How Elgar’s Cello Concerto conquered the world
As the piece turns 100, Ivan Hewett pays tribute to one of the great works of the 20th century
This year marks the centenary of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto, a piece that is dear to the heart of so many on these islands. Next week the piece is being performed in Worcester Cathedral, not far from where Elgar was born, and where he had some of his earliest successes as a composer. That wise and experienced cellist Raphael Wallfisch will be playing it with the English Symphony Orchestra, as part of the second Elgar Festival. On August 22 it will be played by the new kid on the cellists’ block, Sheku Kanneh-mason, at a Prom. And there are numerous other performances across the year.
So what is it that makes Elgar’s Cello Concerto so beloved? One reason is the sheer Englishness of it, that indefinable something that rises like a scent from the music’s nostalgia and bluff humour and muted understatement. Another is the way the cello, more than any other instrument, seems to evoke the human voice. You could say that’s true of every cello concerto, but there’s something about the way Elgar places the saddest melodies in just the right range of the cello that gives this concerto a uniquely “speaking” quality. We seem to be hearing Elgar’s own voice in the mournful song of the cello.
He wrote it at 60, when recovering from a dangerous operation, although its twilight feeling gives the sense he is mourning the passing of the whole pre-first-worldwar culture of his country, as much as his own youth.
The sadness of the piece also seems indissolubly linked to the incredibly gifted, beautiful but tragic cellist
Jacqueline du
Pré, who made her first recording of the piece aged only 22, in 1965. It’s that recording which has become the yardstick against which every subsequent performance of the concerto has been measured and the tragic pathos of the piece has become associated with her own performing career, which was cruelly cut short by multiple sclerosis in the midseventies. Her recordings of the piece have in effect become her own elegy.
It’s hard to think of any other piece which has become so wedded to one particular performer, and the resulting myth has had the effect of placing Elgar’s concerto almost beyond criticism. But there have been dissenting voices. Michael Kennedy, the late, great critic of this newspaper, found the work’s melancholy was marred by self-pity, and he wasn’t alone in that view. It’s fair to suggest the opening melody is just too unvaried in its swaying rhythm and too selfindulgently sad. It’s also fair to ask where, when measured alongside the great cello concertos, Elgar’s contribution stands. It could be said there are more heartwarming melodies in Dvořák’s great concerto, a more interesting, less self-obsessed kind of romantic twilight in Schumann’s piece, more wit in Haydn’s D major concerto. In the 20th century the roll-call of composers whose cello concertos could be said to outshine Elgar’s is long: Shostakovich (who composed two), Britten, Lutosławski, Dutilleux.
My feeling is that Elgar’s concerto does indeed stand up. It is a profound and many-layered piece, which would now be securely in the repertoire even if du Pré had never existed. The opening melody can seem pallid, but later on the music is emotionally volcanic. The piece veers wildly and puzzlingly between different sorts of feeling, in a way which rivals Mahler – and demonstrates that the man behind Pomp and Circumstance was as much of a modernist as the Austrian composer.
The strangest moment comes in the finale, which launches off in a jaunty way that reminds us of Elgar’s bluff public persona. But then a new melody breaks in, almost desperate in its sorrowfulness, leading eventually to a reminiscence of the third movement’s tenderly regretful melody. The best description of this moment comes in JB Priestley’s 1947 play The Linden Tree, which was actually inspired by the concerto. At one point the main character, an embittered professor who is out of sympathy with modern life, listens to his daughter playing that very passage. He describes it as Elgar “wandering through the darkening house of life – touching all the things he loved – crying farewell – forever – forever”. But then the nostalgia is cut off by a brutally brusque ending. It’s almost as if Elgar realises he has revealed too much of himself, and brings the curtain down fast.
The emotional complication of Elgar’s concerto, its interweaving of reticence and violence and nostalgia, means it shows a different face to every performer. It’s a richness that clearly appeals beyond these shores, as cellists everywhere now want to take it up. For a long time the concerto was a purely English phenomenon; in its centenary year it’s good to see that now it belongs to the world.
The tragic pathos of the piece has become associated with du Pré’s own career, which was cruelly cut short