1900 onwards – A new century and conflicting rumours

With Charles Woodhouse’s ownership, my life took on yet another dimension.  I now enjoyed the experience of being played in The Queen’s Hall Orchestra, in the newly instigated London Promenade Concerts under ‘Old Timber’, Henry Wood, and sharing in the excitement of Charles being a founder-member of the London Symphony Orchestra.

(‘Old Timber’ – Henry Wood)

Although the musical atmosphere in England was anticipating huge social and political upheavals and the possibility of war with Germany, I was able to relish the wide range of new musical developments, largely through the enterprising efforts of ‘Old Timber’. But the ‘Golden Boy’ of the Edwardian period was Edward Elgar, and I found all my early experiences of ‘stimmung’ and romantic tone-colour were easily brought out of my body when Charles and I played his compositions – most notably his ‘Introduction & Allegro for Strings’, the ‘Enigma Variations’, his oratorios and his symphonies.  In spite of the natural joy which this music gave (especially to stringed instruments like me), I was aware that Elgar was modelling his style on the old German-Austrian traditional symphonic forms and the Wagnerian sound world.  The Parisian ‘freedom’ I discovered with Halfdan Jebe, with its rejection of all things traditional and ‘German’, was nowhere to be heard in Elgar’s musical quest for perfection.  But the English public loved this ‘Grand Old Man of English music’. Perhaps part of his allure was his ability to hold together those two later-to-become arch- enemies – England and Germany – in one musical orbit one musical orbit.

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(Edward Elgar)

There was a performance of his recently completed oratorio ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ which will remain in my memory forever.  It took place at the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford Cathedral in 1905, with Elgar himself conducting. This remarkable work, inspired by the writings of Cardinal Newman, is now regarded as the work which captures Elgar’s true spirit.  For me, the most moving moments come in the opening bars of the Second Part of the oratorio, when the music endeavours to resonate with the sound of heaven, but I will hold my excitement, and wait to tell you more about the effect of this work on me when I describe some (much-later) later performances at the hands of young Harvey Richardson.

Little did I realise at this time that another remarkable work for chorus and vast orchestra was to have its premiere in Germany.  This was Halfdan Jebe’s close friend Frederick Delius’s ‘Eine Messe des Lebens’, (‘A Mass of Life’), an extraordinary setting of selected verses from Friedrich Nietzsche’s poem ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’.  Can you imagine a greater contrast – English Catholicism and German nihilism?   Such a crossing and crucifixion of ideologies demands another diary entry – next time…………………..

(Frederick Delius)