Elgar/Payne Symphony No 3 - is it to fade out of sight ?

[BBMmk2]

Indeed as Hyperion found to their cost.

Thankfully, they are still going!

[Lat-Literal]

I noticed a recentish review that referred to Anthony Payne's realisation as having had a vogue and that this was fading.

Indeed a quick search on backtrack showed no future performaced planned. I for one should be sad if this were the case . I think that it is an outstandingly satisfying work demonstrating not only the richness if much of the source material as well as the talent of Mr Payne in making a coherent work from the sketches.

I am wondering whether the review you read was British? Elgar's orchestral work is frequently overlooked outside Britain, especially when it comes to performance. Payne's Elgar 3 will be used to reinforce those prejudices unless it is marketed internationally as something of a springboard. While I'm not overly keen on Elgar 1 or Elgar 2, I do think it is 2 which in sound is more accessible to modern audiences. The Larghetto and the finale are at least memorable. Elgar 1 was more successful in its time because it was to all intents and purposes the first high profile British symphony. I suggest that it is that status which is almost unknowingly linked to its popularity today rather than it being about the number of performances early on.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Whether the review was British or not, there are no plans for any performances of the Elgar/Payne Symphony anywhere in the world. (See #110 )

[Lat-Literal]

Whether the review was British or not, there are no plans for any performances of the Elgar/Payne Symphony anywhere in the world. (See #110 )

I accept that point but what I am saying is that it will be up to British concerts halls and audiences to determine whether it has longevity. Because all of the historical evidence suggests that there is no especial wish for it elsewhere unless it is hyped. If British reviews talk it down, then the outlook isn't hopeful. It has to be said that the tide might well be against it. It isn't right on. There is a question as to why Elgar is unpopular abroad. Perhaps it is because he was as he claimed a 'troubadour of old, who stepped in, in front of his army, giving them tunes to whistle, sing, or march to.' But he was also as a Catholic an outsider, a harsh critic of British music and ostensibly influenced by Dvorak and Wagner, as reflected in the style.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

If British reviews talk it down, then the outlook isn't hopeful.

"If".

But reporting the fact that there are no forthcoming performances of the work anywhere in the world isn't "talk[ing] it down". I reported this fact in #110, and have "talked it up" throughout my posts in this Thread.

[Lat-Literal]

"If".

But reporting the fact that there are no forthcoming performances of the work anywhere in the world isn't "talk[ing] it down". I reported this fact in #110, and have "talked it up" throughout my posts in this Thread.

I am not suggesting, ferney, that you are talking it down.

It might be helpful at this point. to have the exact source of the "recentish review that referred to Anthony Payne's realisation as having had a vogue and that this was fading". Roger Scruton considers it to be "a brilliant and heartfelt recuperation of musical ideas; one that has helped to revitalise our musical culture". Maybe he's contributed to its falling from favour.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

[teamsaint]

Unpopularity is the default position for most music, most of the time, in most places.


Even quite a lot of relatively popular music struggles to get concert outings .

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Unpopularity is the default position for most music, most of the time, in most places.
Even quite a lot of relatively popular music struggles to get concert outings .

You are, of course, quite right - but the Elgar/Payne is interesting in this regard because of its initial popularity (the "vogue" Barbi mentions in the OP). The question here is whether the initial popularity was a flash-in-the-pan, and interest in the work faded as people got to know the work better - or whether other factors are dissuading conductors/orchestras/concert agencies from programming it. (I don't think we'll be able to give definitive answers on this Forum, as we don't have access to what what those "other factors" might be, if they even exist!)

[teamsaint]

You are, of course, quite right - but the Elgar/Payne is interesting in this regard because of its initial popularity (the "vogue" Barbi mentions in the OP). The question here is whether the initial popularity was a flash-in-the-pan, and interest in the work faded as people got to know the work better - or whether other factors are dissuading conductors/orchestras/concert agencies from programming it. (I don't think we'll be able to give definitive answers on this Forum, as we don't have access to what what those "other factors" might be, if they even exist!)

Probably comes down to a point of view, then.

Anyway,
Just a few random examples of things going out of fashion:

Bantock. Songs from the Chinese Poets. Published 1918, 7 proms performances by 1940, none since.

Peter Racine Fricker. 8 proms performances, almost all in the fifties and sixties.

Henze symphonies. A group of performances around 1995 to 2000, and not much , if anything , since.

Looking at the Proms archive briefly, one might draw the conclusion that British composers ( used to) get perhaps undue attention during their lifetime, ( check out Bantock and Cowen, hundreds of Proms performances way back when) , and that time doesn't do appreciation of their music any favours.

My suggestion would be for Suffolk Coastal to get working on one of his spreadsheets and prove whatever needs proving.

[Pabmusic]

... There is a question as to why Elgar is unpopular abroad...

A while back (as much as two years) I posted some evidence that mitigates this. There were listed non-British performances of Elgar's works over several months. There were many performances of the Cello Concerto and Enigma, of course, but also both symphonies (sorry! given this thread) - including the 2nd in Paris. Gerontius was there, too (one in Paris again, I think). I can't find it now, and it's too much work to do it again. But we do like to put things in compartments, and Elgar fits neatly in the "unpopular abroad" box. Yet back in the 1950s Hans Keller pointed out that there were many more foreign performances of Elgar than the British realise.

I've found it! It's post no. 73 here from 2013:

http://www.for3.org/forums/showthread.php?9396-Why-doesn-t-Europe-get-Elgar/page3&highlight=Elgar+performances+pabmusic

[Barbirollians]

I have a vague feeling the comment I read might even have been in Gramophone but it was definitely a British publication.

[kea]

This formulation of yours has made me think, and I think that in the end my own personal view is the same. With the stress on the "personal" - I can't imagine why a creative artist would feel the need to inhabit, as it were, the personality of another artist, from a different point in history ("they do things differently there"), when life is short and there is so much to do in terms of finding a way to explore uncharted musical territory; I can't imagine feeling the need to express one's relationship to a particular music in that sort of way. But of course people are different.

I can completely imagine why a creative artist would do that, since it seems to reflect a pretty common position for 21st century composers to be in: growing up listening to classical music (and inundated with the background noise of society, including the use of film music to simulate various emotional states), starting to compose with that being your primary field of reference, and then discovering that there's simply no demand for symphonies and sonatas anymore and the musical language that lends itself to simulating emotion is deprecated, and then going to university and learning the craft of composition but never having the talent to explore anything new or uncharted.

Obviously Not All Composers are bourgeois studied-composition-at-uni stylistic conservatives who secretly long to be able to write music that has notes and rhythms and functional harmonies in it and still be taken seriously by the Establishment, but it seems like quite a lot are, up to and including such notable people as Helmut Lachenmann and Gérard Pesson and etc. And I do sympathise to some extent, since I had a pretty similar early life trajectory and don't consider myself talented enough to create anything original or to be a "creative artist" at all. I guess I do have issues with the idea that creating a work based on sketches/drafts/etc by another composer is a "completion" though.

I understand why people write them—it's rare to have the opportunity to write a 40-minute symphony in C minor that is stylistically at least a hundred years out of date, and be able to hear it performed and have it taken seriously as an act of re-creative composition instead of pastiche and kitsch—and I understand why they are presented as eg the "Elgar/Payne 3rd Symphony" or the "Schubert/Newbould 10th Symphony" or whatever—because unless you can convincingly tie it to an established composer of the canon and reduce yourself from composer to scholar, it will be seen for the pastiche it is. But I think it does expose the artistic bankruptcy of the classical music world, in much the same way that forgeries passed off under the name of Mozart or Bach can become repertoire items whereas authentic works from less famous composers are never more than curiosities: it reveals that the only criterion for widespread acceptance of a musical work is the fame of the composer. Artistic quality does not even enter the discussion in the end.

So obviously we may potentially have a situation with the Elgar/Payne where it currently is still performed and recorded, but less often than the authentic Elgar symphonies, which may have any number of causes (including the costs of hiring the score and parts and paying royalties, whereas obviously Elgar himself is out of copyright now). But I do think it's safe to say that without changing a single note of the symphony, if Payne had presented it as the long-lost manuscript of Elgar's 3rd Symphony he had discovered in the dusty archives of some library, rather than his own work, it would be much more popular now than it is; and if Payne had presented it as his own work, even if acknowledging the debt to Elgar's sketches, it would still be in manuscript and likely would never have seen the light of day. That's basically just the world we live in.

(for the record I recall preferring the Elgar/Payne to the two Elgar symphonies, mostly because I'm not a big fan of Elgar and the music doesn't sound quite so Elgarian as Elgar himself, but it's been a long time since I listened to any of them)

[Lat-Literal]

A while back (as much as two years) I posted some evidence that mitigates this. There were listed non-British performances of Elgar's works over several months. There were many performances of the Cello Concerto and Enigma, of course, but also both symphonies (sorry! given this thread) - including the 2nd in Paris. Gerontius was there, too (one in Paris again, I think). I can't find it now, and it's too much work to do it again. But we do like to put things in compartments, and Elgar fits neatly in the "unpopular abroad" box. Yet back in the 1950s Hans Keller pointed out that there were many more foreign performances of Elgar than the British realise.

I've found it! It's post no. 73 here from 2013:

http://www.for3.org/forums/showthrea...ances+pabmusic

1 of 2

Thank you Pabmusic for pointing me in that direction. I did find it very interesting and I read all of it. Without wishing to overly prolong or divert the discussion on this thread, I have thought about this more. While I accept that there have been more foreign perfomances of Elgar abroad since the 1950s - possibly most notably during the 1950s - than the British realise, I do think Elgar suffers internationally from having a unique position in British music. I half agree with the posters who have said that Elgar supporters do not help themselves by emphasising his Englishness - it probably is Englishness rather than Britishness - but then there isn't much that can be done about it when he is part of the bricks and mortar.

Many people want "Land of Hope and Glory" to be the national anthem. It is chosen over the likes of "Jerusalem" for 21st century sporting events. While highlighted in the Proms from the late 1940s, it was first seen as enabling an overtly visual representation of patriotism at the Proms with the advent of televised Proms in the 1960s. But only a considerable time later were the televised Proms beamed across the globe. I suggest it was then that the world came to see both it and Elgar himself as being the one little part of the Proms where the English draw back from the Proms' international emphasis to claim the event for their own. In parallel, there is Nimrod, ongoing in its specific association with Remembrance Sunday. That as I will later suggest may be more of a problem that it appears. Plus there is a royal dimension to Elgar among and yet arguably above other British composers. He is known to international audiences as being associated with royal weddings and this also tends to overly emphasise an Englishness or Britishness. It will to some convey "that English" insularity.

Much has been made of the similarity of the resurgence of Elgar and Mahler in the 1960s and the contrast in many people's opinions of their respective merits. Both were boosted by the advent of the 33 rpm record. With those roots in advanced commercial promotion, associative words probably do matter. While Mahler's titles tend towards aspects of the human spirit, not least in respect of some sense of possibility above fragility, Elgar's symphonies are nameless while elsewhere it is "pomp" and "land" and "glory" along with the hope. While it is Parry who is arguably more stately and Elgar who is allegedly the one with the "jaunt", nothing of the former or latter was especially helpful when it came to sensibilities in that decade. Mahler's spirit was in many ways more in line with the times. The over-emphasised pastoralism in Vaughan Williams elided with them too. As for the rest, Britten, I'd suggest, was just so huge immediately after the war that his success could not be sustained on that level; Stanford and Finzi to the extent that they were acknowledged did not have quite the same patriotic baggage for being of Irish and Jewish heritage respectively; Holst had been open to considerable international influence including the music of India; Tippett was a natural outsider; and Walton, who had on occasion reached out to Hindemith, though alive was suffering from ill health. The big problem for each one of them was an emphasis on pop music.

While the spirit of the 1960s has long gone, much of the post war sensibilities remain. There is a certain feeling that modern British audiences who are a little sensitive to what they perceive as jingoism may well be politically inclined to prefer German composers to British composers with a somewhat German strain. There is also an element of why settle for a copy when it is possible to have the real deal. Additionally - I am sure this is true of Mahler - people like to be surfing an unexpectedly buoyant wave. Arguably, though, music that is perceived by others as being quintessentially English is naturally if ironically aligned with the German tradition. It isn't lost on the British public, for example, that the Royal Family has German heritage. Any insularity that is perceived by international audiences comes with a twist. It isn't simply that the English or the British are seen as nationalistic but that they are with Elgar negotiating the complexities of their own past in which frankly it would almost seem impertinent to intrude. Royalty is important here. Notwithstanding that Charles has a preference for Parry, the top of our state hierarchy almost requires there to be a composer who sits easily in line with it as its musical version. Other countries without royalty or with less significant royalty do not have or need such a connection or reflection. For all of our reputation for being among the more nationalistic of nations, with an internationalism that can't even be fully embraced because of the history of empire, there is then a dichotomy. Our formal as well as informal nationalism has an international dimension by structural definition.

[Lat-Literal]

2 of 2

Given this, and also the war effort in which it wasn't the fascists who won, one might have thought that in theory it would have been the British who were ultimately victorious in music. As it was, the true victor and probably rightly so was the German music which the Germans themselves had either used for distorted purposes or banned. The ultimate rebellion - rebellion is another key word of the 1960s - was and is to restore to former glory what has subsequently been warped and all that has been banned not by states but by overly oppressive state regimes. Unlike any form of any state, rebellion is something that can be fully comprehended internationally. It isn't stuck in time. It can arise anywhere at any time. As such, it will always have relevance. Here the Elgar versus Mahler consideration, while comprehensible, is something of a phony war. To the extent that contrasts and comparisons are made, it should be between Elgar and Beethoven. While Beethoven was favoured by the Nazis, "Ode to Joy" in particular was used too during the war by opponents in ways that emphasised contention. It has ever since been rebel music in all manner of places. That is, from its adoption by the forerunners of the EU whose organisational approaches were in many respects intended to be a formal rebellion against concepts of the nation state to its use by Chinese students in Tianenmen Square. Elgar couldn't compete with that sort of weight.

Let's introduce another word here. It is "Enigma". One might note in line with what has previously been said that the machine which brought the Enigma code was made and named in Germany. Additionally, there is the interesting point that Elgar took pains to refute that the enigma in his "Variations" had anything whatsoever to do with "Auld Lang Syne", thereby reinforcing a sense of Englishness rather than Britishness if not one that was distinct from the German. The greatest enigma may well be just how non enigmatic Elgar's placing happens to be in the English national psyche. So firm in foot is it at least in simplistic perception that it is very hard indeed to think how any near equivalent to President Macron could be elected as he was to the backdrop of, yes, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy". A rebellious statement, no doubt. One that was not designed for the promotion of France but rather to symbolise with the greatest of force the new President's European credentials. In contrast, it is worth noting the music chosen for one of the most memorable occasions in our country in recent years. Charles and Diana had selections from most of the main British composers but the deliberate emphasis was to play down the politics and choose compositions from their "softer end".

As I suggested in earlier posts, none of this bodes well for Payne/Elgar in Europe. While there may well have been more performances of Elgar in Europe than we might imagine, that doesn't mean that the reception to Elgar there has ever been overwhelming. There are just too many obstacles of history, philosophy and psychology. It isn't even as if Payne can be given any supposedly positive spin of watering down Elgar. It is so clear that he was of the intention to contribute to Elgar's standing. As for this country, the fact that Symphony 3 is not "pure Elgar" is likely to be to its detriment along with the fact it arrived at a time when it could be seen as at odds with internationalism. Possibly had Payne's completing of a sixth march in Pomp and Circumstance been a runaway success, things might have been different but it appears that it hasn't exactly found its place among modern British audiences.

I was, though, wrong on one point. There is one other comparison or contrast to be made. It is Elgar versus Ives. For the Enigma Variations, see also The Unanswered Question. While hardly comparable musically, there is a similar mind set that underpins the two works in concept. The only difference is that Ives is musically truly enigmatic. Especially but not only in the United States, compositions by Elgar and Ives are not infrequently performed together on the same night. In fact, on occasions, it is Elgar, Ives and Beethoven which, however unlikely that combination might appear, is very astute in what it asks audiences to consider. Elgar and Ives have also been recorded together on disc. They were both admired by Mahler. Elgar was for a while quite close to Horatio Parker who had taught Ives composition when he was at Yale. Ives the rebel who was "out with the old and in with the new" is now Ives the composer who can be embraced by the American establishment. Elgar has long been a feature of graduation ceremonies throughout the United States. Consequently, I suggest that if Payne's Elgar 3 is to have a future any future concentration would be best there. If that fails, it would also be worth bearing in mind that Elgar is also a feature in similar formal occasions in Canada and indeed the Philippines. Britain is not its best bet for success and any question of a future in Europe is almost certainly answered in history by the word "no".

Oh, I promised to say a little more about Nimrod. No one of that name is known to have existed. However, one version is that he is a monarch who rebels against God. Perhaps then we can locate a bit of rebellion in Elgar's music after all. Another will have British Muslims upset if the academics ever get their hands on it. One can see it easily turning into a tabloid story and then a petition to Parliament. So it might well be in the long run that Payne's version of Elgar is ironically Elgar's guarantor. Not being Nimrod, it isn't a Nimrod for anybody's back.