BITTERSWEET SYMPHONY
It’s Elgar’s most famous and enduring composition but, as Richard Westwood-Brookes argues, our much-loved song Land of Hope and Glory was something of a mixed blessing for the great man.
WHENEVER you think of Land of Hope and Glory, you think of England. It’s one of those inescapable notions – our “go-to” patriotic song, celebrated with gusto and much flag-waving every year at the Last Night of the Proms.
It was written by our greatest composer, Sir Edward Elgar, himself as English as Tower Bridge, the Boat Race and cucumber sandwiches. Yet, ironically, despite the success it brought him, it became a matter of regret that he ever wrote it at all.
Elgar was born in 1857 in a humble country cottage near Worcester, and grew up in the family’s city centre music shop where, remarkably, he not only learned to read music from the material sold over the counter, but also how to compose from the various tutor books. He also learned to play virtually every instrument in the orchestra. Unlike any other great
composer, Elgar was entirely selftaught – often joking later in life that his entire education, including how to read and write, had only cost a matter of a few pounds.
During his younger days he earned a living playing and teaching violin and, aged around twenty-two, was appointed conductor of the attendants’ band at the local lunatic asylum, running weekly dance sessions for the patients. When the band needed new music to play, he obliged, and thus his career as a composer began.
International fame as a composer was, of course, only a dream. Life was firmly rooted in provincial activities and, though he wrote a few small pieces, there was nothing of any consequence. That was to change in 1889, when, at the age of thirty-two, he married Alice Roberts, the daughter of a Major General.
Alice was the rock upon which his career was firmly based. She had sacrificed her own aspirations of becoming a successful novelist and poet in order to devote her life to him – but it came at an enormous price. When they married, she was abandoned by her gentry family and disinherited because they believed she was marrying beneath her station.
This brought financial worries, and for Alice a considerable loss of social status – she had become the wife of an unknown musician, living in rented accommodation, and struggling to survive – but from the outset she was absolutely determined to bring success to her genius husband.
She coaxed him into composition, even ruled the bar lines on the manuscript paper because they couldn’t afford the proper material, then made sure that his writing was in good order every night so that it was ready for him the following morning. Being the daughter of a military man, Alice knew the importance of hard work. The word failure was not in her dictionary.
Initially, however, life was tough. After a short honeymoon they moved to London in the hopes of establishing him as a great composer. But no-one, it seemed, wished to know a Mr Elgar from Worcester, so, dejected, they came back, settling in Malvern.
Elgar returned to the drudgery of teaching violin. He continued writing whenever his teaching permitted, and eventually won invitations from provincial musical festivals. Through the 1890s he gained great success, particularly from performances of his dramatic large-scale choral compositions such as King Olaf and Caractacus. In 1899, national recognition finally arrived with his Enigma Variations – the famous set of orchestral portraits of various friends, including the popular Nimrod.
Spurred on by this success, Elgar considered a symphony inspired by the tragic story of General Charles Gordon, who was killed in the Siege of Khartoum. He didn’t complete it, but out of the various themes he had sketched, one looked special.
“It is the kind of tune which only comes once in a lifetime,” he said. “It will knock ’em flat when they hear it.”
The Gordon tune was the tune we know today as Land of Hope and Glory and, when he finally used it as part of his first Pomp and Circumstance March, his prediction proved correct. It was first played at a concert in Liverpool in 1901, when we were still fighting the Boer War. The tune overwhelmed the audience, who saw it as a hymn of victory.
A few weeks later it was repeated at the London Proms, and caused a truly historic sensation. Sir Henry Wood, who conducted, recalled in his memoirs My Life in Music: “The people simply rose and yelled. I had to play it again – with the same result; in fact they refused to let me go on with the programme. After considerable delay, while the audience roared its applause, I went off and fetched Harry Dearth who was to sing the next part of the programme; but they would not listen. Merely to restore order I played the march a third time. And that, I might say, was the one and only time in the history of the Promenade Concerts that an orchestral item was accorded a double encore.”
As a result, the first march – with its Gordon tune – has been repeated ever since at the Last Night of the Proms.
For Elgar, this was fame at last, after all the years of struggle – and more acclaim seemed likely.
The following year, Edward VII, who had acceded to the throne on the death of Queen Victoria, was to be crowned. Elgar was asked to write a work celebrating the Coronation at a special gala concert. He planned an ode in seven movements, performed by a huge choir, orchestra, soloists and even the Band of the Coldstream Guards.
A librettist was required, and Arthur Benson, son of a former Archbishop of Canterbury and master at Eton College, was recommended as an appropriate person to provide words suitable for the occasion. They devised the last movement as a tremendous hymn celebrating the new King’s arrival. What better tune than the Gordon one, Elgar thought.
Benson was tasked to come up with the words to accompany it. Words which celebrated a country looking forward with hope to a new era of bright expectation, while also celebrating the glory of 64 years of Victorian achievement.
From the outset there were problems. Benson said the Gordon tune would not fit well to the words he had in mind and wrote to Elgar.
“If you could string together a few nonsense words, just to show me how you would wish them to run, I would construct it, following the tune closely.”
Then Elgar was warned not to use the tune at all by his friend and mentor August Jaeger – immortalised as Nimrod in the Enigma Variations.
“I say you will have to write another tune. I have been trying much to fit words to it. It is quite impossible to sing ANY words to it . . . You must write a new tune to the words and not fit the words to the tune.”
Elgar ignored this and pressed on, with Benson finally coming up with words which satisfied. They were different from those we sing today: “Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the free
How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee?
Truth and Right and Freedom, each a holy gem,
Stars of solemn brightness, weave thy diadem”.
The performance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, was set for a few days before the Coronation. The King and Queen were to attend, as were Royalty and dignitaries from around the world. Elgar’s Ode would open the sumptuous programme, which also featured the greatest opera stars in the world. Tickets, if you were fortunate enough to obtain one, cost more than £1,700 in today’s money.
Elgar had selected his performers – including the legendary Australian Dame Nellie Melba. The chorus was to be brought from Sheffield. He would conduct in person, and the concert programme was printed on finest silk. This was an occasion beyond his wildest dreams.
Then fate struck its tragic blow. The King fell ill, the Coronation was postponed, and the concert cancelled. The Ode was never to be performed as
part of any subsequent Coronation celebration and only emerged more than half a year later in Sheffield, where it was played in a concert with other music. It has hardly been performed ever since.
Elgar wrote to a friend:
“Don’t for heaven’s sake sympathise with me – I don’t care a tinker’s damn! It gives me three blessed sunny days in my own country instead of stewing in town. My own interest in the thing ceased, as usual, when I had finished the manuscript. I was biking out in Herefordshire yesterday and the news reached me at a little roadside pub: I said, ‘Give me another pint of cider’.”
But what of the song? Elgar’s original version was written in the style of a serious classical piece, to be sung by a large chorus and soloists accompanied by a full orchestra. But roadside organ-grinders were already playing the tune on every street corner. The publishers realised that they had a potential world-beater on their hands – if only the words were slightly different. They needed a song which was not particularly allied to the King’s Coronation, but which captured a wider public mood and was simple enough for everyone to sing.
In the spring of that same year,
Cecil Rhodes, the now much-criticised architect of Britain’s colonies in Africa, died. He gave a huge bequest to the nation for the further expansion of the Empire. At last the publishers had something to latch on to.
Benson was asked to rewrite the words. He obliged, and with a nod to Cecil Rhodes’s bequest, came up with the time-honoured lines:
“Wider still and wider, shall your bounds be set,
God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.”
The popularity of Land of Hope was sensational, but grew to be a sort of curse for Elgar, overshadowing much of the wonderful music he produced. There were also two symphonies, one from 1908 and the other from 1911; a violin concerto, perhaps the most romantic of all time in 1910 and a musical study of Shakespeare’s Falstaff followed in 1913. In 1919 came his Cello Concerto in E Minor. There were also the choral masterpieces: The Dream of Gerontius, a setting of the epic poem of life and death by Cardinal
Newman, and the two Biblical oratorios – The Apostles and The Kingdom. All this, as well as the famous Enigma Variations, and many other works came from his pen but for years most of it was ignored. Indeed, some still believe Land of Hope and Glory was all he ever wrote.
In 1924, when he conducted a vast choir and orchestra at the opening of Wembley Stadium, he had wished to showcase some new music but bitterly remarked, “All they want is Land of Hope!” Given the nature of those fateful lyrics, too, he has also been seen as nothing more than a Colonial tub-thumper, a standard-bearer for a long-gone Edwardian age of Empire.
The real Elgar was none of these. He was a passionate, self-effacing genius who gave us some of the greatest masterpieces of music. Who cannot fail to be moved by the strains of Nimrod, the sonorous melancholy of his cello concerto or the majesty of The Dream of Gerontius?
For librettist Benson, too, the song became a mixed blessing. Despite writing the lyrics of what is undoubtedly the best-known song in the English language, this wellrespected poet, novelist and literary critic is now virtually forgotten, and his most famous words are often ascribed to Rudyard Kipling.
Elgar once said: “I like to look on the composer’s vocation as the old troubadours or bards did. In those days it was no disgrace for a man to be turned on to step in front of an army and inspire the people with a song. For my own part, I know that there are a lot of people who like to celebrate events with music. To these people I have given tunes. Is that wrong? Why should I write a fugue or something which won’t appeal to anyone, when the people yearn for things which can stir them?”
Stir them he did, but it is ironic that the little song based on a tune he wrote so long ago should be the piece for which he is most remembered.
The BBC Proms return to the Royal Albert Hall on 19 July. The Elgar Festival starts on 30 May in and around Worcester. See Diary, p82-83. Our thanks to John Lapworth who sent in his collection of Elgar articles and memorabilia when he saw our ‘Coming Next Issue’ page in the spring edition. John volunteered at Elgar’s Birthplace Museum for over 20 years. John, we take our hat off to you!