Elgar's spirit haunts Malvern hills?

By Staff
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Malvern, England, May 29: ''Who?'' says a young man hiking with his wife to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Sometimes called Britain's most famous composer, Edward Elgar is clearly no victim of celebrity.

Yet climb the steep Malvern Hills in the English Midlands and you may stride in time to music of the sturdy Edwardian, born 150 years ago on June 2, who loved hiking there and whose music, be it romantic or robust, is utterly British.

''I think of Malvern and rolling hills and the English countryside,'' said violinist Tasmin Little before playing Elgar's soulful, noble Violin Concerto with the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra recently in Newbury.

A taciturn, moustachioed gentleman -- who from all accounts would barely speak to anyone he had not known for a decade or more -- he mixed reserve with eccentricity and a sense of Empire to create music as varied as the best British weather.

You may get soaked or almost blown over following in the footsteps of the composer of ''Enigma Variations'' and ''Dream of Gerontius'', or tub-thumpers like England's unofficial second anthem ''Land of Hope and Glory'' and ''Pomp and Circumstance''.

''The weather changes so dramatically up there, it's scary,'' said Sarah Smith who, with her husband Robert, runs The Blue Bird Tea Rooms at the foot of the hills, which peak at 425 metres and are the highest point west of the Urals.

Elgar, who rode his bicycle ''Mr Phoebus'' 80 km in a day, occasionally took tea in the rooms until he died, aged 76, in 1934.

His statue stands on a knoll in this spa town, whose visitors have included a 7-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Oscar Wilde -- said to have quipped that old ladies go to Malvern to die but somehow fail to get there.

Politically Incorrect

A famous composer's anniversary can be an occasion to cash in, as Salzburg did last year for Mozart's 250th birthday, but Elgar was no Mozart and his 150th will be low-key.

His music will be heard this year throughout the British Isles, in Asia, the United States and in continental Europe. His birthplace museum in Lower Broadheath, near Worcester, will have an open house one evening and a crafts fair to lure visitors.

But in the Blue Bird, the Smiths are cautious. They dropped the ''Elgar's favourite tea rooms'' slogan used by previous owners and won't be drawn on which chair they think he sat on.

''It may have been this one,'' Robert said, pointing to an aged specimen. ''Or any,'' he said, gesturing across the room.

It is an appropriately ambiguous response to a composer who evokes mixed reactions -- if he evokes any reaction at all.

''You get a mixed attitude towards him, relating to age and experience,'' said Robert Homer, 65, a retiree walking his dog near the statue.

One side of Elgar was the late romantic, who had a platonic relationship with a woman he called ''Windflower'', loved Wagner, believed in spirits and incorporated the sound of the Aeolian harp, a precursor to the wind chime, into his music.

Another was the ''Colonel Blimp'' -- with walrus moustache and Edwardian garb printed onto British 20-pound notes until they were replaced this year -- as politically correct as Rudyard Kipling (''The White Man's Burden'') or Cecil Rhodes (''If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists'').

Adherents to the romantic view need go no further than the 1965 performance of his Cello Concerto by 20-year-old cellist Jacqueline du Pre, who died at 42 of multiple sclerosis, with Sir John Barbirolli, who had known Elgar. The meeting of youth and age ranks as one of history's great recordings.

For the flipside, the crowd at the last night of the summer Proms concerts in London waves Union Jacks and roars out ''Land of Hope and Glory'' as if the sun had never set.

It makes a feast for scholars, and British bookshelves are groaning with Elgar this year. Cambridge University Press alone has published half a dozen volumes.

Vulgarity Is The Genius

Matthew Riley, a lecturer in music at the University of Birmingham, maintains Elgar rejuvenated English music by bringing the pageantry of the Roman Catholic mass to a ''white'' Protestant musical tradition -- with a whiff of vulgarity.

''There is something vulgar in Elgar, but in a way that is the genius,'' Riley, whose ''Edward Elgar and the Nostalgic Imagination'' is published by Cambridge, told sources.

Elgar's Catholic background and lower middle-class upbringing as the son of a piano tuner and salesman made him the odd-man-out at the Anglican party. He overcompensated.

''The use of the brass at the big climaxes, the fast runs on the trombones, I mean he just throws in everything.'' Elgar's style became part and parcel of the vogue for pageantry at the end of the 19th century. His ''Pomp and Circumstance'' marches fit in with a culture that was busy inventing pageantry for public events and royal occasions.

What he did not do was make the transition beyond the late romantic -- a movement which died with the First World War.

''The tides of history pushed in the Schoenberg-Stravinsky direction rather than the Sibelius-Elgar direction,'' said Paul Harper-Scott, music lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, and author of ''Edward Elgar, Modernist''.

The tradesman's son who wrote the soundtrack for British pageantry is buried with his wife Alice and daughter Carice at St Wulstan's Roman Catholic Church, Little Malvern.

Does his spirit haunt the hills? Hike there and find out.

Reuters>

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