PROGRAM NOTES
by Dr. Richard E. Rodda

Violin Concerto in B minor, Op. 61
Edward Elgar (1857-1934)

Composed in 1909 and 1910.
Premiere on November 10, 1910 in London, conducted by the composer with Fritz Kreisler as soloist.

In 1909, Edward Elgar was at the height of his career. The Enigma Variations hadappeared in 1899 and the oratorio The Dream of Gerontius one year later, spreading Elgar’s name throughout Britain, the Continent and the New World. Cambridge University made him a doctor honoris causa in 1900; Oxford did so five years later. With his choral ode for the coronation of Edward VII in 1901 and the appearance of the first two Pomp and Circumstance Marches in 1902, he became England’s unofficial music laureate. (He had to wait until 1924 to be appointed Master of the King’s Musick.) He was knighted in 1904. The University of Birmingham named him to its music faculty in 1905. Europe and America demanded to see him in person, so he traveled widely to conduct and dispense his own music. A series of splendid works tumbled forth in those years — Cockaigne, Sea Pictures, the Introduction and Allegro for Strings, The Apostles and The Kingdom, supplemented by numerous part and solo songs and chamber pieces. When he finished the First Symphony at the end of 1908, he was ready for a rest.

In April 1909, shortly after Hans Richter had introduced the First Symphony in Manchester and London, Elgar and his wife, Alice, accepted an invitation to visit their American friend, Mrs. Julia Worthington, at her villa in Careggi, near Florence. Feeling drained creatively, Elgar had sworn off music for the time being (in later years at his home, “Plas Gwyn” at Hereford, he set up a chemistry lab into which he frequently escaped for the same reason), and played the part of the happy tourist in Italy. The Elgars traipsed about Tuscany and made an excursion to Venice. As it had Mendelssohn and Brahms and Berlioz during the previous century, Italy inspired Elgar to composition. While in Careggi his muse was rekindled and the first sketches for two new works — a violin concerto and another symphony — appeared. Elgar left Italy in early June, stopping at Garmisch-Partenkirchen for a session of sincere mutual admiration with Richard Strauss, and arrived at Plas Gwyn on June 16th. He worked some more on the Concerto, but the second half of 1909 was heavily booked with festival appearances and conducting engagements, including an extended tour with the fledgling London Symphony Orchestra, and he devoted his available time for composition to the Second Symphony, so the violin piece lay dormant until the first of the year.

After resuming work on the Violin Concerto in January 1910, Elgar had doubts about his ability to finish it. (He had already abandoned two attempts at such a piece in 1890 and 1901.) Some of his close friends, especially the Lord and Lady Stuart-Wortley and Lady Edward Speyer (who in less elevated days had been the professional violinist Leonora von Stosch), shepherded him through this bad time, and by March he was committed to the completing the piece. Though Elgar was himself an experienced violinist, he asked W.H. Reed, a member (and later concertmaster) of the LSO, for advice on the finer points of technique and notation. Reed described the scene when he entered Elgar’s London flat in New Cavendish Street: “There was the composer, striding about, arranging scraps of manuscript in different parts of the room, pinning them to the backs of chairs and placing them on the mantelpiece with photograph frames to hold them in position. It was wonderful to note the speed at which he scribbled out another passage or made an alteration or scrapped a sketch altogether as being redundant.” (Elgar always used separate sheets of manuscript paper so that he could shuffle them at will to compare the piece’s various sections.) Elgar worked on the Concerto throughout the summer, in London, at Plas Gwyn and at the cottage of his friend Frank Schuster at Maidenhead, frequently seeking Reed’s advice and trial performance of the most recent sketches. (The two musicians remained close; Reed issued an admiring biography of the composer in 1949.) The Concerto was finished on August 5, 1910. “It’s good! awfully emotional! too emotional but I love it,” he told Schuster.

The premiere was set for November 10, 1910 in Queen’s Hall, London, at the opening concert of the Philharmonic Society’s 99th season. Elgar agreed to conduct. Violinist Fritz Kreisler, who had been encouraging Elgar to write a concerto for him since at least 1906 and to whom the score was dedicated, was the soloist. The performance marked the first premiere of a major work by Elgar in nearly two years, and interest ran high — the hall was sold out weeks in advance. The performance went splendidly. “Probably there has never been at a Philharmonic concert such a scene of enthusiasm,” reported the London Musical Times. Kreisler toured successfully throughout England with the piece; Eugene Ysaÿe introduced it on the Continent in March 1911; Albert Spalding gave its American premiere in Chicago nine months later. The Violin Concerto was the last unalloyed triumph of Elgar’s life.

When the Concerto was published by Novello simultaneously with its premiere, the score appeared with a cryptic Spanish legend on the flyleaf: “Aquí está encerra el alma de..…” (“Here is enshrined the soul of.....” ), a quotation from Le Sage’s Gil Blas de Santillane (1735). As with the Enigma Variations, Elgar here posed a puzzle of identity. When the conductor Nicholas Kilburn asked for a solution to the riddle, Elgar replied, “Here, or more emphatically in here, is enshrined or simply enclosed — burial is perhaps too definite — the soul of ...? The final ‘de’ leaves it indefinite as to sex or rather gender. Now guess,” though he assured another friend that “the ‘soul’ was feminine.” Elgar seems to have provided one clue by the five dots following the quotation, two more than the three customary for an ellipsis in printer’s syntax, with which he was thoroughly familiar. Early speculation favored Mrs. Worthington, at whose Italian villa the Concerto was conceived. Her first name was Julia (five letters) and her nickname was “Pippa,” and, it was rumored, the composer was in love with her. Later and more convincing evidence, however, points to Alice Stuart-Wortley as the recipient of the tacit dedication. The Elgars had met Alice, daughter of the painter Millais, in 1906, when the Stuart-Wortleys moved to London from Sheffield. Elgar visited them frequently at their home in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, thereafter, and was particularly delighted when Alice played his music for him on the piano. (“I love to hear you play,” he confided to her in 1911.) His feelings for her at the time of the composition of the Violin Concerto seemed to have warmed beyond fondness. “I have been working hard at the ‘windflower’ themes [his nickname for her; they both loved the countryside and its wildflowers] — but all stands still until you come and approve,” he wrote on April 27, 1910. For the rest of his life he referred to the piece in his letters to her as “our own concerto,” and sometimes inscribed them with a musical quotation from the score. Whether to Alice or to Julia or to some unknown other, Elgar’s mysterious legend calls forth not just the unspoken emotions of many years ago, but also serves as an arrow straight to the heart of this eloquent Concerto’s true nature — feelings intimate and tender contained in a setting expansive and magniloquent. “To listen to the Violin Concerto,” wrote Diana M. McVeagh, “is at times like eavesdropping on a private conversation — or even a confessional — so inward is its quality.”

It may be of some interest to certain listeners to know that the opening movement largely follows the traditional sonata-concerto form, that the four main thematic motives are presented in quick succession by the orchestra during its introduction, that the music is spun almost completely from these melodic fragments, and that the requirements for the soloist, both technical and expressive, are among the most demanding of any concerto in the literature. Others, however, will find that Elgar’s craftsmanship, masterful and mature as it is, is simply the means to the end of this music’s expression, of which John F. Porte wrote, “His vein of tender sentiment is perhaps the most lovable of all its kind in music, and shared by that of Schubert; Elgar never shows us a soul that is seared or tortured, for while he can feel, he does not despair. An extreme sensitiveness to poetic ideas or reflections is part of Elgar’s thought, but this is always counterbalanced by a breezy reaction, a throwing aside, as it were, of anything which might lead to doubt; it is the ascendant spirit, the strong faith in himself, the blessing of common pluck, which never failed him.” The second movement continues in a similar vein, though is more given to song than to rhetoric. Elgar once said that he wrote the finale as a frame for the accompanied cadenza that lies at its heart, “whose amazing loveliness would alone keep the composer’s name alive,” wrote Diana McVeagh. Themes from the earlier movements are recalled and transformed in the course of the finale to create a marvelous unity of expression throughout the entire work.

MORE NOTES ON THIS PROGRAM

MOZART: Overture to The Impresario, K. 486
BRAHMS: Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68

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