AN EARLY PORTRAIT OF DR. ELGAR.
From a Photograph.
"You ask me to go into greater details about my musical education. I am constantly receiving letters on this point from all over the world, for it is well known that I am self-taught in the matter of harmony, counterpoint, form, and, in short, the whole of the 'mystery' of music, and people want to know what books I used. To-day there are all sorts of books to make the study of harmony and orchestration pleasant. In my young days they were repellent. But I read them and I still exist."
If only cold type could suggest the humour with which those words were spoken!
"The first was Catel, and that was followed by Cherubini. The first real sort of friendly leading I had, however, was from 'Mozart's Thorough-bass School.' There was something in that to go upon—something human. It is a small book—a collection of papers beautifully and clearly expressed—which he wrote on harmony for the niece of a friend of his. I still treasure the old volume. Ouseley and Macfarren followed, but the articles which have since helped me the most are those of Sir Hubert Parry in 'Grove's Dictionary.'"
"How did these various authorities mix?" I interrupted.
"They didn't mix," was Dr. Elgar's reply, "and it appears it is necessary for anyone who has to be self-taught to read everything and—pick out the best. That, I suppose, is the difficulty—to pick out the best. How to forget the rubbish and remember the good I can't tell you, but perhaps that is where his brains must come in.
"It would be affectation were I to pretend that my work is not recognised as modern, and I hate affectation, yet it would probably surprise you to know the amount of work I did in studying musical form. Only those can safely disregard form who ignore it with a full knowledge and do not evade it through ignorance.
"Mozart is the musician from whom everyone should learn form. I once ruled a score for the same instruments and with the same number of bars as Mozart's G Minor Symphony, and in that framework I wrote a symphony, following as far as possible the same outline in the themes and the same modulation. I did this on my own initiative, as I was groping in the dark after light, but looking back after thirty years I don't know any discipline from which I learned so much.
"So you insist on my telling you some more of my early struggles and my early work? I was interested in many other things besides music, and I had the good fortune to be thrown among an unsorted collection of old books. There were books of all kinds, and all distinguished by the characteristic that they were for the most part incomplete. I busied myself for days and weeks arranging them. I picked out the theological books, of which there were a good many, and put them on one side. Then I made a place for the Elizabethan dramatists, the chronicles including Baker's and Hollinshed's, besides a tolerable collection of old poets and translations of Voltaire, and all sorts of things up to the eighteenth century. Then I began to read. I used to get up at four or five o'clock in the summer and read—every available opportunity found me reading. I read till dark. I finished by reading every one of these books—including the theology. The result of that reading has been that people tell me I know more of life up to the eighteenth century than I do of my own time, and it is probably true.