ELGAR: Introduction and Allegro for String Quartet and String Orchestra, Opus 47
Edward William Elgar—Sir Edward after being knighted by King Edward VII on July 4, 1904—was born in Broadheath, Worcestershire, England, on June 2, 1857, and died in Worcester on February 23, 1934. Using a Welsh tune he had written down while on holiday in Cardigan Bay in 1901, Elgar began the Introduction and Allegro in January 1905 and completed it in February. He led the less than one-year-old London Symphony Orchestra in the first performance in Queen’s Hall, London, on March 8, 1905. The score is dedicated to S.S. Sanford, Professor of Piano at Yale University, who had bought Elgar a Steinway upright for his study at Hereford and was his host when he visited Yale to receive an honorary doctorate in 1905. Cameron Basil led the first and only San Francisco Symphony performances in December 1930. In the string orchestra, first and second violins, violas, and cellos are divided into two sections each almost throughout the work.
Elgar wrote his Introduction and Allegro at the urging of August Jaeger, the “Nimrod” of the Enigma Variations, for the brilliant, ambitious, and hungry London Symphony Orchestra. Now the oldest survivor among London’s orchestras, the London Symphony in 1905 was a fledgling ensemble which, ironically, owed its existence to a dispute over the system—today mostly defunct—that allowed players to send deputies to rehearsals and performances.
There is a much-told story of a conductor maddened by the constantly changing faces before him at rehearsals. Finally he could not resist comment, and after excoriating most of the orchestra he commended the timpanist for his constancy in attendance. “Thank you very much,” said the blushing recipient of the conductor’s praise, “only I’m afraid I won’t be able to make the concert.” Henry J. Wood, the conductor who in 1895 had founded both the Promenade Concerts (the Proms) and the Queen’s Hall Orchestra to play them, was also fed up, and in 1904 he proposed a new contract that would give him first call on the players’ services and forbid them to send deputies. Affronted, more than half his orchestra broke away and, with a group of new colleagues, reconstituted themselves as a self-governing orchestra, calling themselves the London Symphony.
At first blush it is surprising that Elgar, by his support of the break-away group, would have come down on the side of the artistically so destructive deputy system, and the biographies are not enlightening on the subject. He did genuinely like orchestras and orchestral musicians—the Cockaigne Overture is dedicated “to my friends the members of British orchestras”—and in his younger years, he had been a violinist in Worcester and later in the orchestra that eventually became the City of Birmingham Symphony. He knew many members of the new orchestra personally. Probably no less compelling was the fact that the great Hans Richter, who had led the first performances of the Enigma Variations and The Dream of Gerontius and who would later do the same for the Symphony No. 1, had agreed to conduct the London Symphony’s inaugural concert.
At any rate, Elgar was persuaded by Jaeger’s suggestion. Unearthing some material he had sketched three years before, in short order he produced a masterpiece—one on a small scale, but a masterpiece no less—that combines the pleasures of passion and virtuosity. In the summer of 1901 he composed two orchestral marches to which he gave the Shakespearean title of Pomp and Circumstance. Then, finding himself tired, depressed, and unable to work, he accepted an invitation for himself and his wife to visit South Wales, where Rosa Burley, a schoolteacher friend from his home territory of Malvern, had taken a cottage for the summer.
Elgar brightened up almost at once and found himself thinking of writing a brilliant piece for string orchestra. As he sat on a cliff on the island of Ynys Lochtyn, he heard singing. It was too distant to be distinct, but the persistent fall of a minor third impressed itself upon him, and that became the salient feature of the theme he invented. This is the melody that the solo viola plays less than a minute into the Introduction. For the time being, Elgar put this beginning aside, busying himself with the Coronation Ode (for Edward VII), the oratorio The Apostles, and the overture In the South, along with several smaller works.
Then came Jaeger’s excited letter: “I’ll hope you can write . . . a short new work. Why not a brilliant quick String Scherzo, or something for those fine strings only? a real bring down the House torrent of a thing such as Bach could write (Remember that . . . Brandenburger Concerto!) a five minutes work would do it! It wouldn’t take you away from your big for long. You might even write a modern Fugue for Strings, or Strings & Organ! That would sell like Cakes.”
Elgar hesitated, but another singer, this one heard in the Wye Valley in his own part of the country, brought the Welsh tune from 1901 to mind. On January 26, 1905 he wrote to Jaeger: “I’m doing that string thing in time for the Sym:orch concert. Intro: & Allegro—no working-out [development] part but a devil of a fugue instead. G major & the sd. divvel in G minor . . . with all sorts of japes & counterpoint.”
He begins with a grandly declamatory music in G minor, falling, to which the solo quartet replies with something more wistful, rising. These exchanges then make way for the viola solo, the Welsh tune with its see-sawing thirds, accompanied by divided violas and cellos with just a few notes from basses and violins. “And so my gaudery became touched with romance,” Elgar wrote in the program note for the first performance. The orchestra expands on this and then returns to the Introduction’s opening gestures.
After a suspenseful halt, the Allegro begins, in G major, and with the wistful rising tune now heard at twice its previous speed. For contrast, the Welsh tune is turned into a chattering theme in repeated sixteenth notes. (Fourteen years later, Elgar returned to this effect in the scherzo of his Cello Concerto.) The music quiets down in a magically scored transitional passage of mixed straight notes and tremolandos. This reminded Elgar’s friend W.H. Reed, a violinist in the London Symphony Orchestra and later its concertmaster, of an Aeolian harp that Elgar kept in his window at Hereford: “Elgar never tired of listening to its fairylike improvisations . . . the crescendo and diminuendo [in this passage] give an exact impression of the minstrelsy of that harp in the window.”
From this there emerges the “divvel” of a fugue, back in G minor, and of captivating brilliance. The recapitulation is managed with a wonderful sense of freshness. The Welsh tune gets one last, grand restatement, and then Elgar moves this inspired work to its impassioned close.
—Michael Steinberg
Michael Steinberg, the San Francisco Symphony’s program annotator from 1979 to 1999 and a contributing writer to our program book until his death in July, was one of the nation’s pre-eminent writers on music. We are privileged to continue publishing his program notes. His books are available at the Symphony Store in Davies Symphony Hall.
More About the Music
Recordings: Vernon Handley conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra (EMI Classics) | Mark Elder conducting the Hallé Orchestra (Hallé) | Andrew Davis conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra (Apex)
Reading: Elgar the Music Maker, by Diana McVeagh (Boydell Press) | Edward Elgar: A Creative Life, by Jerrold Northrup Moore (Oxford University Press) | Elgar in Photographs, also by Moore (Cambridge University Press) | The Life of Elgar, by Michael Kennedy (Cambridge University Press)