For many of us, the music of Edward Elgar is instantly recognisable,
characteristic of the confident, Edwardian age he lived in
and part of the national heritage,
just like the man.
But we are the victims of one of the wiliest image consultants of the last century -
Elgar himself.
He particularly enjoyed bamboozling posterity.
As a contemporary of Puccini and Mahler,
Elgar wrote music that even today challenges our preconceptions.
There we go.
And it doesn't feel, really, like Elgar's world.
It's visceral and comes right out of the guts of the music.
Although his home life seemed a model of decorum,
this man of many moods was always falling in love.
And unflinching new evidence from one of the women who knew him best
reveals what sort of man he was.
Gosh! Well, that is quite a letter
In his lifetime, he was known for being complex and difficult.
His friends realised he deliberately hid himself behind a mask of respectability.
But they have now gone
and as the years have passed, it's the mask that survived.
The real Elgar is only now being recovered.
'His eyes were restlessly moving all the time.'
Up and down, left and right. That restless energy.
And, for a moment, I had this uncanny feeling that, at last, I knew him and what he would have been like.
APPLAUSE
'Ages ago, when I was a kid, I remember an ad on the TV'
that was for tomato sauce, ketchup.
In Venezuela? In Venezuela.
Our headmaster would play records to us,
so in three or four-minute chunks, he played us The Dream Of Gerontius
on Saturday mornings, before our cornflakes.
He really clicked with me
when, I remember it distinctly,
a specific performance of the Enigma Variations in the Albert Hall.
I don't think I had a recording at home
but there was a recording at school
conducted by Toscanini.
I tremble to think how many times I've heard it.
It's always fresh.
Absolutely remember getting to the climax, the Glimpse of God,
and, of course, that is such an unusual moment in music
that it left an indelible mark.
The bottle like that and the sauce coming down, down, down
and when it was reaching the food, whatever it was - chips, probably -
Pomp And Circumstance March No.1 was sounding. SHE SINGS
That was the heroic thing, finally the ketchup got onto the chip.
MUSIC: "Pomp And Circumstance March No.1
It may have become a rousing, patriotic tune
but Land Of Hope And Glory began life without any words
simply as the middle section of an orchestral march.
Like much of Elgar's music,
if you do what he wanted and imagine you have never heard it before,
it's not quite what it seems.
It's not pretentious, it's not pompous,
it's just wonderfully open and sincere.
And that's what, um...
totally embraces me, and I'm not even British at all!
He had a knack of expressing a national mood in a very personal way.
When you hear Land Of Hope And Glory, you shouldn't think of it as a tub-thumping song
but of the fact that it's really quite a sad tune.
It has Elgar's trademark languishing sixth
falling to a fifth. That's to say, this note...
That's an interesting harmony Elgar uses a lot
because that...
is an inversion of a minor chord, so think sad, perhaps,
and then that...is a major chord.
So that's sad turning to happy.
The other thing that Elgar was very good at was this sort of thing,
same technique but the opposite way round...
PLAYS SIXTH THEN FIFTH
And there we have a sixth, a sort of an inversion of a major chord...
And again there's this drooping, sort of sad thing. PLAYS FIFTH
So Elgar uses a lot of these drooping sixths
This tune... POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE MARCH No.1
..actually has it and as soon as you've realised that is the key aspect of that tune
it can never be a triumphalist anthem again.
The Pomp And Circumstance Marches are brilliant marches
but they're just ringing the doorbell when it comes to learning about what's in the Elgar house.
In old age, Elgar cherished the memory of this cottage
a few miles outside Worcester, where he was born in 1857.
But his parents moved back into the city before he was two.
So this wasn't a real memory but an icon of his infancy
and of the humble origins which made him both proud and ashamed all his life.
He brought friends here.
Some of them spotted that he was building his own legend,
doing what he could to manipulate the verdict of posterity.
"I know nothing about music," he would say.
True, in one sense, because he never had a composition lesson in his life.
Yet he lived and breathed it as he worked in his father's music shop
and played the violin professionally, as well as the piano, organ, bassoon and trombone.
As a composer, between the success of his Enigma Variations in 1899
and the Cello Concerto 20 years later,
he was the dominant force in British music,
the greatest native composer since Purcell.
But with the rise of Stravinsky and Schoenberg
his music went into decline.
He was written off as a relic of empire, jingoistic and out of date.
Now free of imperial clutter,
the range and complexity of his music is being rediscovered.
It's the deeply personal voice
of a man wrestling with the contradictions of his own life.
The music seems, to me, to suggest the sort of fractured,
troublesome visionary who was up one minute, down the next,
found life very, very difficult and was extremely emotional.
The appearance he presented to the world was very different.
His passport lists his height as 5'10",
his eyes, hazel,
his nose large and aquiline,
the right equipment for the gentleman he aspired to be.
His knighthood, at the age of 47, sealed the deal.
But it led both man and music to be misunderstood.
That stiff upper lip had much to answer for.
I think it was probably Elgar's moustache!
There are two early pictures, one as a young man, without one,
and he looks sort of incomplete.
It covers almost the whole of the mouth.
Bit macho.
A retired colonel or general.
He just looked like a country gentleman.
Very often at the beginning and ends of pieces
we feel this strength of character
but buried in the core of the works, and perhaps more essential to their meaning,
is an entirely clean-shaven
vision, really, of a childlike,
even feminine musical character that's lurking beneath.
Because he looked so robustly English,
people think his music is too.
But in his own day, it was regarded as being more emotional than was proper for an Englishman.
I find his music as dramatic and lyric as Puccini
and as interestingly, harmonically, as Strauss.
But it's that veneer in his music which...
which I think people take as very English.
I think of him, because they were contemporaries, strangely,
as a sort of English Mahler.
There could be the outside world and then the deep inside world.
People are always talking about irony in Mahler
and they don't seem to have seen it in Elgar, but his music is full of irony
even when it's moving with terrific rhythmic vigour.
Pomp And Circumstance, we always think, don't we...
That sort of thing. Or we think...
And so on. Marvellous, perky rhythms and strutting things.
But, of course, it's also...
Nothing very Pomp And Circumstance about that, that's immensely menacing.
Those marches, the actual quick march sections,
are sometimes very uneasy.
The harmony is shifting all over the place
and I think people will often see the rumbustious Elgar
as being open and full of vigour and Edwardian swagger
and they've missed the fact that it's actually melancholic,
which is a deep irony which you see throughout his music.
And an ambivalence in his own character. Absolutely so, yes.
It's what makes him a great artist.
I think he knew very well
what a complicated being he was.
# Deep in my soul
# That tender secret dwells...
Deep In My Soul, a tender secret dwells.
It seems to suit Elgar's enigmatic character.
# Lonely and lost to light for evermore
# Save when to thine
# My heart responsive swells
# Then trembles
# Into silence
# Into silence as before
# As before...
He wanted to be accepted, he wanted to be praised and appreciated,
but inside, there was a trembling heart,
a nervous disposition.
# There, in its centre
# A sepulchral lamp
# Burns the slow flame
# Eternal but unseen... #
So much of his music is quite intensely private.
He's revealing things that he does not reveal in any other way.
# Which not the darkness of Despair can damp
# Though vain its ray
# As it had never been
# Through vain its ray as it had never been...
The ambiguity of his musical persona
is at the heart of what makes his music valuable and interesting.
And this ambiguity is actually essential, I think, to understanding both the music and the man.
Elgar was brought up in the shadow of Worcester Cathedral.
But, for years, he was an outsider,
more often seen in the new Roman Catholic church of St George's
where his father was organist and his mother a devout worshipper.
As the son of a shopkeeper, and a Catholic too,
he never belonged to the musical establishment.
He discovered what he was up against when he wrote his masterly setting
of Cardinal Newman's poem the Dream of Gerontius,
which is about a dying man and the journey of his soul after death.
"It stank of incense," someone said,
and Worcester Cathedral censored any mention of the Virgin Mary in performance,
a ban that lasted almost half a century.
They were very dubious, because this was a Catholic work
and all the mariolatory, all the references to the Virgin,
are just replaced with asterisks and dots.
Apparently, the singers were just left to get over it and mumble away as best they could.
Was that with Elgar's agreement?
It was the only way to do it.
Yes, certainly with Elgar's agreement, he conducted it.
Gerontius scarred Elgar. "My heart," he said after the first performance,
"is now shut against every religious feeling and every soft, gentle impulse forever."
It had been a disaster. The choir was under-rehearsed and out of tune.
"I really wish I were dead over and over again," he said,
"but I dare not, for the sake of my relatives, do the job myself."
Never again did he write what could be seen as a Catholic work.
Instead, he turned to the Anglican Church for advice
and used the Bible for his text.
No-one could object to that.
And no-one did.
It brought him much more into the fold.
As he conjured up the sunrise seen from the Temple roof in Jerusalem,
he worked Jewish music into his score as well.
He wrote a part for the shofar, the ceremonial ram's horn of the synagogue,
a startling choice even a century later.
As a conductor, standing in front of the Dawn scene of the Apostles is one of the great things
because the orchestration is completely bizarre.
The sound of this high tam-tam in the background, shimmering away,
is completely extraordinary, and the shofar on one side, and this huge orchestral crescendo.
It's visceral and comes right out of the guts of the music.
Elgar had come a long way since succeeding his father as organist at St George's church.
At that stage, he had few compositions to his name
and fewer prospects.
But a determined woman in her late 30s had turned up on his doorstep,
the daughter of a major general.
Her name was Alice Roberts and she wanted piano lessons.
This prompted Elgar to write a new song.
# Is she not passing fair
# She who my love...
There's a marvellous chord progression which I really love
where Elgar is asking himself, "is she not passing fair? Passing fair..."
And you can just see the furrowing of the brow as he has these chords.
You have that She...is...passing...fair
Good. And then it goes...
Pa...ssing...fair?
# Then she is passing fair
# Pa-assing fair
And that's one of the best expressed question marks in music that I know.
# I love so well.
And I think he wasn't sure.
It took Elgar two years to pop the question.
Frustrating for a woman nudging 40.
But marriage was to bring him companionship, money - though never quite enough -
and a daughter, Carice.
And Alice had no doubts.
She came from a completely different - more county, we would say - background.
Her family were shocked that she was marrying so far beneath her.
Perhaps that gave her the energy to want to make a success of him.
Alice Roberts was a published novelist and poet
but after her marriage she gave up her own creative ambitions
and devoted herself to her husband.
For some reason, she believed when she met Mr Elgar
that this man was a genius.
They spoke in a private baby language.
He called her Chicky, she called him Eddoo.
The parlou rmaid and their grand London house some years later, Louise Chapman,
fleshed out the Elgar menage.
Quite a big assortment for breakfast - cold ham, and he used to have kedgeree a lot.
His newspaper used to be pressed,
I used to have to press it, and also his shoelaces.
After breakfast he'd go to his music room
and I could see him sitting at the piano and composing.
Not very smoothly. Very hesitant in a lot of the passages.
And Lady Elgar used to do all his scoring for him.
"Try so-and-so," she'd say. "We'll go through so-and-so."
"Eddoo! Eddoo!" she used to go.
He was essentially a lazy man
but Elgar was easily diverted from work.
Alice, his wife, she jolly well kept him to the grindstone,
said, "Go and compose. That's your purpose in life."
"My word, doesn't she keep him at it?" said one Malvern friend.
Another, the young headmistress Rosa Burley, went on holiday with the Elgars to Germany.
In her memoirs, she spoke of the Elgars' facade of married bliss.
Alice, she noted, was not so much a wife as a doting mother of a gifted son.
While Elgar enjoyed embarrassing Alice with his coarse remarks.
He always had a man-size chip on his shoulder about being lower middle-class
and wanting to mix with the slightly smarter set.
I think he wasn't an entirely loveable character.
He could be very prickly and rude. Actually rude.
Terribly insecure. Reading his correspondence, it's unbelievable.
Very gauche and offensive.
I don't think he was a very sweet man,
he was probably very angry.
Elgar's mercurial portrait of Shakespeare's Falstaff
encompasses his boorishness and his wit,
unstable in both tonality and mood.
Clearly Elgar saw himself in Falstaff.
The opening uses almost all 12 notes of the chromatic scale
and it's hard to say what key it's in.
And he produces different themes,
which show different aspects of Falstaff -
his braggadocio, his thrustingness,
his martial prowess.
A man who got on with ladies, but also a boastful man.
In connection with Falstaff's boasting,
Elgar writes the most extraordinarily discordant piece...
HE HUMS DISCORDANTLY
..all over the orchestra.
So that with these contrapuntal binding togethers
of these different themes which are aspects of Falstaff's personality,
Elgar is actually binding together different aspects of his own personality.
The more disguises he could wear in his music, the better his music got.
The piece that launched his career was supposed to be about his friends pictured within,
but it was just as much about himself.
The Enigma Variations is perfect.
I don't think there's a note wrong with it.
It shows you everything about him - the impatience,
the romanticism, the exuberance.
It's all there in tiny little snapshots, wonderfully wrought.
From the first note to the last, there is nothing you can say.
You are in his power.
The best-known Variation is often played today as a solemn memorial -
not at all what was in Elgar's heart.
He wrote it for one of his closest male friends, his publisher August Jaeger...
his Nimrod.
He did have this long sequence of nicknames for him,
of which the most famous is Nimrod, the biblical hunter.
Jaeger is German for "hunter"
and that's the name given to the most passionate of all of the Variations,
far surpassing his wife's own Variation in intimacy and ecstasy of expression.
NIMROD PLAYS
I find it one of the most sublime and beautiful gifts
that someone, a composer, can give to a friend.
"I'm giving myself to you, whoever you are."
And I'm sorry but I feel so happy when I listen to it, I can't cry.
It is very noble, it's very generous,
it's very warm, it's very grand, it's a great arc of melody.
Without being...
Without too much pageantry.
Here I am. I'm going to say that for the third time
and look to find this climax. It's very difficult.
I cry but I don't cry for sadness, I cry for emotion.
NIMROD SWELLS Here - look at that.
The Enigma Variations propelled Elgar into national orbit.
Within five years, the tradesman's son became a knight of the realm
and his wife became Lady Elgar - vindication at last.
She moaned, she complained.
On the day that a tea party was held to celebrate the award of his knighthood,
Carice was reported to say to the guests,
"I'm so glad that Daddy's going to be knighted. It puts Mother back where she should be."
I don't think that even a very precocious child would understand the social niceties that lie behind that
without having been instructed by her mother, maybe over many years,
that her mother is better than the station her father has landed her in.
These things mattered to her father too.
On a government form at the start of the First World War,
the knight was asked for his occupation.
Composing didn't seem to count.
He was appointed one of the earliest members of the Order of Merit by the King
and woe betide anyone who forgot it.
He was invited to the Royal Academy banquet,
which is one of the great social occasions of the year,
and he was very upset because he didn't like the table he'd been put at
and on the invitation card, they missed the OM off
so he left it very early and he wrote to a friend of his
and said, "I went to the Athenaeum Club and had a herring."
He was now marking many of his scores with the instruction "nobilmente",
his own musical term for the nobility he craved.
It was part of his bamboozling technique.
If a composer could write such undeniably noble music as the opening theme of his First Symphony,
then surely he himself must be noble too.
Elgar was a man who thought in terms of tunes
and to make a symphony out of a tune is a devil of a difficult thing to do.
And so you've got this...
PLAYS GENTLY
..and so on. "This great, beautiful tune," I think his wife called it.
It's the most successful English symphony ever written,
with 100 performances around the world in its first year alone.
Other musicians - the younger composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, for instance - knew it broke the rules.
As a violinist himself, Elgar would have been aware that his chosen key - A flat -
was awkward for the strings and it's still the only A flat symphony in the repertoire.
But he wanted a particular sound which he achieved
through his choice of key and his strange orchestration.
The melody is given to fairly heavy woodwind and viola.
The violas, cellos and double basses play the bass detache.
Two mysterious A flats.
ORCHESTRA CONTINUES
Just in two parts - the tune and the bass.
The inner harmony is with two soft, muted horns.
And Elgar puts in that muted horn counterpoint
so that just for a moment, it's not in two parts.
But he just wanted a thread of sound.
When I think of a student who'd brought that scoring to any competition tutor,
he would have put his pencil through it and said, "This will not be heard."
To my mind, when I look at it still, it looks all wrong,
but it sounds all right.
Here indeed we have a mystery and a miracle.
MUSIC SWELLS
Fantastic drum crescendo there!
There can be in his orchestral music a bit of bombast,
which people feel is just Edwardian and part of a bygone era.
I don't think it should come across as bombast,
it should come across as very thrillingly, muscular passion.
Everybody's image of him as being associated with the Edwardian period,
supported by these photographs that he loved having taken.
He was now a celebrity,
with a keen eye for the opportunities that offered.
He was always thinking of promoting his image.
We would say nowadays in that respect, he's very much of our time.
Many of them seem exquisitely planned in the tiniest detail.
If he's caught, as it were, composing Gerontius,
the composition of the picture is excellent.
He fills the frame and he's leaning to display the Roman nose and the imperial moustache
and effortlessly his pen is gliding across the page as he inscribes the score.
Indeed, he claimed this picture caught him just as he'd written the final notes.
I think Elgar was very self-aware.
There are few people who have had themselves photographed on their death bed,
pretending to be dead already.
That is the act of somebody who knows exactly what his appearance is in life.
This is one photograph never published in his lifetime.
It was taken while he was away from home,
a telling glimpse of the unvarnished Elgar -
a romantic artist with a touch of the Bohemian.
There were certain things that were a bit flash about him.
I think there was a side to him that adored beautiful women.
I don't think he was a promiscuous man.
He as very attractive to women and he knew it.
That he managed to have all these heroines and still be married to one woman
is, er, sort of a tribute to his finesse, really, isn't it?
One of Elgar's heroines outshone the rest.
Their relationship, which began in 1910,
remained a tender secret for decades.
It was only uncovered by one of his biographers
after a tip-off from a friend.
He said, "Remember one name - Alice Stuart-Wortley."
I went down to the birthplace and I said to the curator,
"Have you any letters to and from Alice Stuart-Wortley?"
And he gave me a very old fashioned look and he said, "Well, no-one's asked me that before."
And he wandered off and came back with this pile.
I sat at this table, started reading these letters and it's a treasure trove.
I thought, "Here's the real Elgar."
Alice Stuart-Wortley was the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais.
She and her husband Charles, a Conservative MP,
were both musical, had been married for more than 20 years and had a daughter, just like the Elgars.
But whereas Alice Elgar was nine years older than Edward,
Alice Stuart-Wortley was five years younger.
The other Alice was everything she wasn't, in a way.
Perhaps a bit more feminine, a bit more gentle,
a bit more sensual, perhaps.
But it was rather awkward, not to say dangerous, that she had the same name as his wife.
So Elgar gave her the private nickname Windflower
after the delicate wild anemones in his garden,
which he watched being buffeted by the March wind.
They reminded him of her, particularly of the time she came to tea,
and inspired him to persevere with his Violin Concerto
when he was on the point of abandoning it.
It was February 7th 1910, which they kept as an anniversary for the rest of their lives,
because that same evening, Elgar thought up the first of several new themes
which opened the floodgates for the rest of the work.
ORCHESTRA PLAYS
'There is no set way in which you can play the opening of the Violin Concerto.'
The music is so flexible,
so wayward, so stormy...
It's very difficult to cope with it.
The tempo's not settled and tunes are taken up and abandoned and swept away
and we're really longing for the violin to calm things down and say, "Just wait a minute now."
It's a wonderful effect.
From now on, Elgar was in almost daily contact with his Windflower by letter and telephone.
He gave his tender feminine themes the botanical name "anemone nemorosa"
and every spring for the rest of his life, he sent her windflowers.
If he knew his letters would be seen by others, he addressed her as Alice.
But when they were for her eyes only, he always called her Windflower or simply W.
And she seems to have replied in the same way,
though hardly any of her letters have survived.
I suspect Elgar must have destroyed them when he got them,
but she must have reacted well or he wouldn't have gone on writing as he did to her.
Did he keep many letters that he'd received from other people? Oh yes.
So the fact that hers don't survive... Is interesting.
I think it was a very deep relationship. Whether it was physical or not, I don't know.
This one was written on October 18th, 1910,
and that would be about a month before the first performance of the Violin Concerto
and he starts it with a quotation from the work,
actually the Windflower theme...
HE HUMS
This is how he wanted it to be done.
And this letter comes from 1926 and is rather precious,
that's the dried up remains of some windflowers.
And he says, "The little flowers are now appearing so here are two or three for you."
But there they are - 1926, the year I was born - still there.
And this letter was written in the first few months of the First World War, this is 1914.
He says to her in it, "I can not buy you pearls of untold worth.
"Although I wish them and many other lovely things for you,
"no, I can not buy anything for you so I send you a little scrap of my old, old, lonely life
"in which no-one shared," underlined.
"I had my dreams and I suppose ambitions
"so I send you one of the little schoolbooks which lightened my loneliness,"
and what he went on to say after that, we shall never know
because Windflower's daughter cut the rest of the letter away.
It was obviously regarded as too intimate to survive.
At their home in Chelsea, the Stuart-Wortleys sometimes had the Elgars round for dinner.
But Elgar would often drop in by himself.
He and Windflower carved out plenty of time together.
In spring 1910, she went on holiday with her family to Tintagel in Cornwall.
Elgar was soon in hot pursuit. He drove 250 miles and spent two days with her
after her husband had conveniently returned home.
Was that friendship, do you think, entirely innocent?
What do you mean by innocent?
In May, he spent 10 days at the Hut, a friend's house near Maidenhead,
where he worked on the Concerto.
His wife and daughter came to visit
and as they left, Windflower arrived for a three-day stay.
It was a regular pattern.
Elgar needed a woman to inspire him.
And Alice, although she inspired him a bit at first,
I think quickly ceased to be that inspiration
and became instead the person who made everything work,
she was his sort of CEO.
I remember Vaughan Williams telling me he sat next to her at Worcester Cathedral,
listening to the Second Symphony.
She kept nudging him and saying, "Isn't it wonderful?"
He said of course it was but it wasn't her business to keep saying so.
The Second Symphony was inspired once again by the other Alice.
Elgar confided in Windflower that he'd "worked at fever heat"
and "the thing is tremendous in energy".
ORCHESTRA PLAYS
Absolutely blown away by this fantastic activity
and continual invention.
The extraordinary energy, the lust for life
those bracing walks on the Malvern Hills.
There is not one bar that isn't of the highest achievement.
It's the work of a naturally great symphonist.
All of a sudden, it subsides, just collapses.
That's the only emotional way I can describe it.
Then the single note repeated quietly over and over.
NOTE REPEATS
It's as if a door or a window
had opened onto a totally different landscape.
Within about ten seconds he's moved right inside himself.
ORCHESTRA PLAYS
How quickly he wrote to her after he finished the First Movement of the symphony.
The next day he said, "I have written last year into the First Movement." What does that mean?
He told Windflower, "I have written the most extraordinary passage
"I have ever heard. A sort of malign influence
"wandering through the summer night in the garden."
The elaborate textures are very, very sensual
and very opulent and yet dark.
There's something unsettling,
whether it's the low underpinning of the rhythms in the drum
or whether it's this very passionate melody in the cellos
reaching up to the highest notes.
That even might refer to a moment when they nearly
took their relationship on to another plane, who knows?
I imagine that they both realised...
how disastrous that could be for four people...
at least four peoples' lives.
Elgar himself described this episode as a nocturnal love scene
and significantly he wrote Tintagel on the score.
His visit to Windflower in Cornwall a year before
was still in his mind.
The passion of this work captivated Latin-American musicians
when it was recently given its first performance in Venezuela
by the Simon Bolivar Orchestra.
APPLAUSE
I proposed, "Why don't we do Elgar's Second Symphony?"
And they said yes. INTERVIEWER: Did they know what it was? No.
When I arrived to the very first rehearsal,
I had some musicians coming to me saying,
"Can we do some Tchaikovsky 1812? Something easy, there are too many notes."
Then at the break, they all said, "Oh, my God, what a great piece of music it is! Wow!"
For Elgar, writing music was often agony.
He completed a new choral work in the miserable July of 1912.
It should have been a moment of triumph,
but he was in turmoil as he wandered out alone onto Hampstead Heath.
"It was bitterly cold," he told Windflower.
"I wrapped myself in a thick overcoat
"tears streaming out of my cold eyes and loathed the world."
The work is about the creative process of music.
He represents this by quoting other pieces of his -
Gerontius, the violin concerto and Enigma in particular,
with Windflower an unspoken presence.
As he shivered in self-pity on the heath,
he was longing to tear the whole piece up.
"All wasted," he said.
"This Elgar terrain is not the Malvern Hills
"but Wuthering Heights."
There was a side to Elgar that was restless.
And that, I'm not sure has ever been captured in music
as brilliantly as the opening of this work.
It is, at bottom, a piece about isolation.
About loneliness.
You go right into the vision of his neuroses.
HE LISTENS TO MUSIC
I must do this piece...soon.
You can't help but be taken
by the beauty of the music
but it's to listen to this extraordinary, emotional underbelly
because in my experience it's always there.
No mistake.
Oh...
To me, this introduction is like time travelling.
Going back in time and the creative process
into a world of dreams.
The Music Makers is based on a poem by Arthur O'Shaughnessy,
but Elgar told Windflower, "I think of you in the music.
"It's an outpouring of the soul."
When the chorus sing about the need to sing and dream apart,
there are just four bars where very, very quietly
underneath the chorus the first violins recall
one of the most passionate moments
in the First Movement of the violin concerto.
Here, they are repeated very quietly.
As if it was from the back of his memory.
MUSIC PLAYS
He stays in the minor key here.
"Oh, man it must ever be
"That we dwell in our dreaming and singing
"A little apart from ye..."
SINGING
On the word singing, he changes
to the major chord.
Then he quotes the violin concerto, very quietly.
SINGING CONTINUES
He can't forget the woman who inspired it all.
At the time, he told no-one else about the source of his inspiration.
But Elgar and Windflower were seen together.
This newspaper picture of them going to a concert
was captioned, Sir Edward and Lady Elgar,
which must have been galling for his wife.
I think she knew this woman was good for Elgar.
And she was quite happy to let it go on.
I think she'd have been happy to let it go on for whatever length it went, really.
She knew that Elgar came home to her.
The one-time provincial composer from the Malvern hills
was now a national figure at the height of his powers.
Yet, only four or five years later,
he was virtually a spent force.
After the tumult of the First World War,
he seemed to lose his bearings
with the sense that his musical age had passed.
The piece he'd written shortly before the war
now seems strangely prophetic.
Perhaps, more and more, I think of this extraordinary, almost self-portrait, I would say,
Sospiri, which is one of the most haunting miniatures in all music.
The terrible longing that's expressed in that piece
is something to behold.
Sospiri, meaning sighing,
was first heard in August 1914, 10 days into the war.
The British were in the grip of patriotic fervour.
It found no echo in Elgar.
Can you imagine anything less appropriate at that time?
I mean, it would be appropriate four years later.
The melody laden with anguish.
With more than sighs.
For once, there is no ambiguity,
no mask, no masculine swagger.
His deepest feelings are exposed.
There's this very English thing of withholding passion,
but in this one piece, it's there, it's just...
You know, it's naked in front of you.
It's extraordinary, reaching out and not quite...getting there.
Elgar almost disowned the piece later on.
It's the shame of self-revelation, isn't it?
At one stage, he called it "Soupir D'amour," Sigh Of Love,
though we have no clue whom he had in mind.
This time he told Windflower nothing about it.
Elgar walks a rhythmic tightrope and the accompaniment does something
and then the violin does something else and they never coincide.
Finally, before the end, they go ah!
And eventually it comes together.
As a creative artist, Elgar knew all about separation and isolation.
His own confused emotional life emphasised this loneliness.
On one draft of this piece, he wrote the word "absence."
At the end you're just left with this section of the first violin,
one character against the rest of the world.
Elgar himself, as a Roman-Catholic son of a shopkeeper,
looked down on by his wife's family,
never lost the feeling of being an outsider.
When writing his oratorio, The Apostles,
it was the human dilemma that motivated him.
He'd been told as a boy that the apostles were poor young men,
"Perhaps no cleverer than some of you here."
The character he identified with most was the ultimate outsider,
Judas Iscariot,
who drew from him the most dramatic vocal music he ever wrote.
Judas is torn. After betraying Christ, and ingratiating himself
with the Jewish establishment, he is overcome with remorse
and the priests in the chorus mock his weakness.
# A voice of trembling, of fear
# I have sinned
# In that I have betray-ed innocent blood... #
CHORUS SINGS
# I have sinned I have betray-ed
# The... #
CHORUS SINGS
WOMAN SINGS
CHORUS SINGS
It's terrifying, it's like religious fundamentalism, isn't it?
CHORUS SINGS
Judas, with huge faults, nevertheless human, against the institution.
# Shall I go from thy spirit... #
The gospels give Judas no more than a few lines
and Elgar wanted many more.
So he scoured both Old and New Testaments
to find the extra words he needed
to build the character of Judas as the fractured, troublesome visionary
he knew so well, wrestling with despair.
We can see the care which Elgar took
from the biblical references noted in the margin.
The whole Judas scene is an intricate character study.
In the scene where he's at his depths of his soul
and as low as any human being can ever be,
the colouring Elgar gives to the orchestration,
these hints of sunlight in it, the hint of optimism in it,
are quite extraordinary.
# Life is short and tedious... #
"And life is short and tedious". So dark.
# Neither was there any man known
# To have return-ed from the grave
# Though we are born of adventure
# And we shall be here after as though we have never been... #
It's just air and sunlight suddenly.
It's a kind of muted happiness which is absolutely authentic.
# A little spark... #
The man has decided to commit suicide and now, emotionally,
there's a release.
# ..is being extinguish-ed
# My body shall be turn-ed into ashes... #
How ephemeral we are. Maybe that's what lightened his soul.
It doesn't matter, actually, we're nothing.
HE SINGS
Elgar's sympathetic understanding of Judas's state of mind
and impending suicide was rooted in his own experience.
He had, after all, talked about taking his own life
after the early failure of The Dream Of Gerontius.
I played Elgar to the patients at Broadmoor.
And the effect that this music had on them was amazing.
They came to life under the influence of hearing the prelude to Gerontius.
Elgar, of course, is one of those very few composers,
with Brahms being another one,
who knew the inside of an asylum, without being an inmate.
Elgar was employed in the Worcestershire County Asylum at Powick,
as a musician there.
I thought, that day in Broadmoor, that the insight that Elgar got
into the human psyche through seeing the human psyche broken down,
must have been of terrific value to him, once he'd discovered
that he could then take on other persona in his music.
I think if he hadn't been a composer,
he might have been heading for
some kind of breakdown.
I really feel amongst other things,
composing was something of a therapy for him, emotional therapy.
We know that he went through periods of deep depression
and spoke of being suicidal,
and then there would be an absolute explosion of creativity.
There was one occasion at dinner when, under her breath,
Alice Elgar interrupted a fellow guest,
who'd raised the issue of suicide.
So much for Lady Elgar being stiff upper-lip and correct.
She actually said to someone she'd only just met,
"The reason I stopped you saying that was Sir Edward talks about suicide so often
"and I don't want him to be dwelling on it now."
She actually gave that secret away.
Elgar stays with Judas as he moves inexorably towards suicide.
The distant cries of, "Crucify him!"
from the chorus are his only reference to the trial of Jesus
going on at the same time.
Judas is tormented by the realisation that his betrayal
will result in Christ's execution.
THEY SING
All the internal music of that marvellous Judas scene,
it must have come from Elgar's darkest self, you know?
# The Lord knoweth the thoughts of man
# My hope is like dust
# That is blown away with the wind
# It is not possible to escape
# Thine hand
# A sudden feel... #
People shouting, "Crucify him!" some way away.
Almost in Judas's head you can hear the, "Crucify him!".
# He covered himself together
# And the innocent below... #
CHORUS DROWNS OUT HIS SINGING
# Mine end is come...
# The measure of my covetous life. #
That fantastic high viola line.
Intensely poignant.
HE SINGS
You can hear that string slithering down.
# And in it...
# Of that darkness
# He shall afterward receive me
# Yet am I unto myself
# More grievous, more grievous
# Than...the darkness. #
That bitterness in the horns.
CHORUS SINGS
The institution has the last word.
After this extraordinary 15 minutes of Juda's inner workings,
as a human being,
Elgar gives about six bars to the crucifixion,
where he writes the actual text of Jesus's last words,
in the string parts.
"Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?"
"My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?"
But no-one sings it.
CRESCENDO
Shortly after Elgar scored the Judas scene,
his wife was also writing about betrayal.
It was in a poem which she left among her private papers,
for Elgar to find after her death many years later.
It made sobering reading.
They love doth fade Too like a winter sun
I watch it grow as cold
The summer joy is done although its radiant hours seem scarce begun
Dark night must it enfold
Deceive anew...
She originally wrote "be happy" but changed it.
..Deceive anew and smile as if no part where thine in my lost life
Leave me my wasted heart
And buy new joys from out the world's gay mart
Leave me the bitter strife.
Alice's death in 1920 after 30 years of marriage
deprived Elgar of his driving force and his most devoted supporter.
Their sharp-eyed friend, Rosa Burley, never saw Alice's poem.
Yet she concluded that Elgar was distraught not by grief,
but by an over-mastering sense of guilt at his disloyalty to his wife.
He lapsed into virtual silence.
# What is that? #
A pray to the darkness always lurking deep in his soul.
# Nothing
# The leaves must fall, and falling, rustle
# That is all They are dead as they fall
# That is all
# They are dead
# At the foot of the tree
# All that can be is said... #
This strange texture, with everything in octaves.
Little flashes of harmony. It's scarcely melodic at all.
# Nothing... #
Haunting.
# What is that? Nothing
# A wild thing hurt what mourns in the night
# And it cries in its dread
# Till it lies dead
at the foot of the tree
# All that can be is said... #
The poem is about nothingness.
It's trying to express the idea of nothing.
# Nothing... #
I'm beginning to think I'm the victim of a huge practical joke.
I can't believe this music's by Elgar.
# Ah...ah... #
How bleak.
If you told me it was written 30 years later,
I wouldn't be surprised.
# A marching slow of unseen feet
# That is all
# But a bier, spread with a pall
# And a bier is now at the foot of the tree
# All that could be is said
# Is it?
# What?
# Nothing. #
After Alice's death, Elgar hoped Windflower
would use her political contacts to wangle him a peerage.
He had to make do with an hereditary baronetcy
and a Knighthood of the Victorian Order,
"Which awful thing I must accept", he told her.
Their relationship had now settled into a fond friendship,
but nothing more.
One would have thought even that he might have married her
after 1926 when her husband died.
But perhaps she didn't want...! She'd had enough of Elgar
pouring out his woes in letters
without having it at the breakfast table!
But there was one more woman in Elgar's life.
One more muse to rekindle his creative fire.
She caught his ever-roving eye while he was conducting
The Dream Of Gerontius in Croydon in 1931.
He spotted this lady in the back desks of the violins,
Vera Hockman - I think she was probably about 30 at the time -
and absolutely fell for her.
His skittish behaviour in female company was never better documented
than in the case of Vera Hockman.
He was a goner and started behaving like a young man,
writing flirtatious and deeply felt notes to her
and seeing her often.
At only their second meeting, he said straight out
that he hadn't been able to take his eyes off her.
"You're not to leave me for one moment", he said,
"or I shall scream."
Some people just thought, oh, it was a little flutter
at the end of his life.
But I don't think she quite saw it like that.
Vera kept mementos of her friendship with Elgar.
At the time, she was married with two young children,
but she and her husband were separated.
This is a photograph of my mother with a friend,
and in the background you can see George Bernard Shaw,
and Elgar is sitting in a chair with his hat on
just behind my mother.
And this one of Elgar in a boat.
Ha! He looks a bit, sort of, dishevelled,
with his foot up in the air!
The details of their friendship come from Vera's own memoir.
"The Story Of November 7th, 1931", she called it.
The day they met.
The kept the seventh of every month
as what Elgar called their mensiversary.
At 74, he said he was too old
to wait for anniversaries to come round.
He took her to lunch somewhere and ordered two Manhattan cocktails
and she just couldn't believe it. She didn't think he was
the sort of person who would order newfangled American-type drinks.
For years, the woman behind him in this short film clip
was unidentified.
But now it's clear it's Vera Hockman,
followed by Elgar's daughter, Clarice.
She was very warm, very cultured. She loved music, art,
literature - she just loved poetry.
She never walked, she always ran.
Vera even kept this telephone message,
in which he used a romantic but discreet codename, Hyperion,
after Longfellow's novel.
Indeed, he gave her his treasured copy of the book,
which had belonged to his mother.
"I want you to have it," he said,
"because now you are my mother, my child, my lover and my friend."
They met at her aunt's house in St John's Wood in northern London.
Elgar had to pace up and down and round the block
until her aunt had gone out.
"What music I would write," he said, "If I could have you near to me always."
As the sun rose in his Indian summer, Elgar embarked on his third symphony.
He never finished it, but did leave numerous sketches,
which Anthony Payne recently elaborated into a complete work.
Elgar's restless spirit had not faded with the passing years.
MUSIC: Elgar/Payne Symphony No 3
This, of course, is all Elgar but the first 10, 12 bars are fully scored.
MUSIC CONTINUES
It's about this point that I had to start to work because the instruments drop out from the score.
Some of it's kept going. He was obviously writing one of the parts
and not filling the other ones in yet, as he went along.
Then we get to this lovely second tune, which he called Vera's Own Tune on one sketch.
MUSIC: Elgar/Payne Symphony No 3
At this point, there's practically no instruments in the formal score, just the top line.
And you realise that that's the point where he stopped writing and went off to the nursing home,
where he learnt the awful truth about his cancer.
It so speaks to you. I remember at the first run-through with the BBC Symphony Orchestra
when they got to this moment, the string section all began to smile. It was wonderful.
I think we owe the energy with which he attacked the task to Vera Hockman
and if he'd only lived another six months, he would have completed it.
In the nursing home, he supervised an orchestral recording by telephone
and only a week before he died, he listened to a test pressing of his last completed piece,
a portrait of his Cairn terrier, Mina.
"The middle section is too fast," he said.
And dogs were all important to him,
as Vera well knew.
The first time she went to see him, he said, "You can't sit there, that's Marco's chair."
And then she tried to sit somewhere else and he said, "You can't sit there, that's Mina's chair."
And she stood in the middle of the room, not knowing what to do.
I would've loved to have met him.
I always wonder, "Would I have liked him or not?"
He would probably have been a bit too clubbish for me.
But I would've loved to meet him.
Clarice said to me, he'd have liked me, cos I'd have petted the dogs.
She said if you'd seen Marco, the spaniel, made a fuss of it, then you'd be in for life.
What, in a nutshell, does Elgar mean to you?
Oh.
A lifetime obsession.
And many hours of wonderful pleasure, listening to the music
and puzzling over its creator
and imagining him laughing at us all as we puzzle over it.
What do you expect to find in Elgar?
Turbulence, idealism, conflicts of all kind.
Naivete, simplicity. Everything.
Everything. Every human quality you can think of is there in his music.
People who have had a great bereavement get a comfort from Elgar
you mightn't get from Mozart or Beethoven, or any of those composers
and I think it's because there's sense in it of a kind of hurt that he's sharing with them.
And Elgar is one of those who gave us so much
and so substantial and so real
and if you can't hear it, you are deaf and you have no feeling.
Shortly before Elgar died, in February 1934,
his favourite sister Polly wrote to warn Windflower.
"I know you loved him," she said.
In her turn, Alice Stuart-Wortley sent his daughter a letter of sympathy.
"He is our Shakespeare of music," she said,
"Born and died on the soil in the heart and soul of England,
"with the love of his country, its music and its meaning in his own heart and soul."
Whether there was any contact with Vera Hockman during his last illness, we don't know.
But three months after his death, on what would have been his 77th birthday, she wrote him a letter,
which has remained hidden until now.
It offers Elgar experts fresh incite into her feelings for the man behind the mask.
"My wondrous being," she addresses it.
"Written at Robin Hill on June 2nd, 1934. Your birthday."
"It would seem strange and unnatural that I, who have loved you best of all,
"have been silent for all these tragic months.
"The thoughts and memories I treasure of you
"are far too intimate, too inexpressibly dear to me
"to be told to any but our nearest and dearest.
I'd not seen it before and it's very, very poignant,
because she seems to have absolutely gauged his character.
She recalled Elgar's visit a year before,
the last time her Hyperion ever-glorious
had stayed the night at Robin Hill, her home in Croydon.
If someone asked her what made him so unique, she said, she would reply that,
"He was the only person I have known who was absolutely natural in all his actions,"
"spontaneous and grand and glorious, in his..."
"..Supreme egoism.
"You were the most self-engrossed, self-enamoured person imaginable
"and yet you loved yourself in such a loveable way that instead of turning others away from you,
"your love of yourself was contagious.
"I was never afraid or over-awed of your greatness," she went on,
"Because I was destined to know, understand and love you.
"The 7th of November, foreshadowed through the numerous leaping 7ths in your melodies,
"was that moment when two souls, after long ages of drifting towards each other,
"meet and merge and melt into a vaster being, never again to be separated."
Gosh! Well, that is quite a letter.
We all have to rewrite our biographies now.
Extraordinary letter.
What do you feel in reading that?
That the relationship was obviously very profound,
very important for both of them, very meaningful,
despite the enormous number of years that separated them.
And that it implies to me that he felt able to be wholly himself with her.
That any pretence had fallen away.
Well, they must have been very close indeed, I should think.
We don't know whether these were physical or not, do we?
It's a very beautiful letter, because it's very surprising.
How nice that they met.
# Till a tempest came to wake Till a tempest came to wake
# All its roaring, seething billows That upon earth's ramparts break
# All its roaring, seething billows
# That upon earth's ramparts break
# Quiet
# Was my heart
# Within me
# Till your image
# Till your image suddenly
# Rising there
# Awoke a tumult Wilder than the storm
# Awoke a tumult Wilder than the storm at sea
# Wilder than the Wilder than the storm at sea
# Awoke a tumult
# Wilder
# Wilder than the storm Wilder than the storm at sea
# Wilder than the storm at sea. #