Violin Concerto in B minor, Opus 61
Edward Elgar was born at Broadheath, Worcestershire, England, on June 2, 1857, was knighted by King Edward VII on July 4, 1904, and died in Worcester on February 23, 1934. Though sketches for the Violin Concerto date back to October 1905, he composed the work mainly between April 1909 and August 5, 1910. The score is dedicated to Fritz Kreisler, who played the first public performance, with Elgar conducting, on November 10, 1910, at a concert of the London Philharmonic Society in Queen’s Hall, London. Before that there were two private hearings, with Elgar at the piano, during the 1910 Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester, the first on September 4 with W.H. Reed, who had assisted Elgar with details of the violin part, the other on September 8 with Kreisler, whose request had prompted Elgar to write the concerto.
In addition to the solo violin, the score of Elgar’s Violin Concerto calls for 2 flutes, 2oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons and optional contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and optional tuba, timpani, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
The violin was Elgar’s own instrument; he wrote a violin concerto for himself early on, in 1890, when he was still regarded as a minor provincial musician, but he destroyed that work almost at once. Not until he had achieved first renown, then fame, and finally recognition as probably the greatest living English composer did he compose a concerto for the violin that reached performance. By this time he was no longer playing the violin himself, but every measure of the concerto bears witness to his love for the instrument.
As early as June 1904 Elgar received a letter from a German conductor friend, Henry Ettling, who had visited Fritz Kreisler and found the violinist deeply immersed in the score of Elgar’s oratorio The Dream of Gerontius, which was then just becoming known in Germany and overcoming its catastrophically bad first performance in England. Kreisler was highly enthusiastic about Gerontius; he had heard, moreover, that Elgar had composed a violin concerto, and he asked Ettling to see whether Elgar would entrust its first performance to him. This was just a hint, but by 1906 Kreisler officially asked Elgar for a concerto, and he evidently received the composer’s promise to write one. But the composition took its time in coming. At first nothing came of the few sketches he penned; they were driven aside by what the composer’s wife called a “great beautiful tune” that became the opening of Elgar’s First Symphony. Once that had been completed and performed — with enormous success — late in 1908, Elgar could get back to the concerto.
In the spring of 1909 Elgar and his wife made their usual pilgrimage to Italy and stayed at Careggi, near Florence, while an American friend, Julia Worthington, was nearby at the Villa Silli. Here Elgar wrote a number of part-songs, but only after he returned home to Hereford could he get down to really serious work. He considered the possibility of a Falstaff opera (in the end turning his sketches into an elaborate symphonic poem), and also began going over old and unused symphony sketches, considering the notion of a second symphony. But on August 19 his wife wrote in her diary, “E. possessed with his music for the Vl. Concerto.” He worked on it as best he could through his official duties in the fall. By now, as a well-known composer, he was expected to take part in any number of music festivals, and not until early 1910 did he get back to serious work on the concerto. In January he was staying at the home of friends in Hertfordshire, and one of the guests was a professional violinist who tried over parts of the growing work at Elgar’s request, but the only result was to make the composer grow doubtful and despondent about the effect.
In March the Elgars moved to a flat in London. One spring day, while strolling in Regent Street, he encountered W.H. “Billy” Reed, a member of the London Symphony Orchestra and later its concertmaster. Elgar asked him to come over to help out with fingerings and other details of the concerto. (Reed became one of Elgar’s closest friends, and later described this encounter in his own book about the composer.) By the beginning of June, Elgar had nearly finished the first two movements (the slow movement being written mostly while visiting a home owned by another close friend, Frank Schuster), and he returned to Plâs Gwyn, his home in Hereford, to work away at the finale, regularly summoning Reed up from London to play over new passages. Of the work’s ending, Elgar wrote on June 16 to his friend Alice Stuart-Wortley: “I have made the end serious & grand & have brought in the real inspired themes from the 1st movement…. I did it this morning… the music sings of memories & hope.” By July he had finished the drafting of the concerto and began working out the orchestration. In September, he and Reed gave a private reading of the new work at a party given by Schuster for a group of friends attending the Gloucester Festival.
From at least 1906, Elgar had intended the concerto for Kreisler, who in November 1909 had told a reporter, “Sir Edward Elgar promised me a concerto three years ago. When he writes one it will be a labour of love rather than profit. But I can’t get the first note out of him.” Ironically, the concerto was growing apace even as he made that statement; by July 1910 he had his first chance to see the work, after which Elgar wrote to Schuster: “That last movement is good stuff! Kreisler saw it on Friday & is delighted.” The premiere, which Elgar himself conducted, was an enormous success, though people who knew the soloist and conductor well could observe signs of nervousness. Reed, who was playing in the orchestra that night, declared that he was “thrilled beyond words, and so was the whole audience.”
Elgar was exceptionally fond of puzzles, rebuses, anagrams, puns, and other sorts of verbal mystification; and the score of the Violin Concerto bears one of these. The work is dedicated to Fritz Kreisler, but the score is inscribed with a Spanish quotation: “Aquí está encerra el alma de…..” (“Here is inscribed the soul of…..” Since Elgar knew perfectly well that three periods are the normal typographical indication for an ellipsis, he evidently intended something specific by the five periods that he wrote on his score — they almost certainly signify a five-letter name. Mrs. Richard Powell (the “Dorabella” of Elgar’s Enigma Variations) described in her book on Elgar that the composer’s wife told her, in a confidence not broken for 45 years, that the five dots stood for the name of the American friend, Julia Worthington, who had lived near the Elgars on their visit to Careggi in 1909.
But Michael Kennedy’s Portrait of Elgar brings together a great deal of evidence strongly suggesting that the “soul” of the concerto was really another woman, also a close friend of the composer’s, Alice Stuart-Wortley, the daughter of the painter Sir John Millais. Few letters survive to document Elgar’s friendship with Julia Worthington, but there are more than 400 letters, dating over many years, between Elgar and Alice. Their friendship was a deep one, built on mutual regard, Alice’s deep understanding of Elgar’s music, and his appreciation of her musicianship. In his typical way, Elgar gave her the nickname “Windflower,” and as he was working on the concerto in April 1910 he wrote to her, “I have been working hard at the windflower themes — but all stands still until you come and approve.” A day later he complained that his tunes were not yet “windflowerish.” Many times Elgar referred to “your” concerto in his letters to her, and it is clear that he was especially eager for her to like the piece. Most convincing of all, perhaps, is the existence of a sheet of her notepaper on which Elgar wrote, with the date September 22, 1910, the Spanish quotation that he put at the head of the score.
It is worth pointing out that the deep affection Elgar and Alice Stuart-Wortley felt for one another did not involve disloyalty to their spouses. Indeed, Alice Elgar wrote many warm letters to “my dearest namesake,” and Elgar gave Charles Stuart-Wortley some of the earliest sketches for the Violin Concerto. All four were longtime friends. Elgar’s close friendship with Alice Stuart-Wortley (and, for that matter, with Julia Worthington) is part of the overall picture of the man, who idealized women and drew some of his musical inspiration from a romantic idea of their beauty and worth. Its significance is particularly marked in the Violin Concerto, where the word “Windflower” seems singularly appropriate for some of the delicate turns of thematic ideas.
The photographic images we have of Elgar — tall and lean, dressed with military precision, well-trimmed moustache, and all — have left a mental image of the composer who stands as the epitome of British imperialism, an image confirmed for many people by the evident patriotic fervor of such well-known works as the Pomp and Circumstance marches.
In 1934, Constant Lambert’s brilliant, highly opinioned book Music Ho! attacked Elgar’s music for “an almost intolerable air of smugness, self-assurance and autocratic benevolence” — a view that must reflect only a tiny portion of his music, and the least important part at that. No one who has listened closely to the three great symphonic scores of Elgar’s climactic years — the two symphonies and the Violin Concerto — can fail to hear the elegiac strain that predominates over all. Far from being tub-thumping paeans to imperialistic glories, all of these works cover a range from vigor and energy to depression, they attempt to conceal moments of doubt, they long for the peace of vanished days, they express the gamut of emotions with a rare directness and immediacy.
Even more than the two symphonies, the Violin Concerto expresses its message with an intimacy all the more remarkable for the substantial scale on which the music is presented. Elgar was always the master of expressive rubato, the slight momentary hesitation that emphasizes the meaning of a note just so; but nowhere do constant changes of tempo, tiny nuances, play a more important role than here. And this, too, makes the concerto seem more personal, as if reflecting the ebb and flow of an individual’s emotions. These minute subtleties of tempo and expression require the greatest imagination and concentration from the violinist, who changes moods with the speed of an operatic singer.
The first movement begins with a substantial orchestral statement that presents an entire series of short musical ideas which grow into spacious paragraphs welded together by musical relationships among the themes. All of the essential material is presented at the outset, though Elgar makes his ideas grow and change character throughout the movement — in particular one rising figure that becomes the real “Windflower” melody of the secondary theme.
The slow movement, in the very distant key of B-flat, is filled with music of the utmost intimacy. The orchestra begins with eight measures of a simple melody. When it begins to repeat the theme, the solo violin enters, not as a dominating force, but ruminating inside the texture. A new theme (which will recur in the last movement) begins the harmonic movement away from the home key to a climax in D-flat, where the first theme of the movement is heard again briefly before moving on to the key of D. Here the soloist introduces a new figure, an expressive march-like idea answered in the full orchestra, which is directed to play “Nobilmente” (“nobly”), Elgar’s favorite performance indication. From this point the harmony quickly circles home for varied restatements of all the thematic ideas.
The finale is highly dramatic from the soloist’s entry at the outset with a series of rising turns that reestablish the home key of the concerto before leading to a prominent march theme in D major, the principal idea of the movement. The general shape of exposition and recapitulation is easy enough to follow, but what comes next is a surprise. As an orchestral fortissimo fades away into the depths, the solo violin soars upward, trilling, to a high F-sharp. Now begins, strictly speaking, the coda of the movement and of the concerto. Softly the strings quote a theme from the second movement (adapted in tempo to the Allegro of the finale). This grows from the lower ranges upward to another climax, out of which the finale’s themes burst forth with renewed energy, evidently ready to conclude the concerto in a glorious wash of B major.
But suddenly the music fades away into the minor and we begin the most original and remarkable passage in the concerto, the “accompanied cadenza.” The soloist ponders themes from the first movement. Against this, the muted strings are ordered to “thrum,” Elgar’s word for a simple but magical effect: rapidly moving the soft part of three or four fingers across the strings. This sustains a transparent harmonic mist against which the violin may sing its plaintive song of retrospection. After one last unaccompanied solo passage (one that, according to Billy Reed, nearly moved Elgar to tears as they worked out its details), the entire work seems about to begin again when suddenly, in a burst of energy, the introduction to the finale returns, and with a last glance at the borrowed theme from the second movement and the principal themes of the finale, the concerto closes in glory.
This is not the glory of conquest but a victory won over self after inner study and the achievement of new understanding. As Elgar wrote to Frank Schuster while completing the orchestration in July 1910, “The world has changed a little since I saw you I think — it is difficult to say how but it’s either larger or smaller or something…. This Concerto is full of romantic feeling — I should have been a philanthropist if I had been a rich man — I know the feeling is human and right — vainglory!” And his words to Alice were equally on the mark: “The music sings of memories & hope.”
Steven Ledbetter
Steven Ledbetter, a freelance writer and lecturer on music, was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998.
The American premiere of Elgar’s Violin Concerto was given by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Frederick Stock conducting, on December 8, 1911, with violinist Albert Spalding.
The first Boston Symphony performance of Elgar’s Violin Concerto featured Jascha Heifetz as soloist, in a Pension Fund concert led by Serge Koussevitzky on January 7, 1934.
