With Proud Thanksgiving

Elgar loved Germany. He often holidayed in Bavaria, and many of his most influential friends had been German; moreover, he was always very grateful to the German nation for promoting his music, especially The Dream of Gerontius. He was one of many who were incredulous that Britain found herself at war with Germany in August 1914. And worse still, his music was losing its popularity as Elgar’s style became more introverted and the heyday of Edwardian England faded in the light of war. Sir Thomas Beecham attended an all-Elgar concert during the war; when a friend commented on the small audience, “Where are Elgar’s friends?”, Beecham replied, “They’re all interned”.

Laurence Binyon was a young poet who worked at the British Museum. He published his first collection of poetry, The Winnowing Fan, in late 1914, and it caught the mood of the time. Binyon’s manager at the museum was Elgar’s friend Sidney Colvin, who suggested Elgar compose a war requiem based on the poems. Elgar agreed, selecting three poems that – to him – made a complete work that was not particularly jingoistic or triumphal.

Then the trouble began.

The first problem was a psychological one for Elgar. The first poem he selected – The Fourth of August – deals with thoughts engendered by Britain’s declaration of war. Most is unsurprising and fairly innocuous, except for these lines, which refer directly to Britain’s struggle arising out of Bismarck’s “Blut und Eisen”:

She fights the fraud that feeds desire on Lies, in lust to enslave or kill, The barren creed of blood and iron, Vampire of Europe’s wasted will…

Elgar simply felt he could not set lines that called Germany “the fraud that feeds desire on lies”, or a “vampire”. So he left the first poem incomplete, finishing both the others in 1915.

Then he met the Cambridge composer Cyril Rootham, only to discover that he had completed a setting of For The Fallen that Novello & Co. had already published! Elgar realised just what this meant – the moment Elgar’s setting was published Rootham’s would almost certainly be eclipsed. So he withheld publication and performance of his own until 1916. To Women and For the Fallen were first performed on 3 May 1916 at Leeds, conducted by the composer, with Agnes Nicholls as soloist. In the event Cyril Rootham never forgave Elgar for this, and in the 1920s and 1930s was at the centre of an anti-Elgar faction at Cambridge University that included the Professor of Music, Edward Dent, and his successor, Patrick Hadley. The antagonism was such that the sensitive Elgar had difficulty in relating to fellow-composer Ralph Vaughan Williams – also a Cambridge graduate, but not one of the anti-Elgar faction – in the 1920s.

The first movement was still incomplete. It was not until Mach 1917 that he decided to finish it. He chose to use a self-quotation from The Dream of Gerontius – from the Demon’s Chorus – and described his views of the Germans as a ‘fallen intellect’ in a letter: “A lunatic asylum is, after the first shock, not entirely sad: so few of the patients are aware of the strangeness of their situation; most of them are placid & foolishly calm; but the horror of the fallen intellect – knowing what it once was & knowing what it has become – is beyond worlds frightful.”