World Premiere: October 27, 1919
Last HSO Performance: May 10, 2020
Instrumentation: Solo cello, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani and strings
Duration: 30 minutes

The First World War was one of the most traumatic events in the history of Western civilization. Wars, intrigues, religious upheavals, disasters of every ilk had regularly wreaked havoc upon Europe from the beginnings of recorded history, many reshaping political boundaries, changing ruling houses, or even redirecting basic philosophies. Nothing previous to The Great War, however, so profoundly altered the assumptions on which our civilization is founded. Between 1914 and 1918, three royal lines — Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Romanov — lost their thousand-year birthrights; the awesome destructiveness of modern technological warfare became stunningly apparent; social repression of ancient ancestry sought redress. World War I shaped not only political boundaries; it shaped our modern world. It taught us not about the fragility of human life (our most primitive Cro-Magnon ancestor who chiseled the first spear-point knew that), but about the fragility of our institutions, our culture, our civilized order — about the razor’s-edge balance on which they rest. When added to these profound concerns, the personal grief of death, deprivation and destruction left no one in the West untouched. Edward Elgar was no exception.

It seemed that Elgar’s world was crumbling in 1918. The four years of war had left him, as so many others, weary and numb from the crush of events. Many of his friends of German ancestry were put through a bad time in England during those years; others whom he knew were killed or maimed in action. The traditional foundations of the British political system were skewed by the rise of socialism directly after the war, and Elgar saw his beloved Edwardian world drawing to a close. (He resembles another titan among fin-de-siècle musicians, Gustav Mahler, in his mourning of a passing age.) His music seemed anachronistic in an era of polychords and dodecaphony, a remnant of stuffy conservatism, and his 70th birthday concert in Queen’s Hall attracted only half a house. The health of his wife, his chief helpmate, inspiration and critic, began to fail, and with her passing in 1920, Elgar virtually stopped composing. His friends drifted away. He became a lonely old man, given to flinging about caustic remarks, even concerning his own music. At a rehearsal of the Cello Concerto in 1923, he turned to Ralph Vaughan Williams and said, “I am surprised that you came to hear this vulgar music.” 

The Cello Concerto, written just before his wife’s death, is Elgar’s last major work, and seems both to summarize his disillusion over the calamities of World War I and to presage the gnawing unhappiness of his last years. Wrote New York Times Harold Schonberg, “In the elegiac Cello Concerto it is hard to escape the notion that Elgar — consciously or otherwise — was making a final statement, retreating into a private world from which he was never to emerge.” The adjectives “mellow,” “autumnal,” “resigned,” “meditative” all attach themselves appropriately to this Concerto, which Elgar said mirrors “a man’s attitude to life.” 

Large sections of the Concerto are given over to solitary ruminations of the cello in the form of recitative-like passages, such as the one that opens the work. The forms of the Concerto’s four movements only suggest traditional models in their epigrammatic concentration. The first movement is a ternary structure (A–B–A), commencing after the opening recitative. A limpid, undulating theme in 9/8 (Moderato) is given by the lower strings as the material for the first and third sections, while a related melody (12/8, with dotted rhythms) appears first in the woodwinds in the central portion. Elgar’s biographer Michael Kennedy wrote of the poignant mood of this movement, “This is overpoweringly the music of wood smoke and autumn bonfires, of the evening of life.”

The first movement is linked directly to the second (Allegro molto). It takes several tries before the movement is able to maintain its forward motion, but when it does, it proves to be a skittering, moto perpetuo display piece for the soloist, Elgar’s closest approach to overt virtuosity in this work. It is music, however, which, for all its hectic activity, seems strangely earth-bound, a sort of wild merriment not quite capable of banishing the dolorous thoughts of the opening movement.

The almost-motionless stillness of the following Adagio returns to the introspection of the opening movement. It, in the words of Herbert Byard, “seems to express the grief that is too deep for tears.” Its calm resignation lays open a window into the soul of the composer that was usually well-shuttered by the vigor and complexity of much of his other music. 

The finale, like the opening, is prefaced by a recitative for the soloist. The movement’s form following this introductory section is based on the Classical rondo, and makes a valiant attempt at the “hail-and-well-met” vigor of Elgar’s earlier march music. Like the scherzando second movement, however, it seems more a nostalgic recollection of past abilities than a potent display of remaining powers. Toward the end, the stillness of the third movement creeps over the music, and the soloist indulges in an extended soliloquy. Brief bits of earlier movements are remembered before a final recall of the fast rondo music closes this thoughtful Concerto.

English musicologist Michael Kennedy wrote of this work, “Here is the elegy for an age. The slaughter of war ... had grieved Elgar, but this requiem is not a cosmic utterance on behalf of mankind, it is wholly personal, the musical expression of his bitterness about the providence that was ... cruelly obtuse to individual sorrow and sacrifice. There is no massive hope for the future in this music, only the voice of an aging, embittered man, a valediction to an era and to the powers of music that he knew were dying with him.” This is music that our own disordered age might do well to experience with a receptive heart.