Modern Musical Drift

by W. J. Henderson

Now, what has Edward Elgar accomplished, and what does the character of his work indicate as the present tendency of oratorio? In his musical method he has striven to demonstrate that Bach and Wagner were of one blood. And, indeed, who that has heard the twining polyphony of five themes near the end of the "Meistersinger" prelude ever doubted that both of these masters sprang from the loins of Palestrina, the son of the house of Ockeghem? Elgar has preserved for the necessity of oratorio the narrator, though he has diversified his recitation by dividing it among the voices.

This preservation of the narrator is the one characteristic of the contemporaneous oratorio form which proclaims to the world that the mandate of the Bishop of London is still in force. Nothing else in the score would disclose this fact. Everything is constructed on dramatic lines; everything is conceived in the mood of Mendelssohn's "Elijah." The tremendous picture of the entrance of the soul of Gerontius into the shrine of the Invisible and the descriptive speech of Mary Magdalen on her tower, accompanied by the sounds of the orgy, demand most eloquently the accompaniment of pictorial scenes. And these are but two examples taken at random from scores prolific in similar instances.

The distribution of the narrative among several voices is the method of Handel, but in the treatment of the choruses Elgar has learned still more from that master. Here we have lessons accepted from both Bach and the Saxon, and in the dawn of the twentieth century we find a product of the skill of Stradella in handling huge masses of tone.

In the employment of one set of choruses representative of actors in the story and another of purely commentary nature, Elgar has followed Bach's method in "The Passion." He has honored aged custom in allotting the words of Jesus to a bass voice. The treatment of the post-ascension speeches of the Saviour as choral, or many-voiced, is as old as Heinrich Schütz.

Furthermore, Mr. Elgar has preserved the ecclesiastic character in his music by adhering to the use of the polyphonic devices which were created by church composers and which have sternly resisted the efforts of the ablest masters, even of Verdi, to lend themselves to the restless utterance of the music drama. Elgar's polyphony is by no means stencilled in form; his fugues are not fugues of the North German pattern. He handles single and double counterpoint with consummate ease and with the assured freedom of one who dares to depart from the beaten path without fear of disaster.

Added to this is the employment of a harmonic style which belongs entirely to the present day. Mr. Elgar's polyphony is built on a harmonic basis which almost completely ignores the ecclesiastic tonalities of the earlier church writers and utilizes the diatonic and chromatic scheme of the present, the method of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde." It is as far from Handel as it is from Mendelssohn. Its source is without question the inexhaustible fount of musical learning, the music of Sebastian Bach, but it is Bach studied by the lamp of Brahms and recited with the tongue of Wagner.

Brahms was himself a filter of Bach, and this might seem to indicate that the Sebastianism of Elgar was exceeding thin. But the English writer, while considering the work of the composer of the "German Requiem," has accepted suggestions from it only as to manner. For the original matter he has gone back to the real master of all masters. In his recitatives he again has shown a profound understanding of the psychologic nature of Bach's declamation. Upon it, as a foundation, he has reared a style of his own, very flexible, full of variety and as changeful in its harmonic undercurrents as a sunset sky.

To these derivations from the art of Bach and others Elgar has added much of the material of to-day's music. In the first place, he has permitted the diatonic major mode to occupy its own proud place as the chief medium for the expression of the optimistic emotions. Bach seldom tarried loner in major keys. He was lingering under the influence of the ecclesiastic modes. Elgar has emancipated his oratorio music from the domination of these modes, but he has not, like Handel and Mendelssohn—the one governed by the Omphalic distaff of Italian opera and the other writing in an age when the minor was always relative—neglected their significance entirely.

Secondly, he has utilized the whole splendor of the modern orchestra and has extended it in every direction which seemed to him necessary. He has employed gongs, both great and small; cymbals ancient and modern, bells with and without keyboard mechanism, tambourine and triangle. Of course, he has written elaborately for the organ; he would not be a loyal son of the royal house of Bach if he had not.