Accepting the End of Empire

I was standing in the wings of Symphony Hall earlier this week, waiting to go on stage and speak about Tchaikovsky's 'Manfred' Symphony. I was chatting with the CBSO's Ensembles Manager (and all round good egg) Richard Bratby. We were pondering repertoire trends, noting the predominance of Mahler but the odd absence of Elgar's symphonies from the repertoire of many of the same orchestras who return to Mahler time and again. Why is that? Surely the message of the two composers is the same with their symphonies... personal struggles in a torrid world of fracture, fragment and shifting power. 

The dialogue about Elgar, as Richard noted, has not changed since the 1930s. His time, unlike Mahler's, has not yet come. Despite Elgar's personal distrust of jingoism, all of his music belabours under associations with his effortless but pride-pumped Pomp and Circumstance Marches (themselves not without ambiguity). Listen to the First and Second Symphonies, however, to say nothing of Anthony Payne's superb elaboration of the Third Symphony for which T.E. Lawrence so craved, and you'll hear no jingoism, but an intense struggle to find a place in the world, accompanied the dying fall of a former way of life. 

What could, therefore, be closer to Mahler, the composer we happily programme ad absurdum (regardless of the suitability of the interpreters)? Perhaps ultimately, we are more comfortable with the marches that Mahler evokes, given that the Empire with which they were associated has long since faded... we are still clinging desperately to the wreckage of ours. Both readings are equally wrong. For many Vienna 1900 is a thing of the past. If only we would realise that it, like Elgar, is part of our present. 

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