Orchestral works of E. Elgar of 1910s as an attempt to renovate composer’s style
Authors: Lysychka Oleksandr 
Published: November 2019

Background. In researches belonging to the domain of music history, revealing of general trajectory of artists’ evolution and defining its character either as stable or flexible becomes one of the most important tasks. This allows to make conclusions of the way composers’ creative life interacts with the cultural context of his time, to define degree of interdependency of individual style and epochal. In the end, this work becomes a foreground for periodization of artists’ creative life, that is a prerequisite of historical comprehension of his legacy. Three-partite periodization of E. Elgar’s creative life seems to be rather typical on the face of it, but in fact it reflects quite peculiar trajectory of his professional growth, chiefly because the last period largely negates achievements of the former two. This reveal striving of E. Elgar to find completely new way of organisation of musical material on different levels. Moreover, general tendency towards economy of musical material, accentuating of “aphoristic” density of expression, found in the works of this timespan, allow to consider this period as late one, as they are typological features of this stage of composer’s creative life. The aim of the research is to unveil congregation of features allowing to regard orchestral works of E. Elgar in the 1910s as an attempt to renew his composing style. Thus, the leading tasks were generalisation of analytical observations on the Second Symphony, symphonic study “Falstaff” and Cello Concerto as well as comparison of these results with acquired by analysis if E. Elgar’s works in 1900s. Methodology. In order to reach the abovementioned goal several typical methods of musically-historic research have been deployed. First and foremost, it is genre-stylistic one, allowing to locate the meaning of given work in the context of musical culture. To define the differences between two styles a comparative method has been used. Classification of E. Elgar’s late period of creative life as one of three most common types, according to N. Savytska, uses her conception, regarded in doctoral thesis if this scholar. Results. One of the most peculiar traits of E. Elgar’s creative life is his way of acquiring compositional craftsmanship – a way that he went completely on his own. A mention of this starts one of the most recent books on the composer (McVeagh, 2013: 114), but it doesn’t get universal significance, even in spite of the fact that self-learning became a principle of E. Elgar’s professional growth both before and after worldwide recognition as outstanding composer. Analysis of his orchestral works from “Enigma” Variations (op. 38, 1899) up to the Violin Concerto (op. 61, 1910) allows to detect a single direction of development of composer’s arsenal of devices, his genre-stylistic inclinations, special features of themes and methods of working with them, harmony, orchestration etc. Thus, E. Elgar demonstrates a very noticeable tendency to a system usually associated with Late-Romantic symphonism of lyrically-dramatic type: overwhelming emotionality of music, prevalence of large and complicated structures and abundant orchestral resources, rather dense orchestral texture and usage of two harmonic systems: diatonic and chromatic. Moreover, research on the works, composed between abovementioned two, allows to trace gradual crystallisation of these principles, their generalisation in the First Symphony and final confirmation in the Violin Concerto. On this background, appearance of composition like “Falstaff” (ор. 68, 1913) and even Second Symphony (ор. 63, 1911) was truly of revolutionary nature as it was the first attempt to change general line of development. Conclusions. Late period of E. Elgar’s creative life, started in 1911 with the composition of the Second Symphony, can not be entirely classified as any of three types, defined by N. Savytska (2010: 24–25): composer is characterised by traits of both reduced and prognostic periods. Such paradoxicality can be explained by the fact that E. Elgar, on the one hand, decided to abstain from composition after 1919, and on the other – by radical innovation of creative method in 10s and beginning of the work on the Third Symphony shortly before his death in 1934. Signs of the third, consolidating type of period might be seen in tempering the innovative radicality of “Falstaff” in Cello Concerto. Traits of E. Elgar’s creativity after 1911 can be generally comprehended as inclination to move away from the framework of late-romantic style, that played the prominent role during all his life. Composer experiments with deploying absolutely new themes in means of stylistics (connected with songs, dances and marches), appeals to unequivocally humorous plots, eludes complex thematic relations, intonational fabula as well as exceeding density of orchestral texture. Moreover, the comprehension of the time itself changes as it becomes much more concentrated: E. Elgar abandons protracted circumlocutionary expanding of the structure as the expression of ideas in comparison to precedent works becomes more condensed. It seems almost impossible to state the reasons for these changes, but we should propose two hypotheses: of immanent evolution and of external impact. The first one is founded in overly-expressive Late-Romantic symphonic cycle being pushed to its limit in the First Symphony and then repeated in the Violin Concerto in different genre conditions – further reproduction of this model would have led to arid copying and stagnation. The second hypothesis considers radical innovations of musical art that took place in the 1920s, and in this case, metamorphoses are explained by communicative reasoning of the composer, for he was critiqued for his style being “outdated” before.