FREE ELGAR DOWNLOADS

From today we are offering four free Elgar downloads, courtesy of LSO Live, the award-winning record label of the London Symphony Orchestra

1 Nimrod, from the Enigma Variations
Arguably Elgar’s most famous piece of music, and now an indispensable part of Remembrance Day and most memorial services.

2 Praise to the Holiest in the Height
A choral highlight from Elgar’s greatest oratorio, The Dream of Gerontius – a soaring testament to his faith.

3 An extract from the Scherzo of the First Symphony
Acclaimed by the conductor Hans Richter as “the greatest symphony of modern times”.

4 An extract from the Larghetto of the Second Symphony
A complex work that is recognised as one of the composer’s most profound achievements.

EDWARD ELGAR, THE MAN WHO GAVE US HOPE AND GLORY

Clearly not a brave man, Nicholas Kenyon used his departing interview as controller of the Proms to raise the thorny issue of the Last Night. It is loved and hated in equal measure for its flag-waving jingoism and Elgar anthems and Kenyon deftly handed his successor, Roger Wright, a hospital pass when he suggested that a new controller might decide the yearly ritual needs “to move on”.

For many devoted Elgarians, the Last Night of the Proms is only part of the problem. Since the 1960s, many have been embarrassed by the bombastic strain within Sir Edward’s oeuvre. The patriotic imperialism of Land of Hope and Gloryand The Pageant of Empire is to their minds best dismissed as shoddy work, which Elgar was forced to churn out for money and honours.

The “real” Elgar, they say, was the gifted counter-culture genius so elegiacally depicted by Ken Russell in his 1962 BBC film riding to the peaks of the Malvern Hills and cycling through the ferns of the Herefordshire vales. This was the true Elgar of The Dream of Gerontius and The Enigma Variations. The Elgar of the Albert Hall was an unfortunate result of state patronage on which it is generally best not to dwell.

This rereading of Elgar is an absurdity. Elgar was an imperialist with a conviction in the unique destiny of the British Empire. But, rather like Wagner’s antiSemitism, this element of Elgar’s make-up has long been swept under the carpet by both critics and acolytes. This is misguided, since an appreciation of Elgar’s imperialism allows for a far richer understanding of his work.

Elgar was born in Worcester in 1857, and while the rural West Midlands might not have been at the heart of empire, the county’s newspapers and regiments were imbuedwith a sense of imperial ethic. This colonial sensibility was only strengthened by Elgar’s marriage to Alice Roberts, the daughter of an Indian Army major-general. And, as the son of a lower middle-class provincial tradesman, Elgar’s own views were sternly conservative: he opposed Irish home rule and left the Athenaeum club when the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald was elected.

But his imperialism was of an altogether more lofty kind. His vision of empire was, as the historian Jeffrey Richards puts it, “one of justice, peace, freedom and equality, of the pax Britannica and of the fulfilment by Britain of its trusteeship mission”.This was the theme of his 1898 work, Caractacus, which told the story of the British king’s struggle against the Roman Empire. The composition ends with a paean of praise to the future British Empire with words written by H. A. Acworth (which Elgar fully endorsed): And where the flag of Britain Its triple crosses rears, No slaves shall be for subject No trophy wet with tears.Drawn to the romance of chivalry,Elgar especially admired the Christian self-sacrifice on display in the far corners of Empire. The heroic death of General Gordon at Khartoum stirred him to write a symphony in praise of this imperial martyr. The work was eventually abandoned, but much of the music made its way into The Dream of Gerontius.

Elgar also enjoyed the resonances of imperial composition: his carefully crafted nobilmente style provided a perfect soundtrack for the military step and flummery of Empire. His marches were a celebration of the romance, glory and nobility of war. “I like to look on the composer’s vocation as the old troubadours or bardsdid,” Elgar wrote. “In those days it was no disgrace to a man to be turned on to step in front of an army and inspire the people.”

For that’s exactly what Elgar’s music did. What’s more, his work transcended class and place, pleasing audiences from Buckingham Palace to the music hall. By the late 19th century the imagery surrounding the British monarch was vitally inter-meshed with the meaning of Empire. Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee was turned into a colonial pageant for which Elgar provided his first publicly successful work, The Imperial March. And when the music-hall impresario Oswald Stoll wanted to cash in on the 1911 Delhi Durbar with an imperial-themed masque, he turned to Elgar. The result was the rampantly jingoistic The Crown of India, which played to packed crowds at the London Coliseum no doubt buoyed up by such lines as, “Lift aloft the Flag of England!/ Hers it is to lead the Light.”

However, it was not all such stirring stuff. After the First World War, Elgar had doubts about how audiences would respond to A. C. Benson’s imperial lyrics for the Coronation Ode: “Wider still and wider/ Shall thy bounds be set.” Similarly, his sombre Cello Concerto (1919) seemed to hint at the decline and fall-inevitable within any empire.Ken Russell certainly suggested that Elgar’s imperial inclinations came to an end after 1918 as he retreated to the hills and glades of the Three Counties. But just as the Empire flourished in the interwar years, so did Elgar’s music. His music was played with ever greater regularity as Land of Hope and Glorybegan to be adopted as an unofficial national anthem.

Of course, it was not to everyone’s tastes. Benjamin Britten switched the radio off as soon as Elgar came on. The acerbic Scottish critic Cecil Gray pictured Hope and Glory arousing “such patriotic enthusiasm in the breast of a rubber planter in the Tropics” as to lead him “to kick his negro servant slightly harder than he would have done if he had never heard it”. Hence the guilty sense of why the Proms might need to “move on”.

But, in reality, it is us listeners who need to move on. Yes, Elgar sought to underpin the British Empire through his music. Rather than trying to deny that reality, we should seek to appreciate the imperial paradigm within which he composed and how it helped to shape his extraordinary music. Whether that means we should scrap the Last Night, I’ll leave Roger Wright to decide.

Tristram Hunt presents Elgar and Empire, June 3, Radio 3, 10.45pm www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/ classical/elgar

Thanks to LSO Live, you will also be able to buy discounted Elgar CDs at www.lso.co.uk/thetimes. We are offering Colin Davis’s new recording of the Enigma Variations at a special price of £5.99, including postage (usual price £6.74), and a six-CD package of Enigma Variations, Symphonies 1-3 and the Dream of Gerontius for just £24.99, including postage (usual price £32.22). You can also buy tickets at a 20 per cent discount for The Dream of Gerontius at the Barbican, London EC2, Jun 3 (www.lso.co.uk/thetimes) or by telephoning the Barbican on 020-7638 8891 and quoting “Elgar Times offer”.

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