Richard Morrison

Should Elgar’s manuscripts head to London or stay in Worcestershire?

Should Elgar’s archive remain in Worcestershire?

It’s ironic that Elgar metamorphosed his friends into such an affectionate and uplifting piece as the Enigma Variations, because in recent decades his most ardent supporters have not always presented themselves as a picture of harmony. The decision by Elgar’s family to allow Anthony Payne to complete Elgar’s sketches for a Third Symphony, against the composer’s express wishes, caused one blazing row, though Payne’s reconstruction proved to be so convincing that it was gradually accepted even by its fiercest opponents. Now the trustees of the Elgar Foundation - chaired by the lawyerturned-politician-turned-opera-critic David Mellor and responsible for the composer’s birthplace in Lower Broadheath, just outside Worcester are in hot water. They have decided to remove the archive of Elgar material from the birthplace, and instead deposit it in the British Library (BL) in London.

Naturally this has upset Elgar’s many devotees in Worcestershire, the county to which he constantly returned, in both body and spirit (even though he spent a few unsettled years in London and Sussex). It has also upset those who think that London already holds too many cultural goodies. To them, the Foundation’s decision is one more example of cultural asset-stripping by a metropolitan elite, akin to the way in which the Royal Photographic Society’s collection of 312,000 historic images was yanked from its perfectly good home in the National Media Museum in Bradford to the V&A, against the wishes of practically everyone in Yorkshire.

Nobody, incidentally, is suggesting that the Elgar archive stays in his birthplace, which is perhaps just as well. A tiny cottage with no link whatsoever to any of Elgar’s compositions (since the family moved out when he was two years old), it has had a chequered history and periods of poor visitor figures, though the National Trust, its present custodian, has improved that. More pertinently, it doesn’t have the research or conservation facilities to house properly important documents relating to Britain’s greatest Romantic composer.

Instead, the Worcestershire lobby wants the archive to go to the Hive in Worcester, described as ‘Europe’s first

The British Library already has 1,000 Elgar letters and the bulk of his music manuscripts

combined university and public library’, where the county’s historical documents are housed. What’s wrong with that? Nothing, says the Elgar Foundation, except that the BL is a better destination. It cites the wishes of Elgar’s daughter, Carice, for her father’s manuscripts to go to London (though she appears to have said contradictory things during the last decade of her life), and also the fact that the BL already has 1,000 Elgar letters and the bulk of his music manuscripts.

Sending the birthplace archive to London, they argue, would also unite the collection – making it easier for scholars from round the world to examine it, and aiding its eventual digitisation so that it can be inspected by anyone with access to the internet. But the Worcestershire lobby retorts that the vast welter of Elgar material would still not be united, because the University of Birmingham (where Elgar was briefly professor of music) also holds a collection of his music as well as 70 of his diaries. And it has no intention of relinquishing those treasures to London.

With a protest petition gaining dozens of signatures each day, the BL has rushed to announce that it has ‘formally accepted this very generous donation’, and made pointed reference to the archive being available in its reading rooms at St Pancras, ‘which serve more than 400,000 users each year’. It’s a powerful argument, as is the case for having the bulk of the Elgar material in a library that also houses most of the first-hand documents relating to Elgar’s British contemporaries and successors.

Yet you could argue the opposite. At the BL the Elgar letters would merely be a few thousand more drops in an ocean of 150 million items; whereas in Worcester they would be treasured as a tangible link to the man who drew such inspiration from the county’s landscape - just as the Britten archive at the Red House in Aldeburgh pays homage to Britten’s Suffolk roots.

Yes, London is easier than Worcester for international scholars to reach. But what diligent Elgar scholar would not want to visit Worcestershire anyway? That’s where the composer’s heart and soul lay, and that’s where – in a little churchyard at the foot of his beloved Malvern Hills – his body is buried. It’s a finely balanced argument, but I think the BL and the Elgar trustees should do the graceful thing and let Worcester keep the archive.

Richard Morrison is chief music critic and a columnist of The Times