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A GREAT ENGLISH MUSICIAN

has a more unmistakably personal style than his.

His intellectual activity has by no means confined itself to music. He has always been an omnivorous reader. And while much of this reading naturally proceeded in desultory fashion, for the sake of relaxation, and took him sometimes as far afield as Froissart, the fourteenth-century French chronicler, as suggested by his early overture of that name, he has never lost the power of concentration, and can study a book to as good purpose as a score. His analytic notes to his symphonic study "Falstaff " (1913) reveal a surprisingly detailed knowledge both of Shakespeare and of Shakespeare's commentators. Science also interests him, and for some years his hobby was scientific kiteflying. He is of the nervously irritable temperament so often coupled with mental alertness, walks about restlessly while conversing, and detests all routine work like teaching. "To teach the right pupil was a pleasure,' he once said, "but teaching in general was to me like turning a grindstone with a dislocated shoulder." In 1889 he married, gave up most of his teaching, and moved to London. Since then he has lived partly among his native Malvern Hills, partly near London, but has devoted himself almost entirely to composing and conducting.

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From Elgar's long list of choral works may be chosen for special mention "The Black Knight" (1893), "King Olaf" (1896), "Caractacus (1899), "The Dream of Gerontius" (1900), and "The Apostles" (1903). His chief orchestral works are the

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Enigma" Variations (1899), in which his genius for the orchestra was first convincingly shown; the overtures "Cockaigne" and "In the South;" the two symphonies; a concerto for violin, dedicated to Fritz Kreisler (1910); and “Falstaff " (1913), his single essay in programme music. The steady advance in depth and variety of expres sion, catholicity of taste, and flexibility of style made by him during the period of his most active production is almost as striking as the growth of Wagner from "Rienzi to "Tristan," or of Verdi from "Trovatore" to "Otello." The Elgar of to-day retains nothing of British insularity; he speaks the language of music, not with an English accent, but as a citizen of the world; he is the peer of Strauss in Germany, of d'Indy in France, of Rachmaninoff in Russia, in the work of all of whom nationality is less felt than humanity.

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This does not in the least mean that Elgar has ceased to be English. His greatness, indeed, is precisely that he has given England a voice in the world of music. His is an essentially English nature. He has the plainness, the seriousness, the manly strength, even something of the inflexibility, the angularity, of his people. He is fond of marking his themes "nobilmente;" and they, even if their nobility is sometimes of a type that reminds us of "muscular Christianity" in its aggressive good health, nevertheless usually live up to the direction. They are melodies of firm pace, of sturdy self-respect, expressing a vigorous, practical good will. They suggest nothing of the pathological hypersensibility, the sensuous preoccupations and itch after sensationalism, of so much of the contemporary Continental music. The almost childlike chastity, so often misunderstood, of the best English natures is reflected in them. On the next page, for example (Figure 1), is a typical Elgar melody, the main theme of the first symphony.

The spiritual aspiration expressed in this beautiful melody, the quiet dignity of its deliberate tread and of the reserved way in which it unfolds its successive aspects, rising gradually to the emotional height of the fourteenth measure and as slowly subsiding, the poignant feeling of the fragments of countermelody added by the horns, the wistfulness of the soft echo of the opening at the endall this will be felt by every sympathetic lis

tener.

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What only study will reveal is the subtlety with which Elgar has managed to be simple without being common. There is not an "accidental" sharp or flat in the whole-that is to say, it is built on the old diatonic scale of eight notes of such solid tunes as Handel's Largo;" yet there is none of the stodgy heaviness of Handel's harmony and the overobvious balance of his rhythm. Elgar, it may be confessed, is not always so successful in the matter of rhythm as here--a certain monotony and singsong reiteration of phrase is the single weakness of his school that he has not always escaped; but here his notes group with as much spontaneous variety as Shelley's syllables. And the harmony is equally fine. There is just enough dissonance to keep things moving, without any of the conventional suspensions of the English academic choral style with which Elgar hinself began, as may be seen in "The Black Knight." The restless bass, peculiarly Elgar

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ian, changing as fast as, or even faster than, the melody, gives the tension demanded by modern feeling.

Sensibility thus supplements will in Elgar; the thoroughly English solidity of his character does not preclude an awareness of the subtler parts of emotional life—of passion, aspiration, doubt, despair, and religious consolationnot always found in Anglo-Saxons; and, indeed, it is precisely to this unusual combination that he owes his place as not only an English but a representative modern composer. Now, translated into musical terms, this is equivalent to saying that he has mastered, not only the vigorous style, with its diatonic harmony and square-cut rhythm, which with all their differences is common to Purcell, Handel, and Mendelssohn, but that

he also commands the more poignant eloquence of that other style, associated most of all with Wagner, in which the harmonies shift and grope along the "chromatic "scale of semitones and the rhythms coalesce into a fluid stream. That is the idiom of mental and spiritual as well as of physical yearning; and no composer who cannot use it can hope to voice the ever-unsatisfied longings of our generation. It is an idiom that may be seen in Elgar's works growing up alongside the older one, and progressively asserting itself.

In "The Dream of Gerontius "it is used with masterly power in phrases of a passionate eloquence that must have startled and shocked the audiences accustomed to drowse through the traditional oratorio. Here, for example (Figure II), is the agonized cry of Gerontius.

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Here the music-lover will feel the imaginative justice and the musical beauty of Elgar's interpretation, while the student of harmony will not fail to note the masterly use of Wagner's method of free transition from key to key, perhaps his greatest contribution to musical expression.

The reader may also be struck by the characteristic difference between Elgar's treatment here and that of the same subject-the languor of approaching death-in Strauss's "Tod und Verklärung." It is not accidental, but highly significant of the opposed attitudes of the two artists, that while Strauss emphasizes the external picture—the panting breath, the choking cries-Elgar penetrates to the inward emotional state. Elgar has written surprisingly little programme music. Aside from a few realistic touches scattered through the choral works, and the delicate little vignette of the friend at sea in the "Enigma" Variations, there is only "Falstaff and that deals more with character than with picture. In this respect Elgar deserves well of his contemporaries for standing against a popular but dangerous tendency to externalize the most inward of the arts (what

painter, or even poet, has quite the Innigkeit of Schumann ?), and for showing that even in the twentieth century the spiritual drama set forth in a work of pure music, like his first symphony, can be as thrilling as those that have made immortal Beethoven's later quartettes and sonatas.

This symphony, which has been called "Brahms's Fifth," just as Brahms's first was called "Beethoven's Tenth," is worthy of the descent thus suggested for it. It is a musical epic of nothing in the outside world, but of the deepest tragedy and triumph that can go on in a man's soul: the struggle to attain, in the turmoil of the actual world, ideal ends; the bitterly learned lesson of human finitude; and the final attainment of peace through stoic resignation and the spiritualization of ideals. This is the burden of all the greatest philosophers from Marcus Aurelius to Bertrand Russell. It is the element of vitality that gives Beethoven's music its eternal youth. We have reason for the deepest satisfaction that so eloquent, so thoroughly modern, a version of the old yet ever new story should have been made by a musician of our own day.

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A MARVEL OF CONSTRUCTION

BY B. C. FORBES

HE art of war in Europe has taught

the United States new lessons in the art of peace.

This is the steel age—the age of steel battleships and steel sky-scrapers, steel shells and steel rails, steel submarines and steel automobiles. Mammoth machine shops, munition factories, and other "war material " plants have been brought into being as if by the waving of a fairy's wand. Row upon row of workmen's dwellings have sprung out of the ground at industrial centers.

Here is one marvel: A full-sized blast-furnace has been built within the space of eightyfive days, against a previous record of fully six months.

This meant that in less than three months from the time the first shovelful of earth was dug there was planned, assembled, directed, and set going a monster apparatus for turning iron ore into pig iron at the rate of 500 tons per day, worth $10,000.

It meant, among many other things, the expert laying of 3,060,000 bricks, the skillful placing of 7,958,400 pounds of structural steel and castings, the clinching of 352,200 rivets-all in eighty-five days, remember!

It meant the spending of not less than $1,000,000; but it meant, also, the production before the furnace's fire should go out of $20,000,000 worth of iron, to be transformed into steel worth-no one dares guess how many scores of millions of dollars.

It meant something more than all that. It meant team-work in industry. It meant enthusiasm, loyalty, and efficiency of the highest order among a thousand workmen, speaking many tongues, but all intent upon one purpose the breaking of all records for furnace-building the world had ever known.

To accomplish this new methods of industrial co-operation were evolved.

It was on March 6 last that the directors of the Cambria Steel Company, of Johns

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