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For many of us, the music of Edward Elgar is instantly recognisable, | 0:00:04 | 0:00:09 | |
characteristic of the confident, Edwardian age he lived in | 0:00:09 | 0:00:13 | |
and part of the national heritage, | 0:00:13 | 0:00:15 | |
just like the man. | 0:00:15 | 0:00:17 | |
But we are the victims of one of the wiliest image consultants of the last century - | 0:00:18 | 0:00:22 | |
Elgar himself. | 0:00:22 | 0:00:25 | |
He particularly enjoyed bamboozling posterity. | 0:00:26 | 0:00:30 | |
As a contemporary of Puccini and Mahler, | 0:00:30 | 0:00:33 | |
Elgar wrote music that even today challenges our preconceptions. | 0:00:33 | 0:00:37 | |
There we go. | 0:00:44 | 0:00:46 | |
And it doesn't feel, really, like Elgar's world. | 0:00:46 | 0:00:48 | |
It's visceral and comes right out of the guts of the music. | 0:00:48 | 0:00:52 | |
Although his home life seemed a model of decorum, | 0:00:55 | 0:00:58 | |
this man of many moods was always falling in love. | 0:00:58 | 0:01:01 | |
And unflinching new evidence from one of the women who knew him best | 0:01:01 | 0:01:06 | |
reveals what sort of man he was. | 0:01:06 | 0:01:08 | |
Gosh! Well, that is quite a letter | 0:01:08 | 0:01:11 | |
In his lifetime, he was known for being complex and difficult. | 0:01:14 | 0:01:18 | |
His friends realised he deliberately hid himself behind a mask of respectability. | 0:01:18 | 0:01:24 | |
But they have now gone | 0:01:25 | 0:01:27 | |
and as the years have passed, it's the mask that survived. | 0:01:27 | 0:01:32 | |
The real Elgar is only now being recovered. | 0:01:32 | 0:01:36 | |
'His eyes were restlessly moving all the time.' | 0:01:37 | 0:01:39 | |
Up and down, left and right. That restless energy. | 0:01:39 | 0:01:44 | |
And, for a moment, I had this uncanny feeling that, at last, I knew him and what he would have been like. | 0:01:44 | 0:01:51 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:01:58 | 0:02:01 | |
'Ages ago, when I was a kid, I remember an ad on the TV' | 0:02:15 | 0:02:21 | |
that was for tomato sauce, ketchup. | 0:02:21 | 0:02:24 | |
-< In Venezuela? -In Venezuela. | 0:02:24 | 0:02:27 | |
Our headmaster would play records to us, | 0:02:29 | 0:02:32 | |
so in three or four-minute chunks, he played us The Dream Of Gerontius | 0:02:32 | 0:02:36 | |
on Saturday mornings, before our cornflakes. | 0:02:36 | 0:02:39 | |
He really clicked with me | 0:02:39 | 0:02:41 | |
when, I remember it distinctly, | 0:02:41 | 0:02:44 | |
a specific performance of the Enigma Variations in the Albert Hall. | 0:02:44 | 0:02:49 | |
I don't think I had a recording at home | 0:02:50 | 0:02:53 | |
but there was a recording at school | 0:02:53 | 0:02:55 | |
conducted by Toscanini. | 0:02:55 | 0:02:57 | |
I tremble to think how many times I've heard it. | 0:02:57 | 0:03:01 | |
It's always fresh. | 0:03:01 | 0:03:02 | |
Absolutely remember getting to the climax, the Glimpse of God, | 0:03:05 | 0:03:10 | |
and, of course, that is such an unusual moment in music | 0:03:10 | 0:03:16 | |
that it left an indelible mark. | 0:03:16 | 0:03:20 | |
The bottle like that and the sauce coming down, down, down | 0:03:25 | 0:03:30 | |
and when it was reaching the food, whatever it was - chips, probably - | 0:03:30 | 0:03:33 | |
-Pomp And Circumstance March No.1 was sounding. -SHE SINGS | 0:03:33 | 0:03:40 | |
That was the heroic thing, finally the ketchup got onto the chip. | 0:03:40 | 0:03:46 | |
MUSIC: "Pomp And Circumstance March No.1 | 0:03:46 | 0:03:50 | |
It may have become a rousing, patriotic tune | 0:03:50 | 0:03:53 | |
but Land Of Hope And Glory began life without any words | 0:03:53 | 0:03:57 | |
simply as the middle section of an orchestral march. | 0:03:57 | 0:04:01 | |
Like much of Elgar's music, | 0:04:01 | 0:04:03 | |
if you do what he wanted and imagine you have never heard it before, | 0:04:03 | 0:04:07 | |
it's not quite what it seems. | 0:04:07 | 0:04:10 | |
It's not pretentious, it's not pompous, | 0:04:10 | 0:04:13 | |
it's just wonderfully open and sincere. | 0:04:13 | 0:04:16 | |
And that's what, um... | 0:04:16 | 0:04:18 | |
totally embraces me, and I'm not even British at all! | 0:04:20 | 0:04:24 | |
He had a knack of expressing a national mood in a very personal way. | 0:04:26 | 0:04:32 | |
When you hear Land Of Hope And Glory, you shouldn't think of it as a tub-thumping song | 0:04:32 | 0:04:37 | |
but of the fact that it's really quite a sad tune. | 0:04:37 | 0:04:40 | |
It has Elgar's trademark languishing sixth | 0:04:40 | 0:04:44 | |
falling to a fifth. That's to say, this note... | 0:04:44 | 0:04:48 | |
That's an interesting harmony Elgar uses a lot | 0:04:52 | 0:04:55 | |
because that... | 0:04:55 | 0:04:56 | |
is an inversion of a minor chord, so think sad, perhaps, | 0:04:56 | 0:05:00 | |
and then that...is a major chord. | 0:05:00 | 0:05:03 | |
So that's sad turning to happy. | 0:05:03 | 0:05:05 | |
The other thing that Elgar was very good at was this sort of thing, | 0:05:05 | 0:05:09 | |
same technique but the opposite way round... | 0:05:09 | 0:05:12 | |
PLAYS SIXTH THEN FIFTH | 0:05:12 | 0:05:13 | |
And there we have a sixth, a sort of an inversion of a major chord... | 0:05:13 | 0:05:19 | |
And again there's this drooping, sort of sad thing. PLAYS FIFTH | 0:05:19 | 0:05:24 | |
So Elgar uses a lot of these drooping sixths | 0:05:24 | 0:05:27 | |
This tune... POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE MARCH No.1 | 0:05:27 | 0:05:32 | |
..actually has it and as soon as you've realised that is the key aspect of that tune | 0:05:32 | 0:05:37 | |
it can never be a triumphalist anthem again. | 0:05:37 | 0:05:39 | |
The Pomp And Circumstance Marches are brilliant marches | 0:05:58 | 0:06:02 | |
but they're just ringing the doorbell when it comes to learning about what's in the Elgar house. | 0:06:02 | 0:06:07 | |
In old age, Elgar cherished the memory of this cottage | 0:06:18 | 0:06:23 | |
a few miles outside Worcester, where he was born in 1857. | 0:06:23 | 0:06:27 | |
But his parents moved back into the city before he was two. | 0:06:30 | 0:06:34 | |
So this wasn't a real memory but an icon of his infancy | 0:06:34 | 0:06:38 | |
and of the humble origins which made him both proud and ashamed all his life. | 0:06:38 | 0:06:43 | |
He brought friends here. | 0:06:48 | 0:06:50 | |
Some of them spotted that he was building his own legend, | 0:06:50 | 0:06:53 | |
doing what he could to manipulate the verdict of posterity. | 0:06:53 | 0:06:57 | |
"I know nothing about music," he would say. | 0:06:59 | 0:07:02 | |
True, in one sense, because he never had a composition lesson in his life. | 0:07:02 | 0:07:06 | |
Yet he lived and breathed it as he worked in his father's music shop | 0:07:07 | 0:07:12 | |
and played the violin professionally, as well as the piano, organ, bassoon and trombone. | 0:07:12 | 0:07:18 | |
As a composer, between the success of his Enigma Variations in 1899 | 0:07:25 | 0:07:31 | |
and the Cello Concerto 20 years later, | 0:07:31 | 0:07:34 | |
he was the dominant force in British music, | 0:07:34 | 0:07:37 | |
the greatest native composer since Purcell. | 0:07:37 | 0:07:40 | |
But with the rise of Stravinsky and Schoenberg | 0:07:49 | 0:07:52 | |
his music went into decline. | 0:07:52 | 0:07:55 | |
He was written off as a relic of empire, jingoistic and out of date. | 0:07:57 | 0:08:02 | |
Now free of imperial clutter, | 0:08:07 | 0:08:10 | |
the range and complexity of his music is being rediscovered. | 0:08:10 | 0:08:15 | |
It's the deeply personal voice | 0:08:22 | 0:08:24 | |
of a man wrestling with the contradictions of his own life. | 0:08:24 | 0:08:28 | |
The music seems, to me, to suggest the sort of fractured, | 0:08:29 | 0:08:33 | |
troublesome visionary who was up one minute, down the next, | 0:08:33 | 0:08:38 | |
found life very, very difficult and was extremely emotional. | 0:08:38 | 0:08:42 | |
The appearance he presented to the world was very different. | 0:08:42 | 0:08:47 | |
His passport lists his height as 5'10", | 0:08:48 | 0:08:52 | |
his eyes, hazel, | 0:08:52 | 0:08:54 | |
his nose large and aquiline, | 0:08:54 | 0:08:56 | |
the right equipment for the gentleman he aspired to be. | 0:08:56 | 0:08:59 | |
His knighthood, at the age of 47, sealed the deal. | 0:09:00 | 0:09:04 | |
But it led both man and music to be misunderstood. | 0:09:04 | 0:09:08 | |
That stiff upper lip had much to answer for. | 0:09:09 | 0:09:13 | |
I think it was probably Elgar's moustache! | 0:09:13 | 0:09:15 | |
There are two early pictures, one as a young man, without one, | 0:09:18 | 0:09:21 | |
and he looks sort of incomplete. | 0:09:21 | 0:09:23 | |
It covers almost the whole of the mouth. | 0:09:25 | 0:09:28 | |
Bit macho. | 0:09:29 | 0:09:31 | |
A retired colonel or general. | 0:09:34 | 0:09:36 | |
He just looked like a country gentleman. | 0:09:38 | 0:09:40 | |
Very often at the beginning and ends of pieces | 0:09:40 | 0:09:44 | |
we feel this strength of character | 0:09:44 | 0:09:46 | |
but buried in the core of the works, and perhaps more essential to their meaning, | 0:09:46 | 0:09:52 | |
is an entirely clean-shaven | 0:09:52 | 0:09:53 | |
vision, really, of a childlike, | 0:09:53 | 0:09:58 | |
even feminine musical character that's lurking beneath. | 0:09:58 | 0:10:02 | |
Because he looked so robustly English, | 0:10:02 | 0:10:06 | |
people think his music is too. | 0:10:06 | 0:10:08 | |
But in his own day, it was regarded as being more emotional than was proper for an Englishman. | 0:10:08 | 0:10:14 | |
I find his music as dramatic and lyric as Puccini | 0:10:15 | 0:10:17 | |
and as interestingly, harmonically, as Strauss. | 0:10:17 | 0:10:20 | |
But it's that veneer in his music which... | 0:10:20 | 0:10:25 | |
which I think people take as very English. | 0:10:25 | 0:10:28 | |
I think of him, because they were contemporaries, strangely, | 0:10:28 | 0:10:32 | |
as a sort of English Mahler. | 0:10:32 | 0:10:35 | |
There could be the outside world and then the deep inside world. | 0:10:35 | 0:10:38 | |
People are always talking about irony in Mahler | 0:10:38 | 0:10:41 | |
and they don't seem to have seen it in Elgar, but his music is full of irony | 0:10:41 | 0:10:44 | |
even when it's moving with terrific rhythmic vigour. | 0:10:44 | 0:10:48 | |
Pomp And Circumstance, we always think, don't we... | 0:10:48 | 0:10:52 | |
That sort of thing. Or we think... | 0:10:52 | 0:10:55 | |
And so on. Marvellous, perky rhythms and strutting things. | 0:10:58 | 0:11:02 | |
But, of course, it's also... | 0:11:02 | 0:11:04 | |
Nothing very Pomp And Circumstance about that, that's immensely menacing. | 0:11:09 | 0:11:15 | |
Those marches, the actual quick march sections, | 0:11:15 | 0:11:18 | |
are sometimes very uneasy. | 0:11:18 | 0:11:21 | |
The harmony is shifting all over the place | 0:11:21 | 0:11:23 | |
and I think people will often see the rumbustious Elgar | 0:11:23 | 0:11:27 | |
as being open and full of vigour and Edwardian swagger | 0:11:27 | 0:11:31 | |
and they've missed the fact that it's actually melancholic, | 0:11:31 | 0:11:35 | |
which is a deep irony which you see throughout his music. | 0:11:35 | 0:11:38 | |
-And an ambivalence in his own character. -Absolutely so, yes. | 0:11:38 | 0:11:42 | |
It's what makes him a great artist. | 0:11:42 | 0:11:44 | |
I think he knew very well | 0:11:45 | 0:11:47 | |
what a complicated being he was. | 0:11:47 | 0:11:50 | |
# Deep in my soul | 0:11:52 | 0:11:59 | |
# That tender secret dwells... | 0:11:59 | 0:12:07 | |
Deep In My Soul, a tender secret dwells. | 0:12:13 | 0:12:17 | |
It seems to suit Elgar's enigmatic character. | 0:12:17 | 0:12:22 | |
# Lonely and lost to light for evermore | 0:12:22 | 0:12:30 | |
# Save when to thine | 0:12:31 | 0:12:38 | |
# My heart responsive swells | 0:12:38 | 0:12:46 | |
# Then trembles | 0:12:46 | 0:12:51 | |
# Into silence | 0:12:52 | 0:12:55 | |
# Into silence as before | 0:12:55 | 0:13:03 | |
# As before... | 0:13:03 | 0:13:06 | |
He wanted to be accepted, he wanted to be praised and appreciated, | 0:13:08 | 0:13:12 | |
but inside, there was a trembling heart, | 0:13:12 | 0:13:15 | |
a nervous disposition. | 0:13:15 | 0:13:17 | |
# There, in its centre | 0:13:17 | 0:13:24 | |
# A sepulchral lamp | 0:13:24 | 0:13:30 | |
# Burns the slow flame | 0:13:30 | 0:13:37 | |
# Eternal but unseen... # | 0:13:37 | 0:13:44 | |
So much of his music is quite intensely private. | 0:13:44 | 0:13:47 | |
He's revealing things that he does not reveal in any other way. | 0:13:47 | 0:13:53 | |
# Which not the darkness of Despair can damp | 0:13:53 | 0:14:06 | |
# Though vain its ray | 0:14:06 | 0:14:13 | |
# As it had never been | 0:14:13 | 0:14:23 | |
# Through vain its ray as it had never been... | 0:14:23 | 0:14:29 | |
The ambiguity of his musical persona | 0:14:30 | 0:14:33 | |
is at the heart of what makes his music valuable and interesting. | 0:14:33 | 0:14:38 | |
And this ambiguity is actually essential, I think, to understanding both the music and the man. | 0:14:39 | 0:14:44 | |
Elgar was brought up in the shadow of Worcester Cathedral. | 0:14:44 | 0:14:49 | |
But, for years, he was an outsider, | 0:14:49 | 0:14:51 | |
more often seen in the new Roman Catholic church of St George's | 0:14:51 | 0:14:55 | |
where his father was organist and his mother a devout worshipper. | 0:14:55 | 0:14:59 | |
As the son of a shopkeeper, and a Catholic too, | 0:14:59 | 0:15:04 | |
he never belonged to the musical establishment. | 0:15:04 | 0:15:06 | |
He discovered what he was up against when he wrote his masterly setting | 0:15:10 | 0:15:14 | |
of Cardinal Newman's poem the Dream of Gerontius, | 0:15:14 | 0:15:16 | |
which is about a dying man and the journey of his soul after death. | 0:15:16 | 0:15:20 | |
"It stank of incense," someone said, | 0:15:26 | 0:15:29 | |
and Worcester Cathedral censored any mention of the Virgin Mary in performance, | 0:15:29 | 0:15:34 | |
a ban that lasted almost half a century. | 0:15:34 | 0:15:38 | |
They were very dubious, because this was a Catholic work | 0:15:38 | 0:15:42 | |
and all the mariolatory, all the references to the Virgin, | 0:15:42 | 0:15:47 | |
are just replaced with asterisks and dots. | 0:15:47 | 0:15:50 | |
Apparently, the singers were just left to get over it and mumble away as best they could. | 0:16:07 | 0:16:12 | |
Was that with Elgar's agreement? | 0:16:13 | 0:16:15 | |
It was the only way to do it. | 0:16:15 | 0:16:17 | |
Yes, certainly with Elgar's agreement, he conducted it. | 0:16:17 | 0:16:22 | |
Gerontius scarred Elgar. "My heart," he said after the first performance, | 0:16:23 | 0:16:28 | |
"is now shut against every religious feeling and every soft, gentle impulse forever." | 0:16:28 | 0:16:33 | |
It had been a disaster. The choir was under-rehearsed and out of tune. | 0:16:33 | 0:16:38 | |
"I really wish I were dead over and over again," he said, | 0:16:38 | 0:16:42 | |
"but I dare not, for the sake of my relatives, do the job myself." | 0:16:42 | 0:16:47 | |
Never again did he write what could be seen as a Catholic work. | 0:16:48 | 0:16:52 | |
Instead, he turned to the Anglican Church for advice | 0:16:52 | 0:16:56 | |
and used the Bible for his text. | 0:16:56 | 0:16:58 | |
No-one could object to that. | 0:16:58 | 0:17:01 | |
And no-one did. | 0:17:01 | 0:17:04 | |
It brought him much more into the fold. | 0:17:07 | 0:17:10 | |
As he conjured up the sunrise seen from the Temple roof in Jerusalem, | 0:17:15 | 0:17:20 | |
he worked Jewish music into his score as well. | 0:17:20 | 0:17:23 | |
He wrote a part for the shofar, the ceremonial ram's horn of the synagogue, | 0:17:30 | 0:17:35 | |
a startling choice even a century later. | 0:17:35 | 0:17:38 | |
As a conductor, standing in front of the Dawn scene of the Apostles is one of the great things | 0:18:39 | 0:18:44 | |
because the orchestration is completely bizarre. | 0:18:44 | 0:18:48 | |
The sound of this high tam-tam in the background, shimmering away, | 0:18:48 | 0:18:54 | |
is completely extraordinary, and the shofar on one side, and this huge orchestral crescendo. | 0:18:54 | 0:18:59 | |
It's visceral and comes right out of the guts of the music. | 0:18:59 | 0:19:05 | |
Elgar had come a long way since succeeding his father as organist at St George's church. | 0:19:51 | 0:19:58 | |
At that stage, he had few compositions to his name | 0:19:58 | 0:20:01 | |
and fewer prospects. | 0:20:01 | 0:20:03 | |
But a determined woman in her late 30s had turned up on his doorstep, | 0:20:03 | 0:20:08 | |
the daughter of a major general. | 0:20:08 | 0:20:10 | |
Her name was Alice Roberts and she wanted piano lessons. | 0:20:10 | 0:20:14 | |
This prompted Elgar to write a new song. | 0:20:14 | 0:20:17 | |
# Is she not passing fair | 0:20:19 | 0:20:23 | |
# She who my love... | 0:20:23 | 0:20:26 | |
There's a marvellous chord progression which I really love | 0:20:26 | 0:20:29 | |
where Elgar is asking himself, "is she not passing fair? Passing fair..." | 0:20:29 | 0:20:35 | |
And you can just see the furrowing of the brow as he has these chords. | 0:20:35 | 0:20:41 | |
You have that She...is...passing...fair | 0:20:41 | 0:20:46 | |
Good. And then it goes... | 0:20:46 | 0:20:48 | |
Pa...ssing...fair? | 0:20:48 | 0:20:52 | |
# Then she is passing fair | 0:20:52 | 0:20:58 | |
# Pa-assing fair | 0:20:58 | 0:21:04 | |
And that's one of the best expressed question marks in music that I know. | 0:21:04 | 0:21:07 | |
# I love so well. | 0:21:07 | 0:21:12 | |
And I think he wasn't sure. | 0:21:12 | 0:21:14 | |
It took Elgar two years to pop the question. | 0:21:15 | 0:21:18 | |
Frustrating for a woman nudging 40. | 0:21:18 | 0:21:21 | |
But marriage was to bring him companionship, money - though never quite enough - | 0:21:21 | 0:21:26 | |
and a daughter, Carice. | 0:21:26 | 0:21:28 | |
And Alice had no doubts. | 0:21:28 | 0:21:31 | |
She came from a completely different - more county, we would say - background. | 0:21:31 | 0:21:36 | |
Her family were shocked that she was marrying so far beneath her. | 0:21:36 | 0:21:40 | |
Perhaps that gave her the energy to want to make a success of him. | 0:21:40 | 0:21:43 | |
Alice Roberts was a published novelist and poet | 0:21:43 | 0:21:47 | |
but after her marriage she gave up her own creative ambitions | 0:21:47 | 0:21:51 | |
and devoted herself to her husband. | 0:21:51 | 0:21:54 | |
For some reason, she believed when she met Mr Elgar | 0:21:54 | 0:21:59 | |
that this man was a genius. | 0:21:59 | 0:22:01 | |
They spoke in a private baby language. | 0:22:01 | 0:22:04 | |
He called her Chicky, she called him Eddoo. | 0:22:04 | 0:22:09 | |
The parlou rmaid and their grand London house some years later, Louise Chapman, | 0:22:09 | 0:22:14 | |
fleshed out the Elgar menage. | 0:22:14 | 0:22:16 | |
Quite a big assortment for breakfast - cold ham, and he used to have kedgeree a lot. | 0:22:17 | 0:22:23 | |
His newspaper used to be pressed, | 0:22:23 | 0:22:25 | |
I used to have to press it, and also his shoelaces. | 0:22:25 | 0:22:30 | |
After breakfast he'd go to his music room | 0:22:30 | 0:22:34 | |
and I could see him sitting at the piano and composing. | 0:22:34 | 0:22:38 | |
Not very smoothly. Very hesitant in a lot of the passages. | 0:22:38 | 0:22:43 | |
And Lady Elgar used to do all his scoring for him. | 0:22:44 | 0:22:50 | |
"Try so-and-so," she'd say. "We'll go through so-and-so." | 0:22:50 | 0:22:55 | |
"Eddoo! Eddoo!" she used to go. | 0:22:56 | 0:23:01 | |
He was essentially a lazy man | 0:23:01 | 0:23:04 | |
but Elgar was easily diverted from work. | 0:23:04 | 0:23:08 | |
Alice, his wife, she jolly well kept him to the grindstone, | 0:23:10 | 0:23:15 | |
said, "Go and compose. That's your purpose in life." | 0:23:15 | 0:23:18 | |
"My word, doesn't she keep him at it?" said one Malvern friend. | 0:23:18 | 0:23:22 | |
Another, the young headmistress Rosa Burley, went on holiday with the Elgars to Germany. | 0:23:22 | 0:23:28 | |
In her memoirs, she spoke of the Elgars' facade of married bliss. | 0:23:28 | 0:23:33 | |
Alice, she noted, was not so much a wife as a doting mother of a gifted son. | 0:23:33 | 0:23:40 | |
While Elgar enjoyed embarrassing Alice with his coarse remarks. | 0:23:40 | 0:23:45 | |
He always had a man-size chip on his shoulder about being lower middle-class | 0:23:45 | 0:23:49 | |
and wanting to mix with the slightly smarter set. | 0:23:49 | 0:23:52 | |
I think he wasn't an entirely loveable character. | 0:23:54 | 0:23:58 | |
He could be very prickly and rude. Actually rude. | 0:23:59 | 0:24:03 | |
Terribly insecure. Reading his correspondence, it's unbelievable. | 0:24:05 | 0:24:09 | |
Very gauche and offensive. | 0:24:12 | 0:24:14 | |
I don't think he was a very sweet man, | 0:24:16 | 0:24:20 | |
he was probably very angry. | 0:24:20 | 0:24:22 | |
Elgar's mercurial portrait of Shakespeare's Falstaff | 0:24:22 | 0:24:26 | |
encompasses his boorishness and his wit, | 0:24:26 | 0:24:29 | |
unstable in both tonality and mood. | 0:24:29 | 0:24:32 | |
Clearly Elgar saw himself in Falstaff. | 0:24:36 | 0:24:40 | |
The opening uses almost all 12 notes of the chromatic scale | 0:24:41 | 0:24:45 | |
and it's hard to say what key it's in. | 0:24:45 | 0:24:48 | |
And he produces different themes, | 0:24:49 | 0:24:51 | |
which show different aspects of Falstaff - | 0:24:51 | 0:24:54 | |
his braggadocio, his thrustingness, | 0:24:54 | 0:24:57 | |
his martial prowess. | 0:24:57 | 0:24:58 | |
A man who got on with ladies, but also a boastful man. | 0:25:08 | 0:25:12 | |
In connection with Falstaff's boasting, | 0:25:12 | 0:25:14 | |
Elgar writes the most extraordinarily discordant piece... | 0:25:14 | 0:25:17 | |
HE HUMS DISCORDANTLY | 0:25:17 | 0:25:20 | |
..all over the orchestra. | 0:25:20 | 0:25:22 | |
So that with these contrapuntal binding togethers | 0:25:25 | 0:25:29 | |
of these different themes which are aspects of Falstaff's personality, | 0:25:29 | 0:25:32 | |
Elgar is actually binding together different aspects of his own personality. | 0:25:32 | 0:25:36 | |
The more disguises he could wear in his music, the better his music got. | 0:25:39 | 0:25:43 | |
The piece that launched his career was supposed to be about his friends pictured within, | 0:25:45 | 0:25:49 | |
but it was just as much about himself. | 0:25:49 | 0:25:52 | |
The Enigma Variations is perfect. | 0:25:53 | 0:25:55 | |
I don't think there's a note wrong with it. | 0:25:55 | 0:25:57 | |
It shows you everything about him - the impatience, | 0:26:01 | 0:26:04 | |
the romanticism, the exuberance. | 0:26:04 | 0:26:07 | |
It's all there in tiny little snapshots, wonderfully wrought. | 0:26:07 | 0:26:12 | |
From the first note to the last, there is nothing you can say. | 0:26:16 | 0:26:20 | |
You are in his power. | 0:26:20 | 0:26:22 | |
The best-known Variation is often played today as a solemn memorial - | 0:26:25 | 0:26:29 | |
not at all what was in Elgar's heart. | 0:26:29 | 0:26:32 | |
He wrote it for one of his closest male friends, his publisher August Jaeger... | 0:26:32 | 0:26:36 | |
his Nimrod. | 0:26:36 | 0:26:39 | |
He did have this long sequence of nicknames for him, | 0:26:39 | 0:26:42 | |
of which the most famous is Nimrod, the biblical hunter. | 0:26:42 | 0:26:45 | |
Jaeger is German for "hunter" | 0:26:45 | 0:26:47 | |
and that's the name given to the most passionate of all of the Variations, | 0:26:47 | 0:26:53 | |
far surpassing his wife's own Variation in intimacy and ecstasy of expression. | 0:26:53 | 0:26:59 | |
NIMROD PLAYS | 0:26:59 | 0:27:02 | |
I find it one of the most sublime and beautiful gifts | 0:27:04 | 0:27:10 | |
that someone, a composer, can give to a friend. | 0:27:10 | 0:27:13 | |
"I'm giving myself to you, whoever you are." | 0:27:13 | 0:27:17 | |
And I'm sorry but I feel so happy when I listen to it, I can't cry. | 0:27:26 | 0:27:31 | |
It is very noble, it's very generous, | 0:27:39 | 0:27:41 | |
it's very warm, it's very grand, it's a great arc of melody. | 0:27:41 | 0:27:48 | |
Without being... | 0:27:50 | 0:27:52 | |
Without too much pageantry. | 0:27:53 | 0:27:55 | |
Here I am. I'm going to say that for the third time | 0:28:07 | 0:28:12 | |
and look to find this climax. It's very difficult. | 0:28:12 | 0:28:16 | |
I cry but I don't cry for sadness, I cry for emotion. | 0:28:23 | 0:28:28 | |
-NIMROD SWELLS -Here - look at that. | 0:28:28 | 0:28:30 | |
The Enigma Variations propelled Elgar into national orbit. | 0:28:41 | 0:28:45 | |
Within five years, the tradesman's son became a knight of the realm | 0:28:45 | 0:28:51 | |
and his wife became Lady Elgar - vindication at last. | 0:28:51 | 0:28:55 | |
She moaned, she complained. | 0:28:55 | 0:28:57 | |
On the day that a tea party was held to celebrate the award of his knighthood, | 0:28:57 | 0:29:02 | |
Carice was reported to say to the guests, | 0:29:02 | 0:29:05 | |
"I'm so glad that Daddy's going to be knighted. It puts Mother back where she should be." | 0:29:05 | 0:29:10 | |
I don't think that even a very precocious child would understand the social niceties that lie behind that | 0:29:10 | 0:29:15 | |
without having been instructed by her mother, maybe over many years, | 0:29:15 | 0:29:19 | |
that her mother is better than the station her father has landed her in. | 0:29:19 | 0:29:23 | |
These things mattered to her father too. | 0:29:24 | 0:29:26 | |
On a government form at the start of the First World War, | 0:29:26 | 0:29:30 | |
the knight was asked for his occupation. | 0:29:30 | 0:29:33 | |
Composing didn't seem to count. | 0:29:33 | 0:29:35 | |
He was appointed one of the earliest members of the Order of Merit by the King | 0:29:36 | 0:29:41 | |
and woe betide anyone who forgot it. | 0:29:41 | 0:29:44 | |
He was invited to the Royal Academy banquet, | 0:29:44 | 0:29:47 | |
which is one of the great social occasions of the year, | 0:29:47 | 0:29:51 | |
and he was very upset because he didn't like the table he'd been put at | 0:29:51 | 0:29:55 | |
and on the invitation card, they missed the OM off | 0:29:55 | 0:29:58 | |
so he left it very early and he wrote to a friend of his | 0:29:58 | 0:30:02 | |
and said, "I went to the Athenaeum Club and had a herring." | 0:30:02 | 0:30:05 | |
He was now marking many of his scores with the instruction "nobilmente", | 0:30:05 | 0:30:11 | |
his own musical term for the nobility he craved. | 0:30:11 | 0:30:14 | |
It was part of his bamboozling technique. | 0:30:14 | 0:30:18 | |
If a composer could write such undeniably noble music as the opening theme of his First Symphony, | 0:30:18 | 0:30:25 | |
then surely he himself must be noble too. | 0:30:25 | 0:30:29 | |
Elgar was a man who thought in terms of tunes | 0:30:29 | 0:30:34 | |
and to make a symphony out of a tune is a devil of a difficult thing to do. | 0:30:34 | 0:30:41 | |
And so you've got this... | 0:30:41 | 0:30:43 | |
PLAYS GENTLY | 0:30:43 | 0:30:46 | |
..and so on. "This great, beautiful tune," I think his wife called it. | 0:30:58 | 0:31:02 | |
It's the most successful English symphony ever written, | 0:31:02 | 0:31:07 | |
with 100 performances around the world in its first year alone. | 0:31:07 | 0:31:11 | |
Other musicians - the younger composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, for instance - knew it broke the rules. | 0:31:11 | 0:31:16 | |
As a violinist himself, Elgar would have been aware that his chosen key - A flat - | 0:31:17 | 0:31:22 | |
was awkward for the strings and it's still the only A flat symphony in the repertoire. | 0:31:22 | 0:31:27 | |
But he wanted a particular sound which he achieved | 0:31:27 | 0:31:31 | |
through his choice of key and his strange orchestration. | 0:31:31 | 0:31:34 | |
The melody is given to fairly heavy woodwind and viola. | 0:31:34 | 0:31:38 | |
The violas, cellos and double basses play the bass detache. | 0:31:38 | 0:31:43 | |
Two mysterious A flats. | 0:31:50 | 0:31:53 | |
ORCHESTRA CONTINUES | 0:31:53 | 0:31:59 | |
Just in two parts - the tune and the bass. | 0:32:09 | 0:32:13 | |
The inner harmony is with two soft, muted horns. | 0:32:19 | 0:32:26 | |
And Elgar puts in that muted horn counterpoint | 0:32:38 | 0:32:41 | |
so that just for a moment, it's not in two parts. | 0:32:41 | 0:32:45 | |
But he just wanted a thread of sound. | 0:32:53 | 0:32:56 | |
When I think of a student who'd brought that scoring to any competition tutor, | 0:32:59 | 0:33:04 | |
he would have put his pencil through it and said, "This will not be heard." | 0:33:04 | 0:33:08 | |
To my mind, when I look at it still, it looks all wrong, | 0:33:08 | 0:33:13 | |
but it sounds all right. | 0:33:13 | 0:33:15 | |
Here indeed we have a mystery and a miracle. | 0:33:16 | 0:33:21 | |
MUSIC SWELLS | 0:33:22 | 0:33:25 | |
Fantastic drum crescendo there! | 0:33:31 | 0:33:33 | |
There can be in his orchestral music a bit of bombast, | 0:33:43 | 0:33:46 | |
which people feel is just Edwardian and part of a bygone era. | 0:33:46 | 0:33:50 | |
I don't think it should come across as bombast, | 0:33:54 | 0:33:57 | |
it should come across as very thrillingly, muscular passion. | 0:33:57 | 0:34:02 | |
Everybody's image of him as being associated with the Edwardian period, | 0:34:04 | 0:34:09 | |
supported by these photographs that he loved having taken. | 0:34:09 | 0:34:12 | |
He was now a celebrity, | 0:34:19 | 0:34:20 | |
with a keen eye for the opportunities that offered. | 0:34:20 | 0:34:23 | |
He was always thinking of promoting his image. | 0:34:30 | 0:34:34 | |
We would say nowadays in that respect, he's very much of our time. | 0:34:34 | 0:34:38 | |
Many of them seem exquisitely planned in the tiniest detail. | 0:34:51 | 0:34:55 | |
If he's caught, as it were, composing Gerontius, | 0:34:55 | 0:34:58 | |
the composition of the picture is excellent. | 0:34:58 | 0:35:01 | |
He fills the frame and he's leaning to display the Roman nose and the imperial moustache | 0:35:01 | 0:35:07 | |
and effortlessly his pen is gliding across the page as he inscribes the score. | 0:35:07 | 0:35:11 | |
Indeed, he claimed this picture caught him just as he'd written the final notes. | 0:35:11 | 0:35:17 | |
I think Elgar was very self-aware. | 0:35:18 | 0:35:20 | |
There are few people who have had themselves photographed on their death bed, | 0:35:20 | 0:35:24 | |
pretending to be dead already. | 0:35:24 | 0:35:25 | |
That is the act of somebody who knows exactly what his appearance is in life. | 0:35:25 | 0:35:32 | |
This is one photograph never published in his lifetime. | 0:35:33 | 0:35:38 | |
It was taken while he was away from home, | 0:35:38 | 0:35:40 | |
a telling glimpse of the unvarnished Elgar - | 0:35:40 | 0:35:43 | |
a romantic artist with a touch of the Bohemian. | 0:35:43 | 0:35:47 | |
There were certain things that were a bit flash about him. | 0:35:51 | 0:35:55 | |
I think there was a side to him that adored beautiful women. | 0:35:55 | 0:35:59 | |
I don't think he was a promiscuous man. | 0:36:01 | 0:36:03 | |
He as very attractive to women and he knew it. | 0:36:03 | 0:36:06 | |
That he managed to have all these heroines and still be married to one woman | 0:36:09 | 0:36:15 | |
is, er, sort of a tribute to his finesse, really, isn't it? | 0:36:15 | 0:36:21 | |
One of Elgar's heroines outshone the rest. | 0:36:23 | 0:36:26 | |
Their relationship, which began in 1910, | 0:36:26 | 0:36:29 | |
remained a tender secret for decades. | 0:36:29 | 0:36:32 | |
It was only uncovered by one of his biographers | 0:36:32 | 0:36:35 | |
after a tip-off from a friend. | 0:36:35 | 0:36:38 | |
He said, "Remember one name - Alice Stuart-Wortley." | 0:36:38 | 0:36:41 | |
I went down to the birthplace and I said to the curator, | 0:36:41 | 0:36:45 | |
"Have you any letters to and from Alice Stuart-Wortley?" | 0:36:45 | 0:36:50 | |
And he gave me a very old fashioned look and he said, "Well, no-one's asked me that before." | 0:36:50 | 0:36:55 | |
And he wandered off and came back with this pile. | 0:36:55 | 0:36:59 | |
I sat at this table, started reading these letters and it's a treasure trove. | 0:36:59 | 0:37:03 | |
I thought, "Here's the real Elgar." | 0:37:03 | 0:37:05 | |
Alice Stuart-Wortley was the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais. | 0:37:05 | 0:37:12 | |
She and her husband Charles, a Conservative MP, | 0:37:12 | 0:37:16 | |
were both musical, had been married for more than 20 years and had a daughter, just like the Elgars. | 0:37:16 | 0:37:22 | |
But whereas Alice Elgar was nine years older than Edward, | 0:37:22 | 0:37:26 | |
Alice Stuart-Wortley was five years younger. | 0:37:26 | 0:37:30 | |
The other Alice was everything she wasn't, in a way. | 0:37:30 | 0:37:34 | |
Perhaps a bit more feminine, a bit more gentle, | 0:37:34 | 0:37:38 | |
a bit more sensual, perhaps. | 0:37:38 | 0:37:40 | |
But it was rather awkward, not to say dangerous, that she had the same name as his wife. | 0:37:40 | 0:37:47 | |
So Elgar gave her the private nickname Windflower | 0:37:47 | 0:37:50 | |
after the delicate wild anemones in his garden, | 0:37:50 | 0:37:54 | |
which he watched being buffeted by the March wind. | 0:37:54 | 0:37:57 | |
They reminded him of her, particularly of the time she came to tea, | 0:37:57 | 0:38:02 | |
and inspired him to persevere with his Violin Concerto | 0:38:02 | 0:38:05 | |
when he was on the point of abandoning it. | 0:38:05 | 0:38:08 | |
It was February 7th 1910, which they kept as an anniversary for the rest of their lives, | 0:38:12 | 0:38:18 | |
because that same evening, Elgar thought up the first of several new themes | 0:38:18 | 0:38:23 | |
which opened the floodgates for the rest of the work. | 0:38:23 | 0:38:26 | |
ORCHESTRA PLAYS | 0:38:26 | 0:38:29 | |
'There is no set way in which you can play the opening of the Violin Concerto.' | 0:38:30 | 0:38:37 | |
The music is so flexible, | 0:38:41 | 0:38:43 | |
so wayward, so stormy... | 0:38:43 | 0:38:46 | |
It's very difficult to cope with it. | 0:38:46 | 0:38:49 | |
The tempo's not settled and tunes are taken up and abandoned and swept away | 0:38:54 | 0:39:00 | |
and we're really longing for the violin to calm things down and say, "Just wait a minute now." | 0:39:00 | 0:39:07 | |
It's a wonderful effect. | 0:39:09 | 0:39:11 | |
From now on, Elgar was in almost daily contact with his Windflower by letter and telephone. | 0:39:33 | 0:39:39 | |
He gave his tender feminine themes the botanical name "anemone nemorosa" | 0:39:39 | 0:39:45 | |
and every spring for the rest of his life, he sent her windflowers. | 0:39:45 | 0:39:49 | |
If he knew his letters would be seen by others, he addressed her as Alice. | 0:40:00 | 0:40:05 | |
But when they were for her eyes only, he always called her Windflower or simply W. | 0:40:05 | 0:40:11 | |
And she seems to have replied in the same way, | 0:40:11 | 0:40:14 | |
though hardly any of her letters have survived. | 0:40:14 | 0:40:18 | |
I suspect Elgar must have destroyed them when he got them, | 0:40:18 | 0:40:21 | |
but she must have reacted well or he wouldn't have gone on writing as he did to her. | 0:40:21 | 0:40:26 | |
-Did he keep many letters that he'd received from other people? -Oh yes. | 0:40:26 | 0:40:30 | |
-So the fact that hers don't survive... -Is interesting. | 0:40:30 | 0:40:35 | |
I think it was a very deep relationship. Whether it was physical or not, I don't know. | 0:40:35 | 0:40:39 | |
This one was written on October 18th, 1910, | 0:40:41 | 0:40:45 | |
and that would be about a month before the first performance of the Violin Concerto | 0:40:45 | 0:40:50 | |
and he starts it with a quotation from the work, | 0:40:50 | 0:40:54 | |
actually the Windflower theme... | 0:40:54 | 0:40:56 | |
HE HUMS | 0:40:56 | 0:40:58 | |
This is how he wanted it to be done. | 0:41:03 | 0:41:05 | |
And this letter comes from 1926 and is rather precious, | 0:41:05 | 0:41:11 | |
that's the dried up remains of some windflowers. | 0:41:11 | 0:41:15 | |
And he says, "The little flowers are now appearing so here are two or three for you." | 0:41:15 | 0:41:21 | |
But there they are - 1926, the year I was born - still there. | 0:41:21 | 0:41:27 | |
And this letter was written in the first few months of the First World War, this is 1914. | 0:41:29 | 0:41:36 | |
He says to her in it, "I can not buy you pearls of untold worth. | 0:41:36 | 0:41:41 | |
"Although I wish them and many other lovely things for you, | 0:41:42 | 0:41:46 | |
"no, I can not buy anything for you so I send you a little scrap of my old, old, lonely life | 0:41:46 | 0:41:53 | |
"in which no-one shared," underlined. | 0:41:53 | 0:41:56 | |
"I had my dreams and I suppose ambitions | 0:41:56 | 0:41:58 | |
"so I send you one of the little schoolbooks which lightened my loneliness," | 0:41:58 | 0:42:04 | |
and what he went on to say after that, we shall never know | 0:42:04 | 0:42:08 | |
because Windflower's daughter cut the rest of the letter away. | 0:42:08 | 0:42:12 | |
It was obviously regarded as too intimate to survive. | 0:42:13 | 0:42:17 | |
At their home in Chelsea, the Stuart-Wortleys sometimes had the Elgars round for dinner. | 0:42:19 | 0:42:24 | |
But Elgar would often drop in by himself. | 0:42:24 | 0:42:27 | |
He and Windflower carved out plenty of time together. | 0:42:27 | 0:42:30 | |
In spring 1910, she went on holiday with her family to Tintagel in Cornwall. | 0:42:32 | 0:42:38 | |
Elgar was soon in hot pursuit. He drove 250 miles and spent two days with her | 0:42:41 | 0:42:47 | |
after her husband had conveniently returned home. | 0:42:47 | 0:42:50 | |
Was that friendship, do you think, entirely innocent? | 0:42:50 | 0:42:54 | |
What do you mean by innocent? | 0:42:57 | 0:43:00 | |
In May, he spent 10 days at the Hut, a friend's house near Maidenhead, | 0:43:02 | 0:43:06 | |
where he worked on the Concerto. | 0:43:06 | 0:43:09 | |
His wife and daughter came to visit | 0:43:09 | 0:43:11 | |
and as they left, Windflower arrived for a three-day stay. | 0:43:11 | 0:43:15 | |
It was a regular pattern. | 0:43:15 | 0:43:17 | |
Elgar needed a woman to inspire him. | 0:43:17 | 0:43:21 | |
And Alice, although she inspired him a bit at first, | 0:43:21 | 0:43:24 | |
I think quickly ceased to be that inspiration | 0:43:24 | 0:43:29 | |
and became instead the person who made everything work, | 0:43:29 | 0:43:32 | |
she was his sort of CEO. | 0:43:32 | 0:43:34 | |
I remember Vaughan Williams telling me he sat next to her at Worcester Cathedral, | 0:43:35 | 0:43:39 | |
listening to the Second Symphony. | 0:43:39 | 0:43:41 | |
She kept nudging him and saying, "Isn't it wonderful?" | 0:43:41 | 0:43:45 | |
He said of course it was but it wasn't her business to keep saying so. | 0:43:45 | 0:43:49 | |
The Second Symphony was inspired once again by the other Alice. | 0:43:51 | 0:43:55 | |
Elgar confided in Windflower that he'd "worked at fever heat" | 0:43:55 | 0:43:59 | |
and "the thing is tremendous in energy". | 0:43:59 | 0:44:01 | |
ORCHESTRA PLAYS | 0:44:01 | 0:44:03 | |
Absolutely blown away by this fantastic activity | 0:44:07 | 0:44:10 | |
and continual invention. | 0:44:10 | 0:44:12 | |
The extraordinary energy, the lust for life | 0:44:17 | 0:44:21 | |
those bracing walks on the Malvern Hills. | 0:44:21 | 0:44:24 | |
There is not one bar that isn't of the highest achievement. | 0:44:30 | 0:44:34 | |
It's the work of a naturally great symphonist. | 0:44:34 | 0:44:37 | |
All of a sudden, it subsides, just collapses. | 0:44:43 | 0:44:46 | |
That's the only emotional way I can describe it. | 0:44:46 | 0:44:50 | |
Then the single note repeated quietly over and over. | 0:44:52 | 0:44:55 | |
NOTE REPEATS | 0:44:55 | 0:44:59 | |
It's as if a door or a window | 0:45:02 | 0:45:04 | |
had opened onto a totally different landscape. | 0:45:04 | 0:45:06 | |
Within about ten seconds he's moved right inside himself. | 0:45:06 | 0:45:10 | |
ORCHESTRA PLAYS | 0:45:10 | 0:45:14 | |
How quickly he wrote to her after he finished the First Movement of the symphony. | 0:45:33 | 0:45:37 | |
The next day he said, "I have written last year into the First Movement." What does that mean? | 0:45:37 | 0:45:42 | |
He told Windflower, "I have written the most extraordinary passage | 0:45:46 | 0:45:49 | |
"I have ever heard. A sort of malign influence | 0:45:49 | 0:45:52 | |
"wandering through the summer night in the garden." | 0:45:52 | 0:45:55 | |
The elaborate textures are very, very sensual | 0:45:55 | 0:46:01 | |
and very opulent and yet dark. | 0:46:01 | 0:46:03 | |
There's something unsettling, | 0:46:03 | 0:46:06 | |
whether it's the low underpinning of the rhythms in the drum | 0:46:06 | 0:46:10 | |
or whether it's this very passionate melody in the cellos | 0:46:10 | 0:46:14 | |
reaching up to the highest notes. | 0:46:14 | 0:46:16 | |
That even might refer to a moment when they nearly | 0:46:30 | 0:46:35 | |
took their relationship on to another plane, who knows? | 0:46:35 | 0:46:40 | |
I imagine that they both realised... | 0:46:40 | 0:46:43 | |
how disastrous that could be for four people... | 0:46:43 | 0:46:46 | |
at least four peoples' lives. | 0:46:46 | 0:46:48 | |
Elgar himself described this episode as a nocturnal love scene | 0:46:52 | 0:46:57 | |
and significantly he wrote Tintagel on the score. | 0:46:57 | 0:47:00 | |
His visit to Windflower in Cornwall a year before | 0:47:00 | 0:47:03 | |
was still in his mind. | 0:47:03 | 0:47:06 | |
The passion of this work captivated Latin-American musicians | 0:47:06 | 0:47:10 | |
when it was recently given its first performance in Venezuela | 0:47:10 | 0:47:14 | |
by the Simon Bolivar Orchestra. | 0:47:14 | 0:47:16 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:47:16 | 0:47:17 | |
I proposed, "Why don't we do Elgar's Second Symphony?" | 0:47:17 | 0:47:20 | |
-And they said yes. INTERVIEWER: -Did they know what it was? -No. | 0:47:20 | 0:47:24 | |
When I arrived to the very first rehearsal, | 0:47:29 | 0:47:31 | |
I had some musicians coming to me saying, | 0:47:31 | 0:47:34 | |
"Can we do some Tchaikovsky 1812? Something easy, there are too many notes." | 0:47:34 | 0:47:41 | |
Then at the break, they all said, "Oh, my God, what a great piece of music it is! Wow!" | 0:48:01 | 0:48:08 | |
For Elgar, writing music was often agony. | 0:48:15 | 0:48:18 | |
He completed a new choral work in the miserable July of 1912. | 0:48:18 | 0:48:23 | |
It should have been a moment of triumph, | 0:48:23 | 0:48:26 | |
but he was in turmoil as he wandered out alone onto Hampstead Heath. | 0:48:26 | 0:48:30 | |
"It was bitterly cold," he told Windflower. | 0:48:32 | 0:48:35 | |
"I wrapped myself in a thick overcoat | 0:48:35 | 0:48:37 | |
"tears streaming out of my cold eyes and loathed the world." | 0:48:37 | 0:48:41 | |
The work is about the creative process of music. | 0:48:44 | 0:48:47 | |
He represents this by quoting other pieces of his - | 0:48:47 | 0:48:50 | |
Gerontius, the violin concerto and Enigma in particular, | 0:48:50 | 0:48:53 | |
with Windflower an unspoken presence. | 0:48:53 | 0:48:57 | |
As he shivered in self-pity on the heath, | 0:48:57 | 0:49:00 | |
he was longing to tear the whole piece up. | 0:49:00 | 0:49:03 | |
"All wasted," he said. | 0:49:03 | 0:49:05 | |
"This Elgar terrain is not the Malvern Hills | 0:49:05 | 0:49:08 | |
"but Wuthering Heights." | 0:49:08 | 0:49:10 | |
There was a side to Elgar that was restless. | 0:49:10 | 0:49:13 | |
And that, I'm not sure has ever been captured in music | 0:49:13 | 0:49:18 | |
as brilliantly as the opening of this work. | 0:49:18 | 0:49:21 | |
It is, at bottom, a piece about isolation. | 0:49:41 | 0:49:44 | |
About loneliness. | 0:49:44 | 0:49:46 | |
You go right into the vision of his neuroses. | 0:49:46 | 0:49:50 | |
HE LISTENS TO MUSIC | 0:49:54 | 0:49:57 | |
I must do this piece...soon. | 0:49:57 | 0:50:02 | |
You can't help but be taken | 0:50:51 | 0:50:54 | |
by the beauty of the music | 0:50:54 | 0:50:55 | |
but it's to listen to this extraordinary, emotional underbelly | 0:50:55 | 0:50:59 | |
because in my experience it's always there. | 0:50:59 | 0:51:02 | |
No mistake. | 0:51:22 | 0:51:26 | |
Oh... | 0:51:26 | 0:51:28 | |
To me, this introduction is like time travelling. | 0:51:35 | 0:51:38 | |
Going back in time and the creative process | 0:51:38 | 0:51:41 | |
into a world of dreams. | 0:51:41 | 0:51:43 | |
The Music Makers is based on a poem by Arthur O'Shaughnessy, | 0:52:21 | 0:52:26 | |
but Elgar told Windflower, "I think of you in the music. | 0:52:26 | 0:52:30 | |
"It's an outpouring of the soul." | 0:52:30 | 0:52:33 | |
When the chorus sing about the need to sing and dream apart, | 0:52:36 | 0:52:40 | |
there are just four bars where very, very quietly | 0:52:40 | 0:52:43 | |
underneath the chorus the first violins recall | 0:52:43 | 0:52:46 | |
one of the most passionate moments | 0:52:46 | 0:52:48 | |
in the First Movement of the violin concerto. | 0:52:48 | 0:52:51 | |
Here, they are repeated very quietly. | 0:52:57 | 0:53:00 | |
As if it was from the back of his memory. | 0:53:00 | 0:53:02 | |
MUSIC PLAYS | 0:53:03 | 0:53:06 | |
He stays in the minor key here. | 0:53:06 | 0:53:09 | |
"Oh, man it must ever be | 0:53:09 | 0:53:10 | |
"That we dwell in our dreaming and singing | 0:53:10 | 0:53:13 | |
"A little apart from ye..." | 0:53:13 | 0:53:16 | |
SINGING | 0:53:20 | 0:53:23 | |
On the word singing, he changes | 0:53:31 | 0:53:33 | |
to the major chord. | 0:53:33 | 0:53:36 | |
Then he quotes the violin concerto, very quietly. | 0:53:42 | 0:53:47 | |
SINGING CONTINUES | 0:54:12 | 0:54:15 | |
He can't forget the woman who inspired it all. | 0:54:20 | 0:54:22 | |
At the time, he told no-one else about the source of his inspiration. | 0:54:28 | 0:54:32 | |
But Elgar and Windflower were seen together. | 0:54:33 | 0:54:36 | |
This newspaper picture of them going to a concert | 0:54:36 | 0:54:39 | |
was captioned, Sir Edward and Lady Elgar, | 0:54:39 | 0:54:42 | |
which must have been galling for his wife. | 0:54:42 | 0:54:45 | |
I think she knew this woman was good for Elgar. | 0:54:45 | 0:54:48 | |
And she was quite happy to let it go on. | 0:54:48 | 0:54:51 | |
I think she'd have been happy to let it go on for whatever length it went, really. | 0:54:51 | 0:54:57 | |
She knew that Elgar came home to her. | 0:54:57 | 0:55:00 | |
The one-time provincial composer from the Malvern hills | 0:55:03 | 0:55:06 | |
was now a national figure at the height of his powers. | 0:55:06 | 0:55:09 | |
Yet, only four or five years later, | 0:55:11 | 0:55:13 | |
he was virtually a spent force. | 0:55:13 | 0:55:15 | |
After the tumult of the First World War, | 0:55:15 | 0:55:18 | |
he seemed to lose his bearings | 0:55:18 | 0:55:20 | |
with the sense that his musical age had passed. | 0:55:20 | 0:55:23 | |
The piece he'd written shortly before the war | 0:55:25 | 0:55:28 | |
now seems strangely prophetic. | 0:55:28 | 0:55:30 | |
Perhaps, more and more, I think of this extraordinary, almost self-portrait, I would say, | 0:55:31 | 0:55:36 | |
Sospiri, which is one of the most haunting miniatures in all music. | 0:55:36 | 0:55:42 | |
The terrible longing that's expressed in that piece | 0:55:42 | 0:55:48 | |
is something to behold. | 0:55:48 | 0:55:50 | |
Sospiri, meaning sighing, | 0:55:58 | 0:56:00 | |
was first heard in August 1914, 10 days into the war. | 0:56:00 | 0:56:04 | |
The British were in the grip of patriotic fervour. | 0:56:04 | 0:56:08 | |
It found no echo in Elgar. | 0:56:08 | 0:56:11 | |
Can you imagine anything less appropriate at that time? | 0:56:12 | 0:56:16 | |
I mean, it would be appropriate four years later. | 0:56:20 | 0:56:24 | |
The melody laden with anguish. | 0:56:32 | 0:56:34 | |
With more than sighs. | 0:56:37 | 0:56:40 | |
For once, there is no ambiguity, | 0:56:46 | 0:56:48 | |
no mask, no masculine swagger. | 0:56:48 | 0:56:51 | |
His deepest feelings are exposed. | 0:56:51 | 0:56:54 | |
There's this very English thing of withholding passion, | 0:57:01 | 0:57:04 | |
but in this one piece, it's there, it's just... | 0:57:04 | 0:57:08 | |
You know, it's naked in front of you. | 0:57:08 | 0:57:10 | |
It's extraordinary, reaching out and not quite...getting there. | 0:57:15 | 0:57:19 | |
Elgar almost disowned the piece later on. | 0:57:30 | 0:57:32 | |
It's the shame of self-revelation, isn't it? | 0:57:34 | 0:57:37 | |
At one stage, he called it "Soupir D'amour," Sigh Of Love, | 0:57:44 | 0:57:49 | |
though we have no clue whom he had in mind. | 0:57:49 | 0:57:52 | |
This time he told Windflower nothing about it. | 0:57:52 | 0:57:56 | |
Elgar walks a rhythmic tightrope and the accompaniment does something | 0:58:09 | 0:58:13 | |
and then the violin does something else and they never coincide. | 0:58:13 | 0:58:17 | |
Finally, before the end, they go ah! | 0:58:19 | 0:58:21 | |
And eventually it comes together. | 0:58:21 | 0:58:24 | |
As a creative artist, Elgar knew all about separation and isolation. | 0:58:33 | 0:58:37 | |
His own confused emotional life emphasised this loneliness. | 0:58:40 | 0:58:45 | |
On one draft of this piece, he wrote the word "absence." | 0:58:48 | 0:58:52 | |
At the end you're just left with this section of the first violin, | 0:59:23 | 0:59:26 | |
one character against the rest of the world. | 0:59:26 | 0:59:29 | |
Elgar himself, as a Roman-Catholic son of a shopkeeper, | 0:59:34 | 0:59:37 | |
looked down on by his wife's family, | 0:59:37 | 0:59:39 | |
never lost the feeling of being an outsider. | 0:59:39 | 0:59:42 | |
When writing his oratorio, The Apostles, | 0:59:44 | 0:59:47 | |
it was the human dilemma that motivated him. | 0:59:47 | 0:59:50 | |
He'd been told as a boy that the apostles were poor young men, | 0:59:50 | 0:59:54 | |
"Perhaps no cleverer than some of you here." | 0:59:54 | 0:59:56 | |
The character he identified with most was the ultimate outsider, | 0:59:56 | 1:00:01 | |
Judas Iscariot, | 1:00:01 | 1:00:02 | |
who drew from him the most dramatic vocal music he ever wrote. | 1:00:02 | 1:00:06 | |
Judas is torn. After betraying Christ, and ingratiating himself | 1:00:06 | 1:00:12 | |
with the Jewish establishment, he is overcome with remorse | 1:00:12 | 1:00:15 | |
and the priests in the chorus mock his weakness. | 1:00:15 | 1:00:19 | |
# A voice of trembling, of fear | 1:00:19 | 1:00:22 | |
# I have sinned | 1:00:38 | 1:00:43 | |
# In that I have betray-ed innocent blood... # | 1:00:43 | 1:00:51 | |
CHORUS SINGS | 1:00:53 | 1:00:56 | |
# I have sinned I have betray-ed | 1:01:00 | 1:01:07 | |
# The... # | 1:01:07 | 1:01:09 | |
CHORUS SINGS | 1:01:09 | 1:01:10 | |
WOMAN SINGS | 1:01:10 | 1:01:13 | |
CHORUS SINGS | 1:01:18 | 1:01:21 | |
It's terrifying, it's like religious fundamentalism, isn't it? | 1:01:30 | 1:01:33 | |
CHORUS SINGS | 1:01:33 | 1:01:36 | |
Judas, with huge faults, nevertheless human, against the institution. | 1:01:54 | 1:01:58 | |
# Shall I go from thy spirit... # | 1:02:11 | 1:02:17 | |
The gospels give Judas no more than a few lines | 1:02:17 | 1:02:21 | |
and Elgar wanted many more. | 1:02:21 | 1:02:23 | |
So he scoured both Old and New Testaments | 1:02:23 | 1:02:26 | |
to find the extra words he needed | 1:02:26 | 1:02:28 | |
to build the character of Judas as the fractured, troublesome visionary | 1:02:28 | 1:02:32 | |
he knew so well, wrestling with despair. | 1:02:32 | 1:02:35 | |
We can see the care which Elgar took | 1:02:37 | 1:02:39 | |
from the biblical references noted in the margin. | 1:02:39 | 1:02:42 | |
The whole Judas scene is an intricate character study. | 1:02:42 | 1:02:46 | |
In the scene where he's at his depths of his soul | 1:02:46 | 1:02:51 | |
and as low as any human being can ever be, | 1:02:51 | 1:02:54 | |
the colouring Elgar gives to the orchestration, | 1:02:54 | 1:02:57 | |
these hints of sunlight in it, the hint of optimism in it, | 1:02:57 | 1:03:01 | |
are quite extraordinary. | 1:03:01 | 1:03:03 | |
# Life is short and tedious... # | 1:03:09 | 1:03:13 | |
"And life is short and tedious". So dark. | 1:03:13 | 1:03:17 | |
# Neither was there any man known | 1:03:18 | 1:03:20 | |
# To have return-ed from the grave | 1:03:20 | 1:03:27 | |
# Though we are born of adventure | 1:03:27 | 1:03:31 | |
# And we shall be here after as though we have never been... # | 1:03:31 | 1:03:38 | |
It's just air and sunlight suddenly. | 1:03:38 | 1:03:43 | |
It's a kind of muted happiness which is absolutely authentic. | 1:03:43 | 1:03:47 | |
# A little spark... # | 1:03:47 | 1:03:51 | |
The man has decided to commit suicide and now, emotionally, | 1:03:51 | 1:03:55 | |
there's a release. | 1:03:55 | 1:03:57 | |
# ..is being extinguish-ed | 1:03:57 | 1:04:01 | |
# My body shall be turn-ed into ashes... # | 1:04:01 | 1:04:08 | |
How ephemeral we are. Maybe that's what lightened his soul. | 1:04:08 | 1:04:11 | |
It doesn't matter, actually, we're nothing. | 1:04:11 | 1:04:14 | |
HE SINGS | 1:04:14 | 1:04:16 | |
Elgar's sympathetic understanding of Judas's state of mind | 1:04:28 | 1:04:32 | |
and impending suicide was rooted in his own experience. | 1:04:32 | 1:04:35 | |
He had, after all, talked about taking his own life | 1:04:35 | 1:04:38 | |
after the early failure of The Dream Of Gerontius. | 1:04:38 | 1:04:41 | |
I played Elgar to the patients at Broadmoor. | 1:04:42 | 1:04:48 | |
And the effect that this music had on them was amazing. | 1:04:48 | 1:04:53 | |
They came to life under the influence of hearing the prelude to Gerontius. | 1:04:53 | 1:05:00 | |
Elgar, of course, is one of those very few composers, | 1:05:00 | 1:05:04 | |
with Brahms being another one, | 1:05:04 | 1:05:05 | |
who knew the inside of an asylum, without being an inmate. | 1:05:05 | 1:05:10 | |
Elgar was employed in the Worcestershire County Asylum at Powick, | 1:05:10 | 1:05:15 | |
as a musician there. | 1:05:15 | 1:05:17 | |
I thought, that day in Broadmoor, that the insight that Elgar got | 1:05:17 | 1:05:22 | |
into the human psyche through seeing the human psyche broken down, | 1:05:22 | 1:05:27 | |
must have been of terrific value to him, once he'd discovered | 1:05:27 | 1:05:31 | |
that he could then take on other persona in his music. | 1:05:31 | 1:05:34 | |
I think if he hadn't been a composer, | 1:05:36 | 1:05:38 | |
he might have been heading for | 1:05:38 | 1:05:39 | |
some kind of breakdown. | 1:05:39 | 1:05:42 | |
I really feel amongst other things, | 1:05:42 | 1:05:43 | |
composing was something of a therapy for him, emotional therapy. | 1:05:43 | 1:05:49 | |
We know that he went through periods of deep depression | 1:05:49 | 1:05:53 | |
and spoke of being suicidal, | 1:05:53 | 1:05:56 | |
and then there would be an absolute explosion of creativity. | 1:05:56 | 1:06:00 | |
There was one occasion at dinner when, under her breath, | 1:06:00 | 1:06:03 | |
Alice Elgar interrupted a fellow guest, | 1:06:03 | 1:06:06 | |
who'd raised the issue of suicide. | 1:06:06 | 1:06:09 | |
So much for Lady Elgar being stiff upper-lip and correct. | 1:06:09 | 1:06:13 | |
She actually said to someone she'd only just met, | 1:06:13 | 1:06:16 | |
"The reason I stopped you saying that was Sir Edward talks about suicide so often | 1:06:16 | 1:06:20 | |
"and I don't want him to be dwelling on it now." | 1:06:20 | 1:06:22 | |
She actually gave that secret away. | 1:06:22 | 1:06:25 | |
Elgar stays with Judas as he moves inexorably towards suicide. | 1:06:25 | 1:06:30 | |
The distant cries of, "Crucify him!" | 1:06:30 | 1:06:33 | |
from the chorus are his only reference to the trial of Jesus | 1:06:33 | 1:06:36 | |
going on at the same time. | 1:06:36 | 1:06:38 | |
Judas is tormented by the realisation that his betrayal | 1:06:38 | 1:06:42 | |
will result in Christ's execution. | 1:06:42 | 1:06:44 | |
THEY SING | 1:06:44 | 1:06:47 | |
All the internal music of that marvellous Judas scene, | 1:06:48 | 1:06:52 | |
it must have come from Elgar's darkest self, you know? | 1:06:52 | 1:06:56 | |
# The Lord knoweth the thoughts of man | 1:06:56 | 1:07:02 | |
# My hope is like dust | 1:07:02 | 1:07:05 | |
# That is blown away with the wind | 1:07:05 | 1:07:09 | |
# It is not possible to escape | 1:07:11 | 1:07:15 | |
# Thine hand | 1:07:15 | 1:07:18 | |
# A sudden feel... # | 1:07:18 | 1:07:22 | |
People shouting, "Crucify him!" some way away. | 1:07:22 | 1:07:25 | |
Almost in Judas's head you can hear the, "Crucify him!". | 1:07:25 | 1:07:29 | |
# He covered himself together | 1:07:32 | 1:07:34 | |
# And the innocent below... # | 1:07:36 | 1:07:39 | |
CHORUS DROWNS OUT HIS SINGING | 1:07:43 | 1:07:47 | |
# Mine end is come... | 1:08:01 | 1:08:06 | |
# The measure of my covetous life. # | 1:08:08 | 1:08:17 | |
That fantastic high viola line. | 1:08:17 | 1:08:19 | |
Intensely poignant. | 1:08:19 | 1:08:21 | |
HE SINGS | 1:08:21 | 1:08:29 | |
You can hear that string slithering down. | 1:08:29 | 1:08:35 | |
# And in it... | 1:08:35 | 1:08:38 | |
# Of that darkness | 1:08:38 | 1:08:42 | |
# He shall afterward receive me | 1:08:47 | 1:08:51 | |
# Yet am I unto myself | 1:08:51 | 1:08:55 | |
# More grievous, more grievous | 1:08:55 | 1:09:01 | |
# Than...the darkness. # | 1:09:01 | 1:09:11 | |
That bitterness in the horns. | 1:09:28 | 1:09:30 | |
CHORUS SINGS | 1:09:30 | 1:09:32 | |
The institution has the last word. | 1:09:47 | 1:09:49 | |
After this extraordinary 15 minutes of Juda's inner workings, | 1:09:55 | 1:10:00 | |
as a human being, | 1:10:00 | 1:10:03 | |
Elgar gives about six bars to the crucifixion, | 1:10:03 | 1:10:05 | |
where he writes the actual text of Jesus's last words, | 1:10:05 | 1:10:09 | |
in the string parts. | 1:10:09 | 1:10:10 | |
"Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" | 1:10:10 | 1:10:13 | |
"My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?" | 1:10:14 | 1:10:16 | |
But no-one sings it. | 1:10:16 | 1:10:18 | |
CRESCENDO | 1:10:38 | 1:10:39 | |
Shortly after Elgar scored the Judas scene, | 1:10:49 | 1:10:51 | |
his wife was also writing about betrayal. | 1:10:51 | 1:10:55 | |
It was in a poem which she left among her private papers, | 1:10:55 | 1:10:59 | |
for Elgar to find after her death many years later. | 1:10:59 | 1:11:02 | |
It made sobering reading. | 1:11:03 | 1:11:05 | |
They love doth fade Too like a winter sun | 1:11:10 | 1:11:13 | |
I watch it grow as cold | 1:11:13 | 1:11:15 | |
The summer joy is done although its radiant hours seem scarce begun | 1:11:15 | 1:11:20 | |
Dark night must it enfold | 1:11:20 | 1:11:23 | |
Deceive anew... | 1:11:25 | 1:11:26 | |
She originally wrote "be happy" but changed it. | 1:11:26 | 1:11:29 | |
..Deceive anew and smile as if no part where thine in my lost life | 1:11:29 | 1:11:35 | |
Leave me my wasted heart | 1:11:35 | 1:11:39 | |
And buy new joys from out the world's gay mart | 1:11:39 | 1:11:42 | |
Leave me the bitter strife. | 1:11:42 | 1:11:46 | |
Alice's death in 1920 after 30 years of marriage | 1:11:48 | 1:11:53 | |
deprived Elgar of his driving force and his most devoted supporter. | 1:11:53 | 1:11:58 | |
Their sharp-eyed friend, Rosa Burley, never saw Alice's poem. | 1:11:58 | 1:12:02 | |
Yet she concluded that Elgar was distraught not by grief, | 1:12:02 | 1:12:07 | |
but by an over-mastering sense of guilt at his disloyalty to his wife. | 1:12:07 | 1:12:12 | |
He lapsed into virtual silence. | 1:12:14 | 1:12:16 | |
# What is that? # | 1:12:16 | 1:12:18 | |
A pray to the darkness always lurking deep in his soul. | 1:12:18 | 1:12:22 | |
# Nothing | 1:12:22 | 1:12:27 | |
# The leaves must fall, and falling, rustle | 1:12:28 | 1:12:35 | |
# That is all They are dead as they fall | 1:12:35 | 1:12:42 | |
# That is all | 1:12:42 | 1:12:44 | |
# They are dead | 1:12:44 | 1:12:47 | |
# At the foot of the tree | 1:12:47 | 1:12:55 | |
# All that can be is said... # | 1:12:55 | 1:13:04 | |
This strange texture, with everything in octaves. | 1:13:04 | 1:13:07 | |
Little flashes of harmony. It's scarcely melodic at all. | 1:13:07 | 1:13:11 | |
# Nothing... # | 1:13:12 | 1:13:16 | |
Haunting. | 1:13:16 | 1:13:19 | |
# What is that? Nothing | 1:13:19 | 1:13:26 | |
# A wild thing hurt what mourns in the night | 1:13:28 | 1:13:36 | |
# And it cries in its dread | 1:13:36 | 1:13:39 | |
# Till it lies dead | 1:13:39 | 1:13:44 | |
# Till it lies dead at the foot of the tree | 1:13:44 | 1:13:55 | |
# All that can be is said... # | 1:13:56 | 1:14:05 | |
The poem is about nothingness. | 1:14:05 | 1:14:07 | |
It's trying to express the idea of nothing. | 1:14:07 | 1:14:10 | |
# Nothing... # | 1:14:13 | 1:14:19 | |
I'm beginning to think I'm the victim of a huge practical joke. | 1:14:19 | 1:14:23 | |
I can't believe this music's by Elgar. | 1:14:23 | 1:14:25 | |
# Ah...ah... # | 1:14:26 | 1:14:33 | |
How bleak. | 1:14:33 | 1:14:35 | |
If you told me it was written 30 years later, | 1:14:35 | 1:14:37 | |
I wouldn't be surprised. | 1:14:37 | 1:14:39 | |
# A marching slow of unseen feet | 1:14:39 | 1:14:46 | |
# That is all | 1:14:47 | 1:14:49 | |
# But a bier, spread with a pall | 1:14:49 | 1:14:57 | |
# And a bier is now at the foot of the tree | 1:14:57 | 1:15:09 | |
# All that could be is said | 1:15:11 | 1:15:20 | |
# Is it? | 1:15:22 | 1:15:26 | |
# What? | 1:15:26 | 1:15:31 | |
# Nothing. # | 1:15:31 | 1:15:37 | |
After Alice's death, Elgar hoped Windflower | 1:15:40 | 1:15:43 | |
would use her political contacts to wangle him a peerage. | 1:15:43 | 1:15:47 | |
He had to make do with an hereditary baronetcy | 1:15:47 | 1:15:50 | |
and a Knighthood of the Victorian Order, | 1:15:50 | 1:15:52 | |
"Which awful thing I must accept", he told her. | 1:15:52 | 1:15:55 | |
Their relationship had now settled into a fond friendship, | 1:15:56 | 1:16:00 | |
but nothing more. | 1:16:00 | 1:16:02 | |
One would have thought even that he might have married her | 1:16:02 | 1:16:05 | |
after 1926 when her husband died. | 1:16:05 | 1:16:07 | |
But perhaps she didn't want...! She'd had enough of Elgar | 1:16:07 | 1:16:11 | |
pouring out his woes in letters | 1:16:11 | 1:16:13 | |
without having it at the breakfast table! | 1:16:13 | 1:16:16 | |
But there was one more woman in Elgar's life. | 1:16:17 | 1:16:20 | |
One more muse to rekindle his creative fire. | 1:16:20 | 1:16:24 | |
She caught his ever-roving eye while he was conducting | 1:16:25 | 1:16:29 | |
The Dream Of Gerontius in Croydon in 1931. | 1:16:29 | 1:16:32 | |
He spotted this lady in the back desks of the violins, | 1:16:33 | 1:16:36 | |
Vera Hockman - I think she was probably about 30 at the time - | 1:16:36 | 1:16:41 | |
and absolutely fell for her. | 1:16:41 | 1:16:43 | |
His skittish behaviour in female company was never better documented | 1:16:43 | 1:16:48 | |
than in the case of Vera Hockman. | 1:16:48 | 1:16:50 | |
He was a goner and started behaving like a young man, | 1:16:50 | 1:16:54 | |
writing flirtatious and deeply felt notes to her | 1:16:54 | 1:16:58 | |
and seeing her often. | 1:16:58 | 1:16:59 | |
At only their second meeting, he said straight out | 1:16:59 | 1:17:02 | |
that he hadn't been able to take his eyes off her. | 1:17:02 | 1:17:05 | |
"You're not to leave me for one moment", he said, | 1:17:05 | 1:17:08 | |
"or I shall scream." | 1:17:08 | 1:17:09 | |
Some people just thought, oh, it was a little flutter | 1:17:09 | 1:17:12 | |
at the end of his life. | 1:17:12 | 1:17:14 | |
But I don't think she quite saw it like that. | 1:17:14 | 1:17:18 | |
Vera kept mementos of her friendship with Elgar. | 1:17:18 | 1:17:22 | |
At the time, she was married with two young children, | 1:17:22 | 1:17:26 | |
but she and her husband were separated. | 1:17:26 | 1:17:28 | |
This is a photograph of my mother with a friend, | 1:17:30 | 1:17:34 | |
and in the background you can see George Bernard Shaw, | 1:17:34 | 1:17:38 | |
and Elgar is sitting in a chair with his hat on | 1:17:38 | 1:17:42 | |
just behind my mother. | 1:17:42 | 1:17:44 | |
And this one of Elgar in a boat. | 1:17:47 | 1:17:50 | |
Ha! He looks a bit, sort of, dishevelled, | 1:17:52 | 1:17:56 | |
with his foot up in the air! | 1:17:56 | 1:17:58 | |
The details of their friendship come from Vera's own memoir. | 1:17:59 | 1:18:03 | |
"The Story Of November 7th, 1931", she called it. | 1:18:03 | 1:18:07 | |
The day they met. | 1:18:07 | 1:18:09 | |
The kept the seventh of every month | 1:18:09 | 1:18:12 | |
as what Elgar called their mensiversary. | 1:18:12 | 1:18:15 | |
At 74, he said he was too old | 1:18:15 | 1:18:17 | |
to wait for anniversaries to come round. | 1:18:17 | 1:18:20 | |
He took her to lunch somewhere and ordered two Manhattan cocktails | 1:18:20 | 1:18:24 | |
and she just couldn't believe it. She didn't think he was | 1:18:24 | 1:18:28 | |
the sort of person who would order newfangled American-type drinks. | 1:18:28 | 1:18:32 | |
For years, the woman behind him in this short film clip | 1:18:32 | 1:18:37 | |
was unidentified. | 1:18:37 | 1:18:39 | |
But now it's clear it's Vera Hockman, | 1:18:39 | 1:18:41 | |
followed by Elgar's daughter, Clarice. | 1:18:41 | 1:18:44 | |
She was very warm, very cultured. She loved music, art, | 1:18:45 | 1:18:51 | |
literature - she just loved poetry. | 1:18:51 | 1:18:55 | |
She never walked, she always ran. | 1:18:55 | 1:18:57 | |
Vera even kept this telephone message, | 1:18:57 | 1:19:00 | |
in which he used a romantic but discreet codename, Hyperion, | 1:19:00 | 1:19:05 | |
after Longfellow's novel. | 1:19:05 | 1:19:07 | |
Indeed, he gave her his treasured copy of the book, | 1:19:07 | 1:19:10 | |
which had belonged to his mother. | 1:19:10 | 1:19:12 | |
"I want you to have it," he said, | 1:19:12 | 1:19:14 | |
"because now you are my mother, my child, my lover and my friend." | 1:19:14 | 1:19:18 | |
They met at her aunt's house in St John's Wood in northern London. | 1:19:20 | 1:19:24 | |
Elgar had to pace up and down and round the block | 1:19:24 | 1:19:28 | |
until her aunt had gone out. | 1:19:28 | 1:19:30 | |
"What music I would write," he said, "If I could have you near to me always." | 1:19:31 | 1:19:36 | |
As the sun rose in his Indian summer, Elgar embarked on his third symphony. | 1:19:38 | 1:19:43 | |
He never finished it, but did leave numerous sketches, | 1:19:43 | 1:19:47 | |
which Anthony Payne recently elaborated into a complete work. | 1:19:47 | 1:19:50 | |
Elgar's restless spirit had not faded with the passing years. | 1:19:50 | 1:19:55 | |
MUSIC: Elgar/Payne Symphony No 3 | 1:19:55 | 1:19:57 | |
This, of course, is all Elgar but the first 10, 12 bars are fully scored. | 1:19:57 | 1:20:03 | |
MUSIC CONTINUES | 1:20:03 | 1:20:05 | |
It's about this point that I had to start to work because the instruments drop out from the score. | 1:20:19 | 1:20:24 | |
Some of it's kept going. He was obviously writing one of the parts | 1:20:24 | 1:20:28 | |
and not filling the other ones in yet, as he went along. | 1:20:28 | 1:20:31 | |
Then we get to this lovely second tune, which he called Vera's Own Tune on one sketch. | 1:20:33 | 1:20:38 | |
MUSIC: Elgar/Payne Symphony No 3 | 1:20:38 | 1:20:41 | |
At this point, there's practically no instruments in the formal score, just the top line. | 1:20:50 | 1:20:54 | |
And you realise that that's the point where he stopped writing and went off to the nursing home, | 1:20:54 | 1:20:59 | |
where he learnt the awful truth about his cancer. | 1:20:59 | 1:21:02 | |
It so speaks to you. I remember at the first run-through with the BBC Symphony Orchestra | 1:21:13 | 1:21:18 | |
when they got to this moment, the string section all began to smile. It was wonderful. | 1:21:18 | 1:21:23 | |
I think we owe the energy with which he attacked the task to Vera Hockman | 1:21:28 | 1:21:32 | |
and if he'd only lived another six months, he would have completed it. | 1:21:32 | 1:21:37 | |
In the nursing home, he supervised an orchestral recording by telephone | 1:21:46 | 1:21:51 | |
and only a week before he died, he listened to a test pressing of his last completed piece, | 1:21:51 | 1:21:56 | |
a portrait of his Cairn terrier, Mina. | 1:21:56 | 1:21:59 | |
"The middle section is too fast," he said. | 1:21:59 | 1:22:02 | |
And dogs were all important to him, | 1:22:02 | 1:22:05 | |
as Vera well knew. | 1:22:05 | 1:22:06 | |
The first time she went to see him, he said, "You can't sit there, that's Marco's chair." | 1:22:07 | 1:22:12 | |
And then she tried to sit somewhere else and he said, "You can't sit there, that's Mina's chair." | 1:22:12 | 1:22:18 | |
And she stood in the middle of the room, not knowing what to do. | 1:22:18 | 1:22:21 | |
I would've loved to have met him. | 1:22:29 | 1:22:31 | |
I always wonder, "Would I have liked him or not?" | 1:22:33 | 1:22:36 | |
He would probably have been a bit too clubbish for me. | 1:22:37 | 1:22:41 | |
But I would've loved to meet him. | 1:22:41 | 1:22:42 | |
Clarice said to me, he'd have liked me, cos I'd have petted the dogs. | 1:22:47 | 1:22:51 | |
She said if you'd seen Marco, the spaniel, made a fuss of it, then you'd be in for life. | 1:22:51 | 1:22:57 | |
What, in a nutshell, does Elgar mean to you? | 1:23:08 | 1:23:11 | |
Oh. | 1:23:12 | 1:23:14 | |
A lifetime obsession. | 1:23:16 | 1:23:18 | |
And many hours of wonderful pleasure, listening to the music | 1:23:20 | 1:23:24 | |
and puzzling over its creator | 1:23:24 | 1:23:27 | |
and imagining him laughing at us all as we puzzle over it. | 1:23:27 | 1:23:31 | |
What do you expect to find in Elgar? | 1:23:34 | 1:23:37 | |
Turbulence, idealism, conflicts of all kind. | 1:23:37 | 1:23:42 | |
Naivete, simplicity. Everything. | 1:23:43 | 1:23:46 | |
Everything. Every human quality you can think of is there in his music. | 1:23:46 | 1:23:51 | |
People who have had a great bereavement get a comfort from Elgar | 1:23:55 | 1:24:00 | |
you mightn't get from Mozart or Beethoven, or any of those composers | 1:24:00 | 1:24:03 | |
and I think it's because there's sense in it of a kind of hurt that he's sharing with them. | 1:24:03 | 1:24:09 | |
And Elgar is one of those who gave us so much | 1:24:09 | 1:24:13 | |
and so substantial and so real | 1:24:13 | 1:24:16 | |
and if you can't hear it, you are deaf and you have no feeling. | 1:24:16 | 1:24:21 | |
Shortly before Elgar died, in February 1934, | 1:24:25 | 1:24:29 | |
his favourite sister Polly wrote to warn Windflower. | 1:24:29 | 1:24:33 | |
"I know you loved him," she said. | 1:24:33 | 1:24:37 | |
In her turn, Alice Stuart-Wortley sent his daughter a letter of sympathy. | 1:24:37 | 1:24:41 | |
"He is our Shakespeare of music," she said, | 1:24:43 | 1:24:46 | |
"Born and died on the soil in the heart and soul of England, | 1:24:46 | 1:24:50 | |
"with the love of his country, its music and its meaning in his own heart and soul." | 1:24:50 | 1:24:56 | |
Whether there was any contact with Vera Hockman during his last illness, we don't know. | 1:25:02 | 1:25:07 | |
But three months after his death, on what would have been his 77th birthday, she wrote him a letter, | 1:25:07 | 1:25:13 | |
which has remained hidden until now. | 1:25:13 | 1:25:16 | |
It offers Elgar experts fresh incite into her feelings for the man behind the mask. | 1:25:17 | 1:25:23 | |
"My wondrous being," she addresses it. | 1:25:24 | 1:25:26 | |
"Written at Robin Hill on June 2nd, 1934. Your birthday." | 1:25:26 | 1:25:32 | |
"It would seem strange and unnatural that I, who have loved you best of all, | 1:25:32 | 1:25:37 | |
"have been silent for all these tragic months. | 1:25:37 | 1:25:40 | |
"The thoughts and memories I treasure of you | 1:25:40 | 1:25:43 | |
"are far too intimate, too inexpressibly dear to me | 1:25:43 | 1:25:46 | |
"to be told to any but our nearest and dearest. | 1:25:46 | 1:25:50 | |
I'd not seen it before and it's very, very poignant, | 1:25:50 | 1:25:54 | |
because she seems to have absolutely gauged his character. | 1:25:54 | 1:25:58 | |
She recalled Elgar's visit a year before, | 1:25:58 | 1:26:01 | |
the last time her Hyperion ever-glorious | 1:26:01 | 1:26:04 | |
had stayed the night at Robin Hill, her home in Croydon. | 1:26:04 | 1:26:08 | |
If someone asked her what made him so unique, she said, she would reply that, | 1:26:08 | 1:26:13 | |
"He was the only person I have known who was absolutely natural in all his actions," | 1:26:13 | 1:26:19 | |
"spontaneous and grand and glorious, in his..." | 1:26:19 | 1:26:23 | |
"..Supreme egoism. | 1:26:23 | 1:26:26 | |
"You were the most self-engrossed, self-enamoured person imaginable | 1:26:26 | 1:26:29 | |
"and yet you loved yourself in such a loveable way that instead of turning others away from you, | 1:26:29 | 1:26:34 | |
"your love of yourself was contagious. | 1:26:34 | 1:26:36 | |
"I was never afraid or over-awed of your greatness," she went on, | 1:26:36 | 1:26:40 | |
"Because I was destined to know, understand and love you. | 1:26:40 | 1:26:44 | |
"The 7th of November, foreshadowed through the numerous leaping 7ths in your melodies, | 1:26:44 | 1:26:49 | |
"was that moment when two souls, after long ages of drifting towards each other, | 1:26:49 | 1:26:55 | |
"meet and merge and melt into a vaster being, never again to be separated." | 1:26:55 | 1:27:01 | |
Gosh! Well, that is quite a letter. | 1:27:01 | 1:27:04 | |
We all have to rewrite our biographies now. | 1:27:04 | 1:27:07 | |
Extraordinary letter. | 1:27:07 | 1:27:09 | |
What do you feel in reading that? | 1:27:09 | 1:27:12 | |
That the relationship was obviously very profound, | 1:27:15 | 1:27:19 | |
very important for both of them, very meaningful, | 1:27:19 | 1:27:22 | |
despite the enormous number of years that separated them. | 1:27:22 | 1:27:26 | |
And that it implies to me that he felt able to be wholly himself with her. | 1:27:26 | 1:27:31 | |
That any pretence had fallen away. | 1:27:32 | 1:27:35 | |
Well, they must have been very close indeed, I should think. | 1:27:35 | 1:27:40 | |
We don't know whether these were physical or not, do we? | 1:27:40 | 1:27:43 | |
It's a very beautiful letter, because it's very surprising. | 1:27:43 | 1:27:48 | |
How nice that they met. | 1:27:49 | 1:27:51 | |
# Till a tempest came to wake Till a tempest came to wake | 1:27:53 | 1:27:58 | |
# All its roaring, seething billows That upon earth's ramparts break | 1:27:58 | 1:28:04 | |
# All its roaring, seething billows | 1:28:04 | 1:28:10 | |
# That upon earth's ramparts break | 1:28:10 | 1:28:16 | |
# That upon earth's ramparts break | 1:28:16 | 1:28:20 | |
# That upon earth's ramparts break | 1:28:20 | 1:28:30 | |
# Quiet | 1:28:34 | 1:28:47 | |
# Was my heart | 1:28:47 | 1:28:52 | |
# Within me | 1:28:52 | 1:29:00 | |
# Till your image | 1:29:01 | 1:29:07 | |
# Till your image suddenly | 1:29:07 | 1:29:12 | |
# Rising there | 1:29:12 | 1:29:15 | |
# Awoke a tumult Wilder than the storm | 1:29:15 | 1:29:22 | |
# Awoke a tumult Wilder than the storm at sea | 1:29:22 | 1:29:27 | |
# Wilder than the Wilder than the storm at sea | 1:29:27 | 1:29:35 | |
# Awoke a tumult | 1:29:35 | 1:29:38 | |
# Wilder | 1:29:38 | 1:29:40 | |
# Wilder than the storm Wilder than the storm at sea | 1:29:40 | 1:29:46 | |
# Wilder than the storm at sea. # | 1:29:46 | 1:29:53 |