Julian Lloyd Webber
Principal, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire
‘Elgar’s Cello Concerto carries for me many personal memories and associations. Putting my thoughts on it into words proved to be a very different challenge to playing it!’
Dame Fortune was smiling kindly on me when I first encountered Elgar’s Cello Concerto. I was nine years old and my grandmother had evidently decided that it was time I heard the instrument I kept sawing away on played properly. So she bought me a cello record for Christmas. My grandmother didn’t know much about classical music and I later discovered that she had been guided by the ‘nice old gentleman’ who ran the specialist record shop on the corner.
I have always been grateful to my mysterious mentor, as my present turned out to be one of the finest cello recordings of the era – the Elgar, played by Paul Tortelier with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Malcolm Sargent. I loved Tortelier’s gentle rendition with its French accent; indeed, his recording confirms my theory that the greater a piece of music, the greater number of interpretations it can take.
‘ANNOUNCE THE HERO’, Pablo Casals would instruct his students at the cello’s first entry in Dvo ák’s magnificent concerto of 1895. But Dvo ák’s heroics were not for Elgar in 1919, the year in which he wrote his own concerto. The First World War had changed everything. Cataclysmic events produce drastic reactions and people look for renewal, but Elgar represented the past. And if people were expecting triumphalism in the new concerto from the composer of the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, their expectations were to be confounded. In addition, Elgar’s role for the orchestra was substantially different from Dvo ák’s. Instead of pitting instruments of similar pitch (horns, bassoons etc) against the cello, Elgar leaves the middle ground to his soloist – further reinforcing the concerto’s lonely contours.
There can be no question that Elgar was profoundly affected by the war. He made few references to it but his choice of confidants – Frank Schuster and
Sidney Colvin – is revealing. Both were longstanding friends and gentle souls with no direct involvement in music. To Colvin (the Cello Concerto’s joint dedicatee together with his wife Frances) he wrote, ‘I cannot do any real work with the awful shadow over us’ and to Schuster he expressed his rage: ‘Concerning the war I say nothing – the only thing that wrings my heart and soul is the thought of the horses – oh! My beloved animals – the men – and women – can go to hell – but my horses; I walk round and round this room cursing God for allowing dumb brutes to be tortured – let him kill his human beings but – how CAN HE? Oh, my horses’.
The musicians Elgar chose to work with during the war were also gentle souls – the violinists Albert Sammons and WH Reed and the cellist Felix Salmond. All three played significant roles both in Elgar’s life and his music during this terrible time. (Some 30 years later my mother studied violin with ‘Billy’ Reed at the Royal College of Music – ‘kind’, ‘lovely’ and ‘gentle’ were the adjectives she used regularly to describe him).
It was only with the war finally over that the 62-year-old Elgar turned his thoughts to writing a cello concerto. It is always interesting to speculate on what drew a composer to write for a particular instrument at a particular time. Certainly, cello concertos tend to be late works in composers’ outputs. It is as if they are entrusting their innermost thoughts to that instrument closest to the human voice which, because of its sonority and unusually wide range of pitch, enables those thoughts to take flight.
Tradition has it that the Cello Concerto’s first performance – at London’s Queen’s Hall on 27 October 1919 – was an unmitigated disaster that traumatised Salmond, the soloist, to the extent that he never played the work again and fled to the US in search of a new career. Yet an unattributed review in The Times makes no mention of the allegedly catastrophic orchestral playing, praises Felix Salmond as ‘a painstaking and sympathetic interpreter’, and notes that ‘both the composer and Mr Salmond were recalled many times at the end’. Hardly the fiasco of legend. And, far from never playing the concerto again, Salmond went on to perform it the following year in Manchester and Birmingham, and ten years later he played it in New York. If he did harbour any lack of desire to suggest the concerto to promoters or teach it to his students in his new life at the Juilliard, it was more likely due to resentment at the vagaries of the record business than any lingering regrets about its first performance – Elgar was contracted to the Gramophone Company while Salmond recorded for Columbia Records.
When it came to making the first recording, the Gramophone Company sniffed around the Portuguese cellist Guilhermina Suggia, but she asked for too much money (bad career move!).
Next it turned to a young British cellist
There can be no question that Elgar was profoundly affected by the war
called Beatrice Harrison and, less than two months after Salmond had given the premiere, Harrison found herself in Elgar’s drawing room, preparing to record it a few days later. After initially recording an abridged version, she returned to the studio in 1928 to do the complete work.
The Gramophone Company’s choice of soloist proved inspired – Harrison showed an immediate, instinctive affinity with Elgar’s mercurial temperament.
And so began a history of notable recordings that includes Casals in 1937, Tortelier in 1953 and Jacqueline du Pré in 1965. Tortelier’s account could not be more different from Du Pré’s, which has become the benchmark by which all others are compared. A downside of the iconic status accorded to Jackie’s very individual performance, however, is that so many young cellists seem to feel obliged to copy it. If there was one thing that convinced me I had the right to record my own version
(on which I was hugely helped by having Yehudi Menuhin as my conductor), it was the certainty that my interpretation was markedly different from Du Pré’s. This wasn’t intentional. I experimented (in private!) with playing the concerto in many ways. But, once on the concert platform, I could only play it the way I felt. And I feel the composer has given us an intensely personal, lonely statement.
A noble beginning
Elgar’s Cello Concerto makes unusual demands on its soloist. In the musicologist Jerrold Northrop Moore’s words, the composer produced ‘such a concerto of isolation, loneliness, farewell even, as had never yet been written’. There are no traditional ‘fireworks’ on display, no showy cadenzas; instead lies the challenge of conveying to an audience one man’s wounded interpretation of the human condition as viewed through the passage of time. Yet the concerto is supremely written for the instrument and it runs the gamut of the cello’s range like no other before it.
There is an overriding arch to the work, with the concerto’s nobilmente opening returning at the end, and it is important for the soloist to hold a firm vision of that arch throughout the performance. This allows room for spontaneity while giving the listener a sense of a coherent whole.
The (false?) grandeur of the opening bars introduces an unusual series of questions posed by the soloist. These are immediately followed by a first theme of such loneliness as to be unique in any concerto. Elgar’s markings for this theme are revealing – there are none. During my studies with Pierre Fournier we worked on the Lalo Concerto together. Lalo litters his score with a profusion of markings which are nothing if not confusing, so
I was hardly surprised when Fournier said ‘ignore all these’, but was extremely surprised when he added ‘just like in the Elgar’. Elgar’s directions are certainly detailed but they are a window to his soul – follow them closely and you can’t go far wrong. That’s why the lack of any markings (save for piano) on this first theme is so significant. They are the only bars in the concerto without expressive indications. Why? Because they tell their own story.
The theme appears three further times – each time with different markings, which it is vital to observe. Soloists usually do this but the famous scalic run to a top E fares less well. Elgar clearly marks its second coming In tempo and on his own recording with Beatrice Harrison even makes an accelerando. Yet today we almost always hear it played with the same huge rallentando both times – reducing the thrilling surprise Elgar surely intended while also making life difficult for the timpanist whose succeeding fortissimo demi-semiquaver figure is forced into a tempo-free limbo!
The recitative-like ‘bridge’ to the second movement is the nearest the concerto comes to a cadenza (see p50), with the soloist offering hints of the music to follow like gusts of wind across the landscape. And it’s a bleak landscape, too, as an impassioned solo cello outburst reminds us of the inherent harshness of nature.
The second movement proper (‘diddle, diddle, diddle’, as Lady Elgar described it) is a soloist’s gift – by no means easy but not as hard as it sounds. Here, Elgar delivers a masterclass in how to write for the instrument: ‘runs’ that lie under the hand, idiomatic use of harmonics and even a left hand pizzicato flourish to end. His orchestration – which allows the cello to ‘come through’ – is superb too. As the work of a self-taught composer, it’s a marvel.
Elgar delivers a masterclass in how to write for the instrument
The following slow movement is a succinct distillation of emotions which have journeyed for many miles together to a valley beyond tears. Lasting barely five minutes, its two-bar phrases are yearning yet warm, and a flash of anger in the middle soon subsides into a place of resigned serenity. An abrupt key change interrupts the mood as Elgar introduces a nervy rhythmic figure which leads to the second recitative-like passage for the soloist. And then, a sudden, sparkling cello arpeggio to the instrument’s stratosphere heralds the start of the finale.
The last movement’s main theme is about as near to triumphalism as Elgar allows his expectant listeners to get, but even here the composer effectively sends himself up by allowing his soloist to introduce a nobilmente figure which immediately collapses in a flurry of bowbouncing demi-semiquavers. I love Elgar’s friend Ernest Newman’s description of this episode as ‘dignity at the mercy of a banana skin’. This mood of fragile good spirits is soon dispersed by a melancholic passage of beautifully melodic cello semiquavers punctuated by sighing phrases from the violins and chilly woodwind interjections.
The solo part here is particularly interesting on account of its gestation. Before recording the concerto myself, I asked to view the composer’s manuscript at the Royal College of Music to see whether it contained any unexpected revelations. It did. The entire original solo part is crossed out at this point. Bar after bar of, frankly, workmanlike passagework has been rewritten in Elgar’s own hand, resulting in the beautiful counterpoint we know today (and please, may no one be tempted to make a recording of the composer’s ‘original’ version!). Now follows a section which reminds me of a similar place in the finale of Elgar’s First Symphony which conductor Adrian Boult described to me as ‘the part he asked the cook to write’. It is indeed a banal passage but – as I suggested to Sir Adrian – it surely only serves to underline the beauty
which follows. ‘I had never thought of that,’ was Sir Adrian’s gracious response.
The conclusion of the concerto is one of Elgar’s greatest achievements
– a summation of themes, heightened emotions, unexpected key changes and total mastery of his material, culminating in an other-worldly suspension of time at the recall of the slow movement. When, finally, the solo cello interrupts the mood with a fortissimo statement of the opening, accompanied this time by two slashing full orchestra chords, we’re left wondering, as the concerto hurries towards its end: have we witnessed a triumph, or is the composer angered by the follies of man and the world loved collapsing around him? An enigma to be sure, and we know that Elgar liked those.
View from the stage
I performed the concerto in concert many hundreds of times but never tired of playing it. I found it to be almost eerily responsive to different conductors, orchestras, concert halls and, especially, to audiences; in a series of three performances in the same hall with the same orchestra and conductor each performance would feel completely different.
For an extra-musical reason, one performance with Menuhin in Sydney is etched in my memory. I wanted to discuss a point of interpretation and knocked on his dressing room door. ‘Come in, come in,’ cried Yehudi. I entered and was surprised to see him standing on his head. ‘It’s about this accelerando in the last movement,’
I told his feet. ‘Where exactly? Show me on the score.’ Prostrating myself, I placed the music upside down in front of Yehudi’s eyes before beginning a detailed discussion of Elgar’s masterpiece with the inverted maestro. I always wished the audience could have witnessed this cameo!
As a British cellist performing internationally, I would often be asked to play the Elgar on my travels. In my twenties and thirties this led to finding myself collaborating with renowned maestros who had never conducted it before. (‘Please don’t tell the orchestra’, they would whisper.) Among these was
Sir Georg Solti. But it wasn’t always the ‘starriest’ conductors who provided the necessary foil for my long-considered interpretation. Among my favourite (in other words most comfortable) partners were Richard Hickox, Vernon Handley, Charles Groves, James Judd, Leonard Slatkin, Yan Pascal Tortelier (as heard on this magazine’s CD), Alexander Gibson, Neville Marriner and, of course, Menuhin.
I have always believed that there should be a reason for making a recording. Adding another version of a well-worn classic to the overcrowded catalogue never appealed to me. So Menuhin – with his unique insight into Elgar’s music – seemed a natural partner. From the beginning I benefited from his benign, gentle guidance. ‘It’s too forthright,’ he said of my first statement of the first movement theme. ‘Play it as if it’s coming from a distance over the hills’. His insight tallies with Elgar’s deathbed remark to the violinist WH Reed: Elgar tried ‘rather feebly’ to whistle the first movement’s haunting 9/8 theme. ‘Billy,’ he said with tears in his eyes, ‘if ever you’re walking on the Malvern hills and hear that, it’s only me. Don’t be frightened.’
On my 16th birthday, my godfather – the composer Herbert Howells – presented me with a score of Elgar’s Cello Concerto which he inscribed: ‘To Julian, from HH, to whom EE once said of this work, “It’s just an old man’s darling”’. One hundred years after its premiere, Elgar’s Cello Concerto is no longer ‘just an old man’s darling’ but has become a ‘darling’ for music-lovers all over the world.