Views And Reviews: Elgar/Payne - Symphony No.3
...Of this Symphony, we really cannot enquire, “Is it Elgar?” The answer is obvious: “No”. But neither is it Payne, and before your, “Well, whose is it, then?” let me ask, “Does it actually matter?” Fundamentally, it never “matters” who writes music, only that it is eloquent. What rule makes “the composer” one person? Sometimes, composition is a team effort...
Paul Serotsky introduces us to Anthony Payne’s reconstruction of Elgar’s unfinished Symphony No.3.
For more of Paul’s incisive and enjoyable words on the greatest music ever written please click on http://www.openwriting.com/archives/views_and_reviews/
The concept of “Music as a Means of Self-Expression” became pandemic only during the Nineteenth Century. Married to the broadly parallel rise of “copyright”, this bred the current obsession with composers' proprietary rights over their “personal expressions”. Think about it: Deryck Cooke's celebrated performing version of Mahler's Tenth is, to some, still controversial, while more recently two realisations of Ives's Universe Symphony are far less contentious. Why? Proprietary rights! Alma Mahler was vehemently opposed to anyone messing with her late husband's “personal expressions”, while the pragmatic Ives bequeathed his accumulated sketches to the world, hoping that “some day, somebody might make something of them”.
From this perspective, Elgar's sketches for his projected Third Symphony relate more to Mahler's case than Ives's. The mortally ill Elgar just once implored violinist W. H. Reed, his “play-through” assistant, “Don't let anyone tinker with it”. This single proprietary expression held absolute sway for 50 years, completely overriding Elgar's less depressed (and more prophetic), “If I can't complete [it], somebody will . . . or write a better one, in 50 or 500 years”.
By including many of the sketches in his book, “Elgar as I Knew Him”, Reed had planted a copyright “time-bomb” to retrieve the music from some obscure oubliette. Only the impending cessation of copyright finally persuaded Elgar's family to sanction Anthony Payne's deeply considered work, so whether by accident or design, Reed secured a just resolution: dabblers were kept out, while someone competent was let in.
Of this Symphony, we really cannot enquire, “Is it Elgar?” The answer is obvious: “No”. But neither is it Payne, and before your, “Well, whose is it, then?” let me ask, “Does it actually matter?” Fundamentally, it never “matters” who writes music, only that it is eloquent. What rule makes “the composer” one person? Sometimes, composition is a team effort. Of course, Payne couldn't liaise with Elgar. Consequently, to retain “product integrity”, he had to subsume his own personality and immerse himself in the role of “Elgar” (and excel at jigsaw puzzles, and – apparently – “engineering” and “concoction”). Even though he “had to become Elgar”, he insists that “[it] is my piece”, less paradoxical than it sounds.
While this symphony isn't Elgar's, it does contain enough Elgar to afford aficionados a tantalising glimpse of what might have been. On Radio 3, Stephen Johnson said, “. . . the beginning of the finale . . . is [an] example of . . . Elgar, . . . half-Elgar, and . . . pure Payne” (the pun, I trust, is unintentional!), and Andrew Davis's assertion, that even experts can't tell what's whose, attested to Payne's technical achievement. We must enquire, “Is it good music?” The answer, again, is “No”! Why? Because it's more than that – as a miraculous synthesis of the workings of two brilliant musical imaginations at a half-century's remove, it's absolutely wonderful music. Billy Reed, we are ever in your debt!
Nevertheless, the opening bars (whose sound would sit comfortably in Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle) and the slow movement's start (the “opening of bronze doors”, into a room that Shostakovich would eventually occupy) confirm Elgar's undimmed creative vigour. His sketches surpass even the 'Cello Concerto in their searing vision of personal mortality: “sehnsucht” for what is gone forever pitched against dreadful, indefinite destiny (the characters of the inner movements). This battle, often fought but never won, is stunningly realised through Payne's imaginatively devotional work.
In this synopsis, the descriptions of the outer movements – complex, multi-thematic sonata forms – have been necessarily foreshortened :
1. Allegro molto maestoso. The first subject has two main ideas: the first strides boldly over a vertiginous chasm to the striving, extrovert second, buzzed by a thematic gnat which flourishes in the development. Rhythmically similar to the opening, the second subject is otherwise legato and expansive. The exposition is repeated. Alternating its initial mysterious air with intensely combative episodes, the development yields to a telescoped reprise heralded by an energetic tamtam. The coda, a complex motivic interweaving, is ultimately reminiscent of the first movement of Elgar's Second.
2. Scherzo – allegretto. A Brahmsian intermezzo, broadly an ABACAD[A] rondo. The wistful salon music of A, reacting to the heightened drama of C, is explosively transformed third time round, its formerly subjugate trumpet counterpoint erupting on belligerent brass. B and D share a particularly Brahms-like amplitude, while the coda drifts, a dream-like haze of thematic resonances.
3. Adagio solenne. Like the Andante of Schubert's Eighth, two themes are stated then recapitulated with variation. If the first movement's start straddled a chasm, this faces the Abyss, its anguish descending onto a sorrowing solo viola. The first subject's brass-burnished lament complements the second's emergence from loneliness into longing. Finally that wracked opening returns, with dismaying inevitability.
4. Allegro. The first subject blazes in brassy chivalry, thence to punchy allegro, uplifting nobilmente, and (of all things) a decidedly “sassy” horn phrase. The second group's similar character is underlined by an unforced resurgence of the “sassy” theme, prefacing the embattled development. Bypassing the “chivalric” theme, the recapitulation achieves an extended lyrical amalgam of the movement's nobilmente. From the ensuing hush, the “punchy” theme traces the progress of Elgar's The Waggon Passes. As this recedes, the ghost of the symphony's opening seeps into the texture, whereupon all is absorbed into the grey gauze of the unknowable.
That final sound is contentious, contenders arguing that Elgar would have used a “proper” cadence. But, as it happens, Elgar left this entirely to Payne. We can only ask, “Does it work?” I think it does, both musically and, if you insist, in the context of “synthetic Elgar” – we cannot know, so how else to end than with music's patented Cosmic Question Mark?
Like March, the Twentieth Century came in like a lion, and it was doomed to go out like a lamb, save for this one astounding work. Elgar's family may regret their protracted reluctance, but then, would the easier ride have blunted the edge of the questing spirit that so vitally informs Payne's inspired – and inspiring – “concoction”? Like so much else, we'll never know: let's just rejoice in what we have.
© Paul Serotsky
If you want to know more, Anthony Payne gives a full account in his book “Elgar's Third Symphony – The Story of the Reconstruction” (Faber & Faber, 1998).
