ABSTRACT
When I boldly wrote Escape to Outer Darhness> in 1956, Elgar was compared both to Richard Strauss, with his intrusion of onomatopoeia and to Mahler, with his deliberately placed 'vulgarity'. Elgar's music (so it seemed) represented 'a quiet inward exploration which could not be measured. His orchestration was at least the equal of Strauss's and the structures were at least as well planned as Mahler's; but there was in addition a quality which has given his music lasting power ...' It eludes musicologists because it is not 'written in the score'. And then, disconcertingly, after the barbaric harmonic glitter of Judas' suicide in The Apostles (1903), Elgar used less and less the 'modern' harmonies of the day, until by the time of the Piano Quintet (t 918-19) and the Cello Concerto (1919), he was apparently using a language that Schumann (his 'ideal' in 1883) would
not have found amiss. The musical personality is powerfully individual: gone are the 'wrong-note' chords, prophetic of Prokofiev, which he used in the 'march' part (fig.59) of the second movement of Symphony No.1 (1907-8) and gone also are the lush unrelated chords to the words 'impossible seeming' in The Music Makers (1912), new-sounding though they seemed at the time.
