Elgar: Piano Quintet in A minor, Op.84 (1918)
Moderato – Allegro – Moderato
Adagio
Andante – Allegro
“…it is strange music, I think I like it, but it’s ghostly stuff”. Thus wrote Elgar to the critic Ernest Newman, to whom this quintet is dedicated. In 1917 he and his wife had moved to West Sussex, for the next four years renting a “lovely cottage in the woods [‘Brinkwells’], high above the world in peace, plenty and quietness”. Nearby, at Flexham Park, was a cluster of gnarled twisted trees – legend says they were a group of Spanish monks struck by lightning while performing impious rites…. Lady Elgar referred to them in her diary as those “sad ‘dispossessed’ trees and their dance and unstilled regret for their evil fate”. These trees and their story clearly had a profound effect on Elgar – and especially his quintet: not only in the “ghostly” nature of much of the music, but also in the quasi-Spanish flavour of passages like the first movement’s second subject – albeit, Spanish tinged with a pronounced nostalgic and faded regret. When it steals into the middle of the finale, transformed into a distant, haunted waltz, like a spectral shadow from the past interrupting the whirl of the dance, it feels as if we are suddenly allowed a glimpse deep into the soul of this ageing and – as he himself feared at the time – failing composer. His latest major work (Falstaff) had been completed as long ago as 1913, and he had produced very little since then. So maybe the move into the countryside proved to be the longed-for catalyst which stimulated his creative juices once again. He himself wrote of the “heavenly nightingales in May…young birds hatching….High summer, rich full and perfect….wheat cut…..the sun climbing over our view in the golden mist…cold but vividly bright”.
The outcome of this renewed burst of compositional energy included the celebrated Cello Concerto, of course – but this has tended to overshadow what our leading Elgar authority Diana McVeagh refers to (perhaps recalling Schumann in 1842) as his “Chamber Music Year” of 1918. Guarding against what might have seemed a new departure for this celebrated composer of large scale orchestral and choral masterpieces, she reminds us that during his early years in Worcester and Malvern he was very much involved with playing chamber music in all manner of combinations, and at this time had already produced a string quartet and a violin sonata (Opp.8 and 9 – which he subsequently disowned). Now, deeply disturbed by the effects of war, the loss of many friends, and his wife’s deteriorating health, he revisited the process: a string quartet (started in March) and a violin sonata, as before; but now crowned by an ambitious piano quintet he himself described as “run[ning] gigantically in a large mood”. He wrote somewhat self-effacingly of this music – but with an uncanny awareness of reality: “I know it does not carry us any further, but it is full of golden sounds and I like it. But you must not expect anything violently chromatic or cubist”. The quintet was begun in the summer of that year, and finished the following Spring – in time for its first performance on 21 May at the Wigmore Hall (when the quartet also received its première). The performers included musicians closely associated with Elgar: that most underrated of great violinists, Albert Sammons; the cellist Felix Salmond; and the composer’s dear friend W. H. Reed (leader of the London Symphony Orchestra, amongst others), who wrote of the work that it “…expresses all the higher emotions of which humanity is capable”. George Bernard Shaw also recorded an early impression: “The Quintet knocked me over at once, I said to myself, with the old critic’s habit of making phrases for publication, that this was the finest thing of its kind since Coriolan. Here are some piano embroideries on a pedal point that didn’t sound like a piano or anything else in the world, but quite beautiful”.
It could be that the Adagio will leave the most lasting impression – and indeed we know that in 1934, during the composer’s final illness, he would listen in tears to this movement on his gramophone. The previous year had seen his much documented recording sessions for the Violin Concerto with the teenage Yehudi Menuhin, who later wrote of his revered mentor with characteristic sensitivity and generosity: “In his music there is that openness, directness and simplicity, which has blessed so many great English men and women. A self-evident pragmatic approach, which has eschewed dogmas, theories, systems and inelastic philosophies. However much he belonged to the era of grandiloquence, pomp and circumstance, he retained an Englishness which remained above and beyond passing fashions, a nobility and generosity, a humour and modesty which shine through his greatest music”. Amongst which must surely be counted this fantastic Piano Quintet – one of the top three all-time favourite works in the entire Fitzwilliam repertoire!
© Alan George
