A golden age

Was there a golden age of English music a hundred years ago? From today’s vantage-point there probably was.

Was there a golden age of English music a hundred years ago? From today’s vantage-point there probably was. The years 1910 and 1911 still excite the imagination as one contemplates the extraordinary richness of the new works that were being introduced to audiences in London and at festivals at that period. If you believed in the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, there was plenty to support you. The spirit was changing — ‘Rarely, rarely comest thou, spirit of delight’ was the ambiguous line by Shelley that Edward Elgar inscribed on the score of his Second Symphony. If a single work of art could be said to epitomise the years from 1900 to 1914, this great symphony must be a leading candidate.

Industrial strife with violence, a gaping divide between classes, pomp and circumstance on an imperial scale and the folly of the Boer War — these were the principal motifs in English life in the Edwardian era. None of these events is programmatically described in the symphony, which is a deeply personal work. The strife and turmoil of the first movement are a guilt-ridden and torn expression of love for another man’s wife and of the anguish it brings. The symphony is dedicated to the memory of King Edward VII, who died in 1911, and its funeral march is fit for a monarch, but its inspiration was as a lament for a musical friend who died young. So the swift and cruel severance of friendship is there, too.

The scherzo recalls an episode of civic unrest witnessed by Elgar in Rome. In the finale, disquiet again subverts the calm of the symphony, which ends quietly in a glow of Wagnerian splendour.