Medley of Greatest Hits

Not to worry, I didn't lose interest in this blog.  I just kept suffering from surplus lack of time!

Ironic that I'm back, and writing about another work in the same category and from the same composer as my last post!

But where King Olaf was written by the young Elgar during the years when he arrived at his maturity as a composer, The Music Makers came near the end of his most creative years.  Although it is an accomplished score, with many beautiful moments, it can hardly be called original.

The Music Makers, set to a poem by Arthur O'Shaughnessy, is almost as much symbolic of the Edwardian age as the famous Pomp and Circumstance Marches.  The poem itself wavers back and forth between beauty of image and bombast of tone.  It doesn't impress me as very good poetry, but then I have never much enjoyed rhyming couplets -- much less four of them in a row based on the same two rhyme sounds!

But then consider the first stanza; I suspect that it was these deeply-felt themes that most inspired Elgar's composition.

We are the music makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;—

World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

 Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world for ever, it seems.

And just for the record, this poem is apparently the origin of the phrase "movers and shakers."

The resulting work has a rather bits-and-pieces feel to many pages.  It hasn't travelled well, and is not even frequently performed or recorded.  Why then dredge it up?  The answer lies in Elgar's compositional method for this work, which brings me to my title.

Like Richard Strauss in Ein Heldenleben, Elgar drew heavily on many of his earlier scores for this one work.  Since this was not something he customarily did, it's fairly obvious that his intention in doing so was to underline musically the text references to the central role of the composer and of music in a truly complete world.  The quotations range from a short four bars of the final climax in the Symphony No. 2 to an entire section woven around and through the orchestral texture of Nimrod from the Enigma Variations.

It's that glorious section based on Nimrod that alone, for me, makes it worthwhile to sit down and listen to The Music Makers again.  Well, that, and the intensely poetic setting of that first stanza which I quoted above.  Of course, it helps to have a truly first-rate recording -- not just first-rate in sound quality, but also in performance.  The central role of the female soloist is taken in my recording by Janet Baker.  If there was ever an artist who could make a second-rate piece of vocal music sound greater than it truly is, she was the one.  (She also performed the same magical alchemy on Elgar's earlier song cycle, Sea Pictures).