Views And Reviews: Elgar’s Froissart Overture
Paul Serotsky introduces us to an early work by Elgar which displays fabulous orchestration, serving as an indicator of great things to come.
Elgar (1857-1934) – Froissart Overture
Elgar matured slowly in the provincial vat. Too slowly, perhaps: already in his thirties and still virtually unknown outside the English Midlands, he could justifiably have had a personal motive for quoting Keats at the head of his first substantial orchestral composition. “When Chivalry lifted up her lance on high” sounds suspiciously like Elgar tilting at the metropolitan mainstream. Certainly this 1890 Worcester Festival commission marked his arrival as a distinctive musical personality, his first step on the road to pre-eminence.
Froissart was a Fourteenth Century French chronicler, whose writings inspired Elgar to create a work every bit as much a product of the high Romantic as any contemporaneous Strauss tone-poem. Although Elgar and Strauss would have then known little of each other, the two share some remarkable similarities of style, rich in sonority and grandiloquent of gesture, the big difference being (of course) that of national accent.
The overture's structure might best be described as “rhapsodic, with a hint of sonata”: there are (at least, arguably) four themes, presented in an orderly manner, but thereafter called on apparently at whim. Not that it matters much: “Froissart”, whether it be in soaring aspiration, purposeful (four-footed?) procession or felicitous musing, is music prophetic of the Elgar to come. Oh, but then there's also that fabulous orchestration . . .
© Paul Serotsky
