Elgar's Mahlerian Masterpiece

[Jared]

I have the Barbirolli.  Had trouble getting past the prelude, I think it will be some time before I get back to it, there's too much Elgar I haven't heard yet, including the cello concerto and the piano quintet.

if they are still on your hit list my friend, then please give these a listen to; they are both very cheap:





the Kennedy/ Handley version of the VC from the 1980's is especially majesterial, whilst the Payne No 3 undoubtedly sits alongside the Cooke Mahler 10 as being a really convincing construction... 

[71 dB]

To me Mahler is not very similar to Elgar. In fact, I struggle with Mahler while I love Elgar's music. I agree with the statement that Richard Strauss is similar to Elgar (these two composers were even good friends). Brahms is a very strong influence to Elgar but the influences go also back to Berlioz, Beethoven, Mozart, Handel and J. S. Bach (Elgar borrowed the scores of these masters from his father's music shop and studied them for self-education). I'd say that Elgar's major influences cover a broader palette of composers and styles than many other composers. That explains the "richness" people hear in Elgar's works.

I fear that the stereotype of "Elgar the jingoist" will last forever. Most people are just narrow-minded prisoners of simplified concepts. However, I am glad to see some people on this forum of smarter individuals at least trying to understand Elgar better.   

[Scarpia]

if they are still on your hit list my friend, then please give these a listen to; they are both very cheap:





the Kennedy/ Handley version of the VC from the 1980's is especially majesterial, whilst the Payne No 3 undoubtedly sits alongside the Cooke Mahler 10 as being a really convincing construction... 

Hehehe.  You missed the Elgar wars.  There was something like 50 pages of discussion on the Elgar violin concerto in one of the Elgar threads here.  I started out with the Kennedy/Rattle, which I despised.  Ended up enjoying the concerto a great deal, with the Chung/Solti and Hahn/Davis recordings proving a much more satisfying experience.  I have the Bean recording and that older Kennedy recording on hand for the next time the impulse to listen to the violin concerto surfaces.

I also have a recording of the 3rd, but I don't remember which one.

[Scarpia]

Well, just listened to the 2nd, Andrew Davis' recording. 

(On a side note, I recommend this set from Warner, which is rather inexpensive, and which has Elgar's major orchestral works in splendid sound and very good performances.)
 
The set also comes with an extensive booklet with lots of interesting information about the music, including what Elgar himself wrote or said about it.

I haven't listened to the piece is quite a few years, so it seemed "new" to me.  My first impression is that there is the unique stamp of Elgar on it, those "noble" dissonant harmonies that resolve in such a stately, wistful fashion, the opulent orchestration.  It is Brahmsian in the Elgar imposes a symphonic form on his music, but the extroverted use of the colors of the orchestra is far beyond what Brahms would allow himself and has the stamp of Richard Strauss.  But it does not evoke Mahler to me, especially not the second movement.  That  movement has the feel of a funeral march, even if Elgar does not designate it so, but a real funeral march which evokes grief at real loss.  Compare it with the blaring brass and theatrical histrionics of the funeral march that Mahler puts at the beginning of his 5th symphony, which evokes hysteria rather than grief.  I don't see the parallel.  I see a clearer relationship with Beethoven's 3rd symphony, and perhaps some of the slow movements of Bruckner.   Similarly, there are moments of horror in the three initial movements of Elgar's second, but Elgar does not wallow in them as Mahler would, they are an obstacle that Elgar must push through to reach an affirmation of the human spirit.  If this symphony has a weekness, it is that the apothesis in the finale does not seem to have enough weight to counterbalance the conflict that has come before, and can create an unsatisfying impression at the end.  Perhaps that is why the audience "sat there like stuffed pigs" at the premier, and why the work doesn't seem to be as popular as the 1st symphony these days.  I think it is a great work, but I particularly value the first three movements as independent statements.  I will be listening again to see if the whole makes a more convincing impression with some familiarity.

[Klaatu]

Hi guys.

Thank you all very much for your contributions, which I've found most helpful, erudite (well, some of 'em!) and interesting.

As the instigator of this thread I'm interested to note that no-one so far sees any kinship of feeling between Elgar's Second and Mahler's late works. I must have a particularly idiosyncratic response to Elgar 2!

I've also just recalled my very first hearing of a Mahler work - it was about 30 years ago on BBC Radio 3. I can't remember what the work was, but I remember my reaction: "This sounds like Elgar!" So even then, there was something that resonated, some sort of entrainment between the two composers in my mind. Bugger me if I know what it is; I'm no musicologist.

But bear in mind I'm speaking very specifically about EE's Second Symphony. I'm by no means suggesting his entire output is Mahlerian. Indeed, I think Brahms, Schumann, Wagner etc. are predominant influences in his oeuvre as most of you guys have stated.

The First Symphony is very Brahmsian  - and it's an absolutely wonderful piece in my opinion. But in Elgar's First the "nobilmente" qualities are much to the fore (although the great motto-tune has a hard-won peroration at the end) and generally it's a confident, extrovert work. (Apart from the slow movement, which is sublime!)

But Elgar's Second is a very different kettle of fish. Haunted, troubled, restless - neurotic, almost. I think it's this sense of unease, of a terrible underlying tragedy despite the would-be optimism of the finale, that makes me think of Mahler.

There's a difference, though. Elgar's vision seems to me to be personal - the working-out of major conflicts within an individual human soul. Whereas Mahler's late work - especially the 9th Symphony (a prime candidate for the most towering symphonic masterpiece of the last century, IMHO) is universal: here Mahler seems to be delving into the darkest places of the human spirit in general terms.*

So both of these works hit the spot for me. Elgar seems to be speaking to me man-to-man, sharing the troubles and tragedies and frustrated dreams of a person's life. Mahler takes me beyond the individual to examine the tragedy of the whole human race.

I love 'em both. Which one I want to listen to depends on whether I want to think about my own troubles or the world's. (Both of them give me some sort of consolation, for some reason.)

Anyway, the great thing is that I've hopefully encouraged a few members of this forum to discover - or rediscover - a great work which I believe is still under-rated. And at the end of the day, that was my whole reason for starting this thread.

PS I was pleased to note that Michael Kennedy, Elgar's biographer, said the following of the first movement of EE's Second Symphony: "No Mahler movement is more obviously a battleground for conflicting emotions and nervous tensions than this by Elgar." And Peter J Pirie, in The English Musical Renaissance, says of the work's second movement: "...the climax of the movement, the Mahlerian climax, with thudding drums and straining strings, must have been completely beyond (the audience).....it needed in fact an audience which had become familiar with at least some of Mahler's symphonies - nearly forty years later - for the true stature of the work to be appreciated."
So it appears I'm not entirely alone in my odd notions!

PPS Please, will someone agree with me that Sospiri, at least, sounds very, very like Mahler!

*David Holbrook's wonderful book, Gustav Mahler and the Courage to Be, gives a detailed analysis of the 9th Symphony as a musical example of existential philosophy.

[Jared]

Hehehe.  You missed the Elgar wars.  There was something like 50 pages of discussion on the Elgar violin concerto in one of the Elgar threads here.  I started out with the Kennedy/Rattle, which I despised.

'horses for courses' I suppose... I'm not an admirer of everything Kennedy has done, but his versions of Elgar & Walton VCs and the Walton Viola concerto with Previn are exactly how I like to hear them (although will admit that I've not heard the others you've mentioned there).

the Davis boxset is also very good and I think, an excellent companion to the Barbirolli one on EMI.. 

[DavidRoss]

PPS Please, will someone agree with me that Sospiri, at least, sounds very, very like Mahler!

*David Holbrook's wonderful book, Gustav Mahler and the Courage to Be, gives a detailed analysis of the 9th Symphony as a musical example of existential philosophy.

I love Sospiri.  Doesn't sound at all like Mahler to me, however.

And I love Mahler's 9th.  Sounds like music to me and nothing like philosophy, existential or otherwise.

[Scarpia]

'horses for courses' I suppose... I'm not an admirer of everything Kennedy has done, but his versions of Elgar & Walton VCs and the Walton Viola concerto with Previn are exactly how I like to hear them (although will admit that I've not heard the others you've mentioned there).

the Davis boxset is also very good and I think, an excellent companion to the Barbirolli one on EMI.. 

I think it was Rattle that I objected to, more than Kennedy.  In any case, Hahn's silky timbre made all those notes easier to swallow.  Chung/Solti has a bit more fire (and Solti was a surprisingly sensitive accompanist).  Looking, I see that I also have Perlman's recording (for some reason there were many versions of the Elgar concerto for a buck or two at the time and I accumulated a number of them).   Anyway, our local "Elgarian" was very convincing in his description of the Bean recording, and I think that is the next one I will listen to.

[Scarpia]

There's a difference, though. Elgar's vision seems to me to be personal - the working-out of major conflicts within an individual human soul. Whereas Mahler's late work - especially the 9th Symphony (a prime candidate for the most towering symphonic masterpiece of the last century, IMHO) is universal: here Mahler seems to be delving into the darkest places of the human spirit in general terms.*

We seem to be oddly out of phase, because it is Mahler that strikes me as addressing his personal demons with this music, whereas Elgar is addressing his view of the relation between personal feelings and the demands of society.  Of course, as has been pointed out above, we are talking about musical notes on a page, sounds with interesting relations of pitch and rhythm, we are describing our associations with the music, not the music itself.  There is no reason to assume we would agree.

[Mirror Image]

I see no connection musically between Mahler and Elgar. In fact, the two couldn't be more different from each other. Listening to say Elgar's Symphony No. 2 and Mahler's Symphony No. 9 is like listening to people from two very different worlds altogether. Elgar's life was not as death-influenced as Mahler who was haunted by death and plagued with one tragic event after another. Elgar, on the other hand, lived a much simpler life. The one thing that impacted Elgar more than anything was the death of his wife, which crushed him. Mahler had three blows to his life: the death of his daughter, his diagnosed heart condition, and the learning of his wife's affair. These had to be devastating for him to deal with, but Mahler continued to compose whereas towards the end of Elgar's life he composed very little. Just the inner drive of both composers is completely different. What motivates them to compose is also different. The only thing these two composers have in common is they wrote music.

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

In general, I agree with those who see other influences (Strauss, Brahms) in this work. There are two brief passages which strike me as Mahlerian though:

1. A very dark, slow section of the 1st mvt. development, after which the music "rises" back into the main theme...this wouldn't be out of place in some of Mahler's creepier music, like the 7th Symphony.

2. The weird throbbing trio section of the scherzo, which comes out of nowhere, grows into nightmarish intensity, and then quietly disappears.

[Sergeant Rock]

As the instigator of this thread I'm interested to note that no-one so far sees any kinship of feeling between Elgar's Second and Mahler's late works.

I'm really surprised nobody agrees with you. I hear an emotional similiarity between them--especially in the Sinopoli performance of which I said some months ago in the Elgar Second thread that "he Mahlerizes Elgar."

PPS Please, will someone agree with me that Sospiri, at least, sounds very, very like Mahler!

I agree with you about this too....and not just an emotional similarity but the actual sound of the music. It's so obvious in the first two minutes I'm shocked no one else hears it.

Sarge

[Luke]

I hear it too - in fact it's a comparison which has been made by others too. IIRC I posted a page from Sospiri on the mystery scores thread once, and part of my description of the piece included the adjective Mahlerian. As I posted earlier, I certainly think there is something akin to Mahler in Elgar - and I think it's probably that so often he's complex, uncertain, uneasy, pointing in lots of directions at once. It's not the surface of the music, clearly not (except in something like Sospiri) - pretty much every surface feature of the music has veyr little in common with Mahler. And it's not the tone either - Elgar doesn't share Mahler's distanced, pained, almost post-modern sense of juxtaposition and irony,  nor his Weltschmerz or his pantheism or Iwhatever. Nor is it in the programmes, or the imagery, or.....whatever. And that, i suppose, is why most people have very good reason to say that they can't hear anything in common between the two composers. But it's there,  I'm sure, deep down, perhaps in the way the fundamental human insecurity of both men is translated into the ellusiveness and capriciousness of their music. Maybe I'm talking rubbish...

[karlhenning]

I've not known you to talk rubbish before, Luke. Not sure you have any talent for it ; )

[drogulus]

    I hear Elgar as akin to both Mahler and Strauss, Mahler in the emotional mercuriality (though the emotions are different) and Strauss for his treatment of the orchestra. His sense of form comes from earlier composers, though. The 2nd Symphony echoes Brahms 3rd in some respects.

    Therefore everyone's right about everything except those who think everyone's wrong.

[DavidRoss]

Elgar doesn't share Mahler's distanced, pained, almost post-modern sense of juxtaposition and irony,  nor his Weltschmerz or his pantheism or whatever. Nor is it in the programmes, or the imagery, or.....whatever. And that, i suppose, is why most people have very good reason to say that they can't don't hear anything in common between the two composers as essentially similar.

Exactly.  I just listended to Barbirolli conducting Sospiri and had to struggle to hear why some might regard it as like Mahler.  To me the emotional worlds are very different, Elgar archingly romantic, bordering on sappy sentimentality, without Mahler's wry, self-conscious Weltschmerz.  And Elgar's orchestration is a bit heavy-handed--amateurish, in the unflattering sense--without the sophistication and subtlety of Mahler in his more chamber-music-like works.  Compare the overwrought harp in Sospiri with the sparing delicacy of the harp in Mahler's 5th Symphony Adagietto, for instance.

[Luke]

Exactly.  I just listended to Barbirolli conducting Sospiri and had to struggle to hear why some might regard it as like Mahler.  To me the emotional worlds are very different, Elgar archingly romantic, bordering on sappy sentimentality, without Mahler's wry, self-conscious Weltschmerz.  And Elgar's orchestration is a bit heavy-handed--amateurish, in the unflattering sense--without the sophistication and subtlety of Mahler in his more chamber-music-like works.  Compare the overwrought harp in Sospiri with the sparing delicacy of the harp in Mahler's 5th Symphony Adagietto, for instance.

I think there's some projecting going on here, a degree to which this is letting the stereotypes do the work for you. The Mahler Adagietto (as you suggest, that is the Mahler that Sospiri is most similar to, it's what people are referring to when they say the Elgar is like Mahler) wry and self-conscious? You know, Mahler isn't all eyebrow-raised, inverted-commas irony, he can also be 'archingly romantic, bordering on sappy sentimentality' too - the Adagietto, work of genius though it is, could easily be heard as such by one with an inclination to do so. And likewise, Elgar as a heavy-handed orchestrator? This doesn't bear up to scrutiny at all, not in his other work and not in Sospiri either - the harp part is actually a model of restraint and idiomatic writing, carefully limited to some straightforward arpeggiated chords, nothing more; check out the score, which is refined and delicate in many other ways too, some specifically Mahlerian (and in its use of harmonium or chamber organ amusingly close to the whole Second Viennese obsession with the instrument, though arriving there from a wholly different place). In fact, Elgar is one of the really great orchestral writers of his day, and like Mahler (and unlike Sibelius and even, dare it be said, Strauss*) he writes with an insider's perspective which gives his scores a special feel, a species of detailed shading that few possess - it's actually one of the areas in which the two composers are most similar. The tired stereotypes say one thing - Mahler the fastidious, intellectual Germanic orchestral wizard, Elgar the bluff, blundering, amateur retired colonel - but the scores themselves tell a very different story.

*note, I'm not saying or trying to imply that either of these two were poor orchestrators - I'm not stupid! Both Strauss and Sibelius are superb writers for orchestra, that's obvious....but it's equally obvious, I hope, that they have very different orchestral styles and aesthetics, and that is simply what I am claiming for Elgar and Mahler too - that they each have an orchestral aesthetic which is different from Strauss's, different from Sibelius's...but quite close to each other's in some though certainly not all respects, of which this detailed, highly shaded 'insider's perspective' type of writing is one.

[karlhenning]

I rather wondered whether Dave wrote with some ironical intent, himself.  The phrase overwrought harp especially. I can't think it possible, even of a (caricatured) Elgar.

[karlhenning]

Tangentially, as I've heard Shostakovich I've always thought the Shostakovich - Mahler 'bond' over-stated.  Not that I deny Shostakovich's admiration for the latter, but (even as I find myself warming to the Mahler symphonies) I've always heard two completely different musical personalities, and manners.

Still, there are undeniable "points of musical commonality" which function along an axis different to those in which I hear two completely distinct composers . . . .

[DavidRoss]

Well, Luke, although I yield to your far superior musical knowledge, and certainly grant that I overstated the case (rhetorical hyperbole is my middle name!) I respectfully disagree about the orchestration in Sospiri versus the adagietto.  I'm not saying that Sospiri is bad (I like it quite a bit), or that Elgar (never a military man, BTW) was unskilled, but that Elgar's arpeggios lack the delicate subtlety of Mahler's sparser harmonic fills.

As for what my prejudices bring to the works, there is doubtless some merit to your point, but I think hearing sentimental wistfulness vs Weltschmerz is an emotional response to the music itself, not an intellectual one after the fact (or before!).  Nevertheless, my biases based on historical knowledge might color my responses more than I know.  Still, were I to hear Sospiri for the first time today, with no prior knowledge of its provenance, I doubt that I would identify it as something by Mahler.  We'll never know, will we?