These are the conclusions of Mr. Ritter after a painstaking investigation. That Dvořák was most unhappy and pathetically homesick during his sojourn in New York is known to many, though Mr. Ritter does not enter into any long discussion of the composer’s mental condition in this country.
Yet some will undoubtedly continue to insist that the symphony From the New World is based, for the most part, on Negro themes, and that the future of American music rests on the use of Congo, North American Indian, Creole, Greaser, and Cowboy ditties, whinings, yawps, and whoopings.
The symphony is scored for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes (one interchangeable with English horn), two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, kettledrums, cymbals, triangle, and strings.
EDWARD WILLIAM
ELGAR
(Born at Broadheath, near Worcester, England, June 2, 1857; died at Worcester, February 23, 1934)
Nearly one hundred years ago, William Hazlitt wrote a few words concerning a speech on Indian affairs by the Marquis Wellesley, the eldest brother of the Duke of Wellington. These words may be justly applied to Sir Edward Elgar, composer of The Dream of Gerontius, two symphonies, the popular march Pomp and Circumstance, and other works familiar to our concert audiences.
“Seeming to utter volumes in every word, and yet saying nothing; retaining the same unabated vehemence of voice and action without anything to excite it; still keeping alive the promise and the expectation of genius without once satisfying it—soaring into mediocrity with adventurous enthusiasm, harrowed up by some plain matter of fact, writhing with agony under a truism, and launching a commonplace with all the fury of a thunderbolt.”
VARIATIONS ON AN ORIGINAL THEME, “ENIGMA,” OP. 36
Theme: Andante. Variations: I. “C.A.E.” L’istesso tempo II. “H.D.S.-P.” Allegro III. “R.B.T.” Allegretto IV. “W.M.B.” Allegro di molto V. “R.P.A.” Moderato VI. “Ysobel” Andantino VII. “Troyte” Presto VIII. “W.N.” Allegretto IX. “Nimrod” Moderato X. “Dorabella—Intermezzo.” Allegro XI. “G.R.S.” Allegro di molto XII. “B.G.N.” Andante XIII. “X.X.X.—Romanza.” Moderato XIV. “E.D.U.—Finale”
Elgar’s Variations were once regarded as a brilliant show-piece for an orchestra. There was a time when Elgar was held to be a “great” composer. Time, the Old Man with a Scythe, has a disconcerting way of handling it. The music with a few exceptions seems at the best respectable in a middle-class manner; the sort of music that gives the composer the degree of Mus. Doc. from an English university. In Elgar’s case, his music won him knighthood, and to this day there are “Elgar Festivals” in England. Was Cecil Gray too severe when he wrote of Elgar: “He never gets entirely away from the atmosphere of pale, cultured idealism and the unconsciously hypocritical, self-righteous, Pharisaical gentlemanliness which is so characteristic of British art in the last century”?