Originally posted by Lat-Literal
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One problem that I have (if it is a problem per se, which I don't believe it to be) is this cloak of "Englishness" that certain people remain determined to make him wear at all times; I simply don't see it (or rather hear it) in his major works at all and, in any case, I'm not sure what it is and how it might be identified. Elgar was once reprimanded for paying insufficient attention to English folk music, to which he retorted something along the lines of "I am a composer and I am one of the folk, therefore I write folk music". Leaving aside Elgar's unfortunate habit of toadying to the "establishment" in the hope of somehow "bettering" himself, it seems to me that, for the most part, the jingoistic head-in-the-sand "pomp-and-circumstance" stuff has largely been thrust upon him and his work rather than being inherently a part of him; let's not forget that he wasn't at all keen to have the text of Land of Hope and Glory thrust upon the central section of his Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 despite the suggestion coming from his buddy Eddie the Seventh, yet there remain some people who believe that his melody is a setting of those words by Arthur Christopher Benson which do the piece no favours whatsoever. Did Busoni consider the Enigma Variations to be redolent of Englishry when conducting one of the early German performances of it? Isn't there something rather more Austro-Germanic about Elgar's finest works (Alassio especially)? Elgar and Strauss were not merely friends, the elder composer being open to the influence of the younger one. The brash, swaggering confidence that inhabits much of Cockaigne (one of my least favourite Elgar works, notwithstanding the skill that went into its composition) strikes me as bordering on the self-mocking, not least because it seems worlds away from the music of the symphonies, concertos and the rest.
To return to the topic of the Third Symphony, those who question the reasoning behind and the wisdom of expending all of that creative/recreative energy on the work of a composer who died at least 35 years before Tony Payne first set eyes on those sketches surely need only to realise that it was the composer in Tony that was so drawn - again and again - to them that, ultimately, he just had to try to turn them into something that might be akin to what Elgar himself might have achieved had death not stood in his way; after all, the "permission" that was declined by the Elgar Estate could extend only to publication and performance - they couldn't stop him doing his work and, at that point, he'd already done quite a lot of it and, by the time that they saw sense and officially commissioned it (having been persuaded that the sketches would soon enter the public domain whereafter anyone could have a go), he'd almost completed it.
20 years after its public première, that Third Symphony still stikes me as something of a case apart from the Schubert/Newbould, Mahler/Cooke/Goldschmidt/Matthewses, Bruckner/SPCM et al examples, not least because Tony Payne had so much less information to go on than did any of the others; it's interesting (to me, at any rate) that several conductors couldn't tell which was Elgar and which was Payne in the score until it was pointed out to them. As to the future of the work anywhere, I would hope that this would be more dependent upon whether audiences think that it's any good and want to listen to it than upon any other nationalistic/political/what-you-will reasons; it's an "English" work only in the sense and to the extent that Elgar was himself English, beyond that minor consideration, it's an international piece with more central European inflections than English ones, as could be said of much of Elgar's other music.
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