6 - Postscript
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
Summary
The tempo variations that arise in the course of an Elgar work are so subtle and elastic that they demand from the conductor and performer an almost complete infatuation with the music. For Elgar's music will not play by itself; merely to supervise it and give it progressional routine playing will only serve to immobilize it.
It may well be, in the Enigma Variations, that the problem is more readily understood by conductors of different nationality and musical background owing to the shortened musical form … (Bernard Herrmann)
Variations in history: performance practice
The Musical Times, being somewhat parti-pris, acclaimed Variations after the first performance, perhaps operating a double standard: it dismissed Rimsky-Korsakov's suite Snégourotchka (sic) as ‘an exercise in orchestration … but as music… beneath contempt’, while in ‘Dorabella’ ‘Berlioz himself need not have been ashamed of owning to this masterpiece of exquisitely refined scoring.’ Jaeger himself, though he complained that the finale was too short, continued: ‘Here is an English musician who has something to say and knows how to say it in his own individual and beautiful way … Effortless originality [is] combined with thorough savoir faire, and most important of all, beauty of theme…’
These sentiments were entirely in line with the views of other critics, and Novello's selected the most favourable for a series of column-length advertisements in The Musical Times. Several epithets appear more than once, among them ‘clever’, ‘ingenious’ (also ‘well-wrought’), and ‘humorous’; aspects singled out more than once for praise are the contrasts within the set and the orchestration.
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- Information
- Elgar: Enigma Variations , pp. 79 - 88Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999