Music blogClassical music
Barenboim celebrates Elgar: 'It is music fit for universal consumption'
Mahler, Strauss and Toscanini were among those who championed his music, but Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Staatskapelle's forthcoming London performance of Elgar's second symphony is an important landmark for the composer's international reputation
Barenboim: 'I get mad at people who say we will be playing music by 'the British composer Edward Elgar'. Does anyone ever say we will play music by "the German composer Johannes Brahms"? No!'. Photograph: David Levene/Guardian
Martin Kettle
@martinkettle
Mon 20 Apr 2015 09.02 EDT Last modified on Tue 18 Apr 2017 11.19 EDT
To Daniel Barenboim, as he put it in a discussion with journalists in Berlin last month, Edward Elgar is simply "a universal composer." The great conductor is determined to stop his audiences from thinking of Elgar as English or British first and a composer second. And tomorrow evening, Barenboim will once again put his music-making where his mouth is, when he conducts at the Royal Festival Hall his Berlin Staatskapelle in Elgar's E flat major second symphony, written in 1911.
This may not seem like a big deal to some. After all, Barenboim is one of the world's great conductors. The Elgar second is without much argument a great symphony. What's to remark upon when the two come together, as they will tomorrow in London and as they did in a 2013 recording with the Staatskapelle, which was recently voted - against competition from generations of home-grown Elgarians - the Building a Library choice on the Radio 3 programme?
The answer is that, even today, Elgar's music is not widely recognised as part of the core repertoire except in the UK and in the British diaspora. That's certainly true in Germany, where Barenboim is based and where, as he puts it, "I get mad at people who want to say we will be playing music by 'the British composer Edward Elgar'. Does anyone ever say we will play music by 'the German composer Johannes Brahms'? No."
Barenboim's championing of Elgar is not unique on the continent. But it is certainly unusual in its consistency and commitment. That helps to make Tuesday's performance an important landmark for Elgar's modern reputation – arguably the most important performance in the UK of an Elgar work by an international conductor since Arturo Toscanini's. And it is something that Barenboim intends to persist with. Next spring, in his high-profile annual Berlin "festival days", Barenboim will be leading the Staatskapelle in both the Elgar symphonies. The first will be bracketed with the star tenor Jonas Kaufmann singing Mahler's wayfaring songs, the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, while the second will be paired with Dvórak's cello concerto played by Yo-Yo Ma. Exalted company indeed.
"I am not on a missionary expedition to make Elgar popular," says Barenboim. "But I really would like to get rid of this 'British' subtitle every time Elgar's music is mentioned. Because the music is not only English."
None of this should be taken to imply that Barenboim is arguing that all music is international or that borders or traditions do not matter. On the contrary. "Every great orchestra ought to be able to change its sound according to the music it is playing," he says. "It's sheer arrogance to say we have our own sound. I have made a very conscious effort to work with the Staaskapelle in stylistic matters and sound."
Toasted by Strauss as the first English progressive - Sir Edward Elgar, ca 1900. Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images
Barenboim's efforts to give Elgar a wider hearing have a big hinterland. In fact Elgar first made his breakthrough on the continent during the fertile pre-first world war high-point of his creative career. In 1902, after a performance of Elgar's oratorio The Dream of Gerontius in Düsseldorf, no less a figure than Richard Strauss toasted the composer as "the first English progressivist." Elgar was naturally delighted. He wrote: "It was worth some years of anguish — now I trust over — to hear him call me Meister."
Strauss was far from the only early admirer. Major European conductors such as Artur Nikisch, then chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, and Hans Richter, who had conducted the first performance of Wagner's Ring cycle, were Elgar champions too. Arturo Toscanini conducted works by Elgar in Italy as early as 1911 (and continued to do so in the US into the 1950s). Claims that Wilhelm Furtwängler once conducted the Elgar second remain unproven. Yet, in his last New York season before returning to die in Vienna, also in 1911, none other than Gustav Mahler himself conducted Elgar's Enigma Variations and his Sea Pictures – the latter in a programme that also contained Sir Charles Stanford's Irish Symphony.
It would be false to portray Europe as the continent without Elgar, any more than Britain was ever truly the land without music, as Germans sometimes alleged in the pre-Elgar era. Nevertheless, it is also true that Barenboim is swimming against the tide by championing the composer. Part of this, very clearly, is explained by Barenboim's own long acquaintance with Elgar, which is rooted in his London years in the 1960s and 1970s, when he was married to the late Jacqueline du Pré, whose accounts of the Elgar cello concerto, which she often played under Barenboim's direction, remain iconic.
Barenboim recorded both the Elgar symphonies in the 1970s, along with several other key Elgar works, mainly with the London Philharmonic. It is a background which not only equips him to be an experienced Elgarian today but also to understand that there is no single "right" way to approach the music. There was a time – largely in response to the fluttering in the British musical dovecote caused by Toscanini's performances – when British chauvinism encouraged the view that only the British properly understood or could perform Elgar. This was never the composer's own view. And Barenboim's knowledge of the British musical world means he is having none of that either.
"In the years when I lived in England," he says, "there were two conductors who at that time were considered great Elgarians. They were John Barbirolli and Adrian Boult. And it was night and day how they played this music. It was a completely different attitude and a completely different interpretation of the music. I think Elgar has this greatness in him. It is why he is a universal composer. That he has certain elements that you might associate with the English countryside — well maybe. Why not? But it is definitely music that is fit for universal consumption."
Daniel Barenboim conducts the Staatskapelle Berlin in Beethoven (with Martha Argerich) and Strauss on Monday 20 April, and in Tchaikovsky and Elgar on Tuesday 21 April. The concerts are part of the Barenboim Project.