can I just say I am enjoying reading your discussion very much indeed.  I don't have anything to further/advance this so I'm just happy to sit on the sidelines! 

I drove past Silbury and then on up to Avebury just last weekend - extraordinary sites both.  I've just ordered a copy of the Riley book too!

I'm looking forward to reading more posts very soon.....

[Luke]

This anonymous Amazon review of Riley's book is worth quoting as a summary of its general 'take':

Riley's book is an academic book, but it's accessible to the layman and deserves to be widely known and appreciated. It's a study which looks at nostalgia from two angles. It explores the workings of nostalgia within Elgar's creative mind and how we've worked him into our own sense of musical history. Musical analysis nestles happily alongside biography, history, literary criticism and reception history to create a work which is as sharply intelligent about Elgar as it is about what we've made of him in the past century.

What I love about it is that its easy command of all these fields goes hand-in-hand with it being so accessible and beautifully written. Admittedly, you have to be a bit of an Elgar buff (if, like me, you can't read music) to pick up on the passages Riley analyses technically. But these are relatively few, and on the whole it's wonderfully communicative and generous. Riley isn't out to score easy points against people who say silly or unexamined things about Elgar, and his questioning of sentimental ideas about the composer is devastating on account of it being so poised, courteous and rigorous.

That generosity fits in with the vision of Elgar which lies at the heart of the book. The gist of Riley's argument is that within Elgar's creative imagination nostalgia was less straightforwardly conservative and more problematic than we have tended to assume.

Elgar was keenly mindful of the past, but appreciated, too, that it was no protection at all against the present. Riley's Elgar is a more sophisticated composer than the `two Elgars' we have popularly known since the 1960s. In that theory, originally developed in the years after 1918 to contain the more embarrassingly militaristic aspects of the composer, there lay a more sensitive, poetic, `truer' Elgar buried beneath the brassily assertive one. What Riley encourages us to see is temporally co-existing Elgars: the Elgar rooted in a better past who, all the time, jostles alongside an Elgar in the grim present, both of them real, both `talking' to each other. Yet the Elgar mindful of the better past was, across his lifetime, gradually defeated. It was a tragic trajectory; Riley, scrupulously careful, doesn't put forward the proposition, but could it help to explain why Elgar more or less gave up composing after 1919?

What that better past for Elgar was, of course, we shall never know. For some commentators, it's the conservative vision of a pre-urban countryside, for others a near-socialist vision of spiritual renewal. Right versus left: faith versus doubt: past versus future: the poetic, inward moments within Elgar are fiercely contested because they are so compelling and so ambiguous, probably the mark of any original artist. The debate has inevitably continued, and Riley analyses it very intelligently and generously, helping to move us on. That's why I think it's a brilliant book.

[71 dB]

It took me a few years to be able to enjoy the violin concerto (perhaps not too surprising in a teenager), but when I finally managed it, it zoomed to the top of my personal Elgar chart.

The Naxos Violin Concerto/Cockaigne Overture dics was my first Elgar CD. I got it for Christmas present from my father in 1997 soon after discovering Elgar (hearing Enigma Variations on radio). At this point I wasn't 100 % sure if I'd like everything by Elgar (because I knew hardly anything by him!), but Enigma Variations had blown me away and Elgar seemed "super-interesting." Hearing the Violin Concerto confirmed me Elgar is certainly my cup of tea. I may have not understood the work completely on the first listen, but I certainly loved what I heard. Then again, I wasn't a teenager anymore. I was almost 27. Encouraged by this Naxos CD I started exploring Elgar with passion. Those were the days!

[Luke]

A similar progression for me. I first heard the Violin Concerto aged about 14 or 15, and I liked it very much, but I was already hooked on the Cello Concerto by about 10 and its uniquely elusive qualities hooked me immediately. In addition to its obvious deep nostalgia and melancholy there is something indefinable about the CC, especially its first subject, drifting downwards like smoke, with a faint implied hemiola to its contour that is so deeply suggestive. It's like a fragrance, this music. Anyway, especially as I was an aspiring cellist and could kind-of play the first page or so by the time I was about 14, the CC was the preferred Elgar concerto in my mind for a long time. And then suddenly - and though I still revere the CC as much as ever - my preference swapped to the VC, which is equally lyrical and poetic but which comes from in media res rather than being a retrospective vision. It's a longer, more complex work, and every single note speaks like Mahler does, in that nothing is ever the same, nothing is routine, there are changes of tempo, of accentuation, of phrasing, all the time, so that the music seems full of nervous life. The violin lives in this piece - indeed, as Elgar almost said, in this concerto is enshrined the soul of the violin. I love this concerto so much!

[Karl Henning]

Can I just say I am enjoying reading your discussion very much indeed.  I don't have anything to further/advance this so I'm just happy to sit on the sidelines! 

I drove past Silbury and then on up to Avebury just last weekend - extraordinary sites both.  I've just ordered a copy of the Riley book too!

I'm looking forward to reading more posts very soon.....

Likewise.

[Irons]

The first Elgar LP to give me this sense of place - the first I remember,anyway - was Hugh Bean's lovely recording of the Violin Concerto. This was the cover; I remember losing myself in it as I got to know the concerto, perhaps my favourite Elgar piece:



...an image also used on this disc:



Perhaps the designers of these LPs are a little unimaginative, but there's no denying how apposite such images are. This in particular is appropriate: it's the Malverns as one approaches from Elgar's birthplace at Broadheath. Here's a slightly glitchy screenshot I just took from Google maps; Broadheath a short distance to the north; the Malverns in the direction indicated on the map:

Original LP cover for Barbirolli's Enigma.

[Roasted Swan]

A similar progression for me. I first heard the Violin Concerto aged about 14 or 15, and I liked it very much, but I was already hooked on the Cello Concerto by about 10 and its uniquely elusive qualities hooked me immediately. In addition to its obvious deep nostalgia and melancholy there is something indefinable about the CC, especially its first subject, drifting downwards like smoke, with a faint implied hemiola to its contour that is so deeply suggestive. It's like a fragrance, this music. Anyway, especially as I was an aspiring cellist and could kind-of play the first page or so by the time I was about 14, the CC was the preferred Elgar concerto in my mind for a long time. And then suddenly - and though I still revere the CC as much as ever - my preference swapped to the VC, which is equally lyrical and poetic but which comes from in media res rather than being a retrospective vision. It's a longer, more complex work, and every single note speaks like Mahler does, in that nothing is ever the same, nothing is routine, there are changes of tempo, of accentuation, of phrasing, all the time, so that the music seems full of nervous life. The violin lives in this piece - indeed, as Elgar almost said, in this concerto is enshrined the soul of the violin. I love this concerto so much!

For sure the VC is a work of genius but I do think it is also the most elusive of EE's great/extended orchestral works.  I remember being struck by Micheal Kennedy in his "Portrait of Elgar" which I found an inspiring book to read in my late teens stating that the VC, Symphony 2 and Music Makers(!) were the 3 key Elgar works.

[Luke]

This is the triumvirate of works that EE grouped together, when writing to Alice Stuart Wortley; he said that he had 'written out his soul' in them, and that it was in them that he had 'shown himself,' so presumably MK was thinking along those lines.

[Karl Henning]

The Hillside has become the hippest corner of GMG.