"King Olaf."
December 2, 1898.
Mr. Edward Elgar seems to owe his fame almost entirely to those autumn festivals which are so important a feature of musical life in this country. An organist, with a turn for serious composition, occupying a post in some city where one of those festivals is periodically held, is favourably placed with a view to getting a hearing for the productions of his musical genius; and Mr. Elgar was, and so far as we know is still, organist at St. George's Roman Catholic Church in Worcester. His career as a festival composer dates from 1890, in which year his overture "Froissart" was produced at the Worcester Festival. Three years later a choral work—"The Black Knight"—was brought to a hearing in the same city, apparently with advantageous results to Mr. Elgar's reputation, for since that time he has devoted much of his energy to composition. The cantata performed yesterday evening for the first time in Manchester seems to have been the fourth of Mr. Elgar's important choral works. When first performed at the Hanley Festival two years ago it attracted much attention, and was hailed by many writers for the press as a work for the Leeds Festival—generally considered the most important event of the kind in the country. The work composed for Leeds and produced there last October was called "Caractacus." It is in general style similar to "King Olaf," while naturally representing a later stage in the composer's development. In both works one notes the same dramatic instinct, the same unconventional treatment, the same faculty of genuine thematic invention, and the same unmistakeable gift for orchestration. As this composer gains in experience it does not seem, as with many others, that his inventive powers become exhausted, but that, on the contrary, they ripen and develop. "Caractacus" is obviously a finer work in every way than "King Olaf." Now, all these facts make Mr. Elgar a very interesting person. The qualities enumerated above—gift for thematic invention, ingenious and telling orchestration, unconventional treatment, and so forth—are extremely rare and valuable. It is quite possible for a composer to have a long and successful career without possessing any one of them, and it is therefore very natural that a composer who does possess them should be hailed with enthusiasm. But, unfortunately, they are not the only qualities necessary to a composer of extended choral works, and Mr. Elgar, who rises so far above mere feeble conventionalities in his actual music, is not free from the common but most mischievous delusion that almost anything will suffice by way of "verses for music." He throws away the resources of his remarkable art upon a text that is in places unfit for any kind of musical treatment, and is, on the whole, hopelessly rambling, incoherent, and tiresome. One becomes interested in a dramatic episode where a bride seems on the point of murdering her bridegroom with a dagger that gleams in the moonlight. But the narrative wanders away to other subjects; a fresh heroine, with quite different affairs and interests, occupies attention, and one hears nothing more of the lady with the dagger. No doubt, the title "Scenes from" the Saga of King Olaf seems to justify such procedure, but it does not prevent the interest from flagging or the general impression left by the work from being fragmentary and incoherent. The best of the music is at the beginning, where there is an extremely fine chorus, "The Challenge of Thor," containing various musical elements all truly expressive and fraught with the same primitive and racy vigour. The more important of the elements in question are the Hammer music, the Iceberg music, the Thunder and Lightning music, and the strains which carry the defiance of Christianity by the old Norse religion. The most effective, too, of the solos is the long tenor recitative following the great chorus. At the words "listening to the wild winds wailing" a highly original and interesting strain begins to be heard in the accompaniment. But the promise of these fine things is not well carried out in the latter part of the work. Everywhere the difficulties are very formidable, and in a good many cases they were too much for the chorus, who, except in "The Challenge of Thor," did not sing in a very free or expressive manner. Nor did they always take their leads with precision; but, in a complex work abounding in accompaniment figures with such puzzling cross-rhythms, these defects were excusable. The cantata did not seem to make any great impression on the audience; but we should expect to find, if ever Mr. Elgar were so fortunate as to obtain a really good subject and a good book, and especially a subject and book thoroughly adapted to his remarkable dramatic powers, that he would produce something of lasting value.