ABSTRACT
A Liberal victory was widely predicted, and although the Sir Edward Elgar's hoped for the best, they surely feared the worst. The following days duly brought abject dismay. The snobbery and fear conveyed in Elgar’s reaction to the 1906 election result bears out a comment by Ernest Newman, then music critic at the Manchester Guardian, that ‘he was in his heart of hearts afraid of the future’. This chapter examines the reception of Elgar’s music in the Guardian, which represented a potentially awkward encounter between a composer—gentleman and journalist—‘waiters’. The Victorian notion of the modern did not predicate a radical break with the past. Rather, Victorians regarded the modern as synonymous with the new, the contemporary and, towards the end of the century, the improved. Elgar regarded himself as a modern, as an artist at the cutting edge of musical development, proud that he drew the deepest inspiration from Wagner, in whose music dramas he was steeped.
