Elgar at Brinkwells
Elgar spent just three years at Brinkwells, but during his time in rural Sussex wrote some of his most inspired and intimate works, says Richard Westwood-brookes
How rural Sussex inspired Elgar’s late chamber works
When Elgar’s three great chamber works were first performed 100 years ago this month, critics believed his music was entering a new and exciting phase. Their emergence ended six years of relative creative silence in which he produced little to rival the masterpieces of the past. In fact, he had even resorted to writing for the West End and music-halls.
But in the summer of 1918, his inspiration caught fire once again, and within a few months he had completed the Violin Sonata, String Quartet and Piano Quintet – followed soon after by his Cello Concerto. Many hoped that this signalled the beginning of a new chapter in his compositional career. These new chamber works surprised many. The music contained moments of great beauty, but there were also dark undertones within, laced with nostalgia and regret. Even Elgar admitted that it was ‘strange music’ with some ‘ghostly stuff’ in it.
Exhausted by London and the First World War, Elgar declared himself ‘sick of towns’
This renewed impetus to compose came from a fundamental change in his surroundings. Exhausted by London, his home since 1912, and the traumas of the First World War, he declared himself ‘sick of towns’ and in early May 1918 sought the rented sanctuary of a remote cottage called Brinkwells, set deep in the woodlands of West Sussex. Its landscape, populated by country folk reminiscent of his Worcestershire boyhood, doubtless reminded him of Birchwood Lodge near Malvern, which years before had inspired The Dream of Gerontius. Within weeks, he began serious composition again.
His friend, the violinist WH Reed came down from London to assist him, recalling: ‘At my first visit the Violin Sonata was well advanced. All the first movement was written, half the second – he finished this actually while I was there – and the opening section of the Finale. We used to play up to the blank page and then he would say “And then what?” – and we would go out to explore the woods or to fish in the River Arun.
‘All the music composed at Brinkwells was undoubtedly influenced by the quiet and peaceful surroundings during that wonderful summer. Miles of woodland, through which he walked daily, enchanted him by their beauty and serenity. How truly he could translate these moods and feelings into music can be seen by anyone who takes but a casual glance at the slow movement of the Quartet. The same power can be seen if one looks into the Violin Sonata, or at the Quintet with its fatalistic theme.’
The music, which his nature wanderings inspired, seemed to evoke the past. The Sonata contained sections reminiscent of exercises his Malvern pupils played in the 1890s while its dark slow movement had the atmosphere of his disturbing nihilistic partsong Owls (An Epitaph). The Quartet contained a fleeting reference to his early Chanson de Matin. But the darkest music of all was in the Quintet – claimed to be inspired by occult legend – with its uncomfortable passages of bitterness, anger and despair.
The first performance in May 1919 before a sparse Wigmore Hall audience divided opinion. Some were mystified. One wrote: ‘the moods of these works are very varied. Like all Elgar’s works they have a good deal of quiet mystic feeling, but they are like Dr Johnson’s friend who tried to be a philosopher, in that “cheerfulness will keep breaking through”.’ But for another they confirmed that ‘Elgar is still a force amongst the many currents of the music tide’.
Elgar’s powers of composition had seemingly returned stronger than ever, producing new and radically different music. He even planned to buy Brinkwells as a permanent retreat, doubtless in the hope that it would continue to inspire him to even greater things, and the prevailing feeling was that perhaps there would be a renaissance – that the composer was back on form, but this time writing in a style he had not explored before.
This view was reinforced when he produced his Cello Concerto in the following autumn, inspiring one critic to write: ‘Certainly it is the most beautiful cello concerto in existence. It is a new sort of concerto, a new and surpassing metamorphosis of an old form.’
But any hope of this was to be short lived. In the spring of 1920, his wife, Alice died. The grief left him unable to attempt any further major works and the Cello Concerto, completed at Brinkwells and premiered a few months before she died, proved his last great masterpiece.
He returned to the cottage in the hope of fresh inspiration but he found the place far too full of memories, lamenting ‘everything in life has changed’. His landlord decided not to sell the cottage to him and he left, for good, in 1921.
Had he lived on at Brinkwells he might have recovered from the blow of his wife’s death. But in the event the three chamber works and the concerto remain a tantalising glimpse of ‘what might have been’ – a new direction in his music that tragically never reached its destination.