ABSTRACT
Elgar’s part-songs have attracted little attention from scholars—perhaps surprisingly, given that many of his pre-war songs are experimental in their treatment of tonality and timbre, and some of them set poems that reflect his preoccupation with the relationship between creativity, mortality, and artistic transcendence. A good example is the Four Choral Songs, Op. 53 (1907–8). In this chapter, I argue three things. Firstly, these songs enable Elgar to work out ideas later developed on a larger scale in his coeval First Symphony, particularly his extensive use of semitonal and tritonal chord and key relationships. Secondly, the ‘sweet music’ articulated in the first song (a setting of part of Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters) becomes a metaphor for the aesthetic idealism of absolute music; the songs are thus both about ‘purely’ musical beauty, and also enact it. Thirdly, the advanced compositional idiom of the songs is an active attempt by Elgar to improve the musical education of English choral singers, enhancing the singers’ experience both as participants, via the songs’ use as test-pieces in competition festivals, and as listeners, whose knowledge of his recent music would enable them better to understand the increasingly unfamiliar language of his mature orchestral works.
