Symphony No. 3 (Elgar)
Encyclopedia
Edward Elgar
's Third Symphony was incomplete at the time of his death in 1934. Elgar left 130 pages of sketches which the British composer Anthony Payne
worked on for many years, producing a complete symphony in 1997, officially known as "Edward Elgar: the sketches for Symphony No 3 elaborated by Anthony Payne" or in brief "Elgar/Payne Symphony No 3". The first public performance was at the Royal Festival Hall
on 15 February 1998, by the BBC Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Sir Andrew Davis
.
held that the BBC
should commission a new Elgar symphony, and with the aid of Landon Ronald
he persuaded the BBC to do so. Elgar worked on the new piece during the last year of his life, jotting down many short snatches of a few bars as well as some pages in full score.
Realising that he would not complete the score, the dying Elgar did not destroy the sketches, and made contradictory remarks about the unfinished work. He told his friend, the violinist W. H. "Billy" Reed
, "Don’t let anyone tinker with it", but to his doctor he said, "If I can’t complete the Third Symphony, somebody will complete it – or write a better one." Elgar and Reed had often played through various sketches for the symphony on violin and piano, and Reed knew more than anyone about Elgar's intentions. Reed reproduced more than forty pages of the most important sketches in his book Elgar as I Knew Him in 1936, probably to illustrate what he believed to be the impossibility of weaving them into a coherent whole. But their publication meant that seventy years later they would come into the public domain
and the Elgar family would be powerless to prevent anyone "tinkering" with them.
In 1974, a BBC Radio 3
producer, Dr Roger Fiske, devised a programme about the Symphony, and orchestrated some of the sketches, completed Elgar's unfinished scoring and composed some other passages. Elgar's daughter gave her approval and Sir Adrian Boult
agreed to conduct the music. Before the programme was made Boult was persuaded that this amounted to "tinkering" with the score, and the programme was dropped. A similar proposed feature for BBC television in 1979 also came to nothing.
Anthony Payne had become interested in the sketches in 1972, and in 1993 the BBC invited him to work on them for a workshop performance. In the event the performance did not take place, because of objections from the Elgar family. Payne nevertheless continued to work on the sketches, completing the Scherzo, the Adagio and the first movement of the work. The Elgar family decided to commission Payne to make an authorised version.
Payne later wrote, "It was during this process that I became more consciously aware of the overall sweep of the symphony. It was different in its sheer breadth of emotion from any of his other symphonic works: there was the raw vigour and magic lyricism of the opening movement, the use of a lighter manner in the second which went far beyond his established symphonic practice, and the searing intensity of the Adagio, tragic in its import, while the finale revealed a world of chivalric action and drama."
His greatest difficulty was in completing the finale, as Elgar had left few clues about its structure and none about how it would end. Payne wrote the whole of the development section and the coda, deciding to end the work quietly, following the model of "The Wagon Passes" in Elgar’s late work the Nursery Suite
. "The finale's main subject actually suggests this kind of treatment, and it would lead the music away into some new visionary world, spanning the years between the composer's death and my attempted realisation of his sketches. I trusted my intuition and went ahead and wrote."
In the UK performances were given in 1998/99 in most of the major cities, including Glasgow
(24 September), Birmingham
(25 September), Bristol
(10 October/27 January), Liverpool
(24 October), Manchester
(17 December) and Cambridge
(29 January). International performances were programmed as far afield as Brussels
, Ljubljana
, St Petersburg, Hong Kong
and Winnipeg
. The US première took place on 20 November 1998 with the Philadelphia Orchestra
conducted by Andrew Davis, followed by performances by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
with Davis and the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington
with Leonard Slatkin
.
label by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Andrew Davis
, in October 1997 four months before the first public performance. Subsequent recordings have been made by:
Edward Elgar
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet OM, GCVO was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos...
's Third Symphony was incomplete at the time of his death in 1934. Elgar left 130 pages of sketches which the British composer Anthony Payne
Anthony Payne
Anthony Payne is an English composer, most famous for the work published as Edward Elgar: The Sketches for Symphony No. 3 Elaborated by Anthony Payne...
worked on for many years, producing a complete symphony in 1997, officially known as "Edward Elgar: the sketches for Symphony No 3 elaborated by Anthony Payne" or in brief "Elgar/Payne Symphony No 3". The first public performance was at the Royal Festival Hall
Royal Festival Hall
The Royal Festival Hall is a 2,900-seat concert, dance and talks venue within Southbank Centre in London. It is situated on the South Bank of the River Thames, not far from Hungerford Bridge. It is a Grade I listed building - the first post-war building to become so protected...
on 15 February 1998, by the BBC Symphony Orchestra
BBC Symphony Orchestra
The BBC Symphony Orchestra is the principal broadcast orchestra of the British Broadcasting Corporation and one of the leading orchestras in Britain.-History:...
conducted by Sir Andrew Davis
Andrew Davis (conductor)
Sir Andrew Frank Davis CBE is a British conductor.Born in Ashridge, Hertfordshire to Robert J. Davis and his wife Florence J. née Badminton, Davis grew up in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, and in Watford. Davis attended Watford Boys' Grammar School, where he studied classics in his sixth form years...
.
History
After the death of his wife in 1920, Elgar retreated into semi-retirement, producing no large-scale works. His friend and champion George Bernard ShawGeorge Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
held that the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
should commission a new Elgar symphony, and with the aid of Landon Ronald
Landon Ronald
Sir Landon Ronald was an English conductor, composer, pianist, singing teacher and administrator...
he persuaded the BBC to do so. Elgar worked on the new piece during the last year of his life, jotting down many short snatches of a few bars as well as some pages in full score.
Realising that he would not complete the score, the dying Elgar did not destroy the sketches, and made contradictory remarks about the unfinished work. He told his friend, the violinist W. H. "Billy" Reed
William Henry Reed
William Henry "Billy" Reed was an English violinist, teacher, minor composer, conductor and biographer of Sir Edward Elgar...
, "Don’t let anyone tinker with it", but to his doctor he said, "If I can’t complete the Third Symphony, somebody will complete it – or write a better one." Elgar and Reed had often played through various sketches for the symphony on violin and piano, and Reed knew more than anyone about Elgar's intentions. Reed reproduced more than forty pages of the most important sketches in his book Elgar as I Knew Him in 1936, probably to illustrate what he believed to be the impossibility of weaving them into a coherent whole. But their publication meant that seventy years later they would come into the public domain
Public domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
and the Elgar family would be powerless to prevent anyone "tinkering" with them.
In 1974, a BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3 is a national radio station operated by the BBC within the United Kingdom. Its output centres on classical music and opera, but jazz, world music, drama, culture and the arts also feature. The station is the world’s most significant commissioner of new music, and its New Generation...
producer, Dr Roger Fiske, devised a programme about the Symphony, and orchestrated some of the sketches, completed Elgar's unfinished scoring and composed some other passages. Elgar's daughter gave her approval and Sir Adrian Boult
Adrian Boult
Sir Adrian Cedric Boult CH was an English conductor. Brought up in a prosperous mercantile family he followed musical studies in England and at Leipzig, Germany, with early conducting work in London for the Royal Opera House and Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company. His first prominent post was...
agreed to conduct the music. Before the programme was made Boult was persuaded that this amounted to "tinkering" with the score, and the programme was dropped. A similar proposed feature for BBC television in 1979 also came to nothing.
Anthony Payne had become interested in the sketches in 1972, and in 1993 the BBC invited him to work on them for a workshop performance. In the event the performance did not take place, because of objections from the Elgar family. Payne nevertheless continued to work on the sketches, completing the Scherzo, the Adagio and the first movement of the work. The Elgar family decided to commission Payne to make an authorised version.
Payne later wrote, "It was during this process that I became more consciously aware of the overall sweep of the symphony. It was different in its sheer breadth of emotion from any of his other symphonic works: there was the raw vigour and magic lyricism of the opening movement, the use of a lighter manner in the second which went far beyond his established symphonic practice, and the searing intensity of the Adagio, tragic in its import, while the finale revealed a world of chivalric action and drama."
His greatest difficulty was in completing the finale, as Elgar had left few clues about its structure and none about how it would end. Payne wrote the whole of the development section and the coda, deciding to end the work quietly, following the model of "The Wagon Passes" in Elgar’s late work the Nursery Suite
Nursery Suite
The Nursery Suite is one of the last compositions by Edward Elgar. Like Elgar's The Wand of Youth suites, it makes use of sketches from the composer's childhood.There are seven movements and a coda:...
. "The finale's main subject actually suggests this kind of treatment, and it would lead the music away into some new visionary world, spanning the years between the composer's death and my attempted realisation of his sketches. I trusted my intuition and went ahead and wrote."
In the UK performances were given in 1998/99 in most of the major cities, including Glasgow
Glasgow
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is situated on the River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands...
(24 September), Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
(25 September), Bristol
Bristol
Bristol is a city, unitary authority area and ceremonial county in South West England, with an estimated population of 433,100 for the unitary authority in 2009, and a surrounding Larger Urban Zone with an estimated 1,070,000 residents in 2007...
(10 October/27 January), Liverpool
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...
(24 October), Manchester
Manchester
Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...
(17 December) and Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
(29 January). International performances were programmed as far afield as Brussels
Brussels
Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...
, Ljubljana
Ljubljana
Ljubljana is the capital of Slovenia and its largest city. It is the centre of the City Municipality of Ljubljana. It is located in the centre of the country in the Ljubljana Basin, and is a mid-sized city of some 270,000 inhabitants...
, St Petersburg, Hong Kong
Hong Kong
Hong Kong is one of two Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China , the other being Macau. A city-state situated on China's south coast and enclosed by the Pearl River Delta and South China Sea, it is renowned for its expansive skyline and deep natural harbour...
and Winnipeg
Winnipeg
Winnipeg is the capital and largest city of Manitoba, Canada, and is the primary municipality of the Winnipeg Capital Region, with more than half of Manitoba's population. It is located near the longitudinal centre of North America, at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers .The name...
. The US première took place on 20 November 1998 with the Philadelphia Orchestra
Philadelphia Orchestra
The Philadelphia Orchestra is a symphony orchestra based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States. One of the "Big Five" American orchestras, it was founded in 1900...
conducted by Andrew Davis, followed by performances by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is an American orchestra based in Chicago, Illinois. It is one of the five American orchestras commonly referred to as the "Big Five". Founded in 1891, the Symphony makes its home at Orchestra Hall in Chicago and plays a summer season at the Ravinia Festival...
with Davis and the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
with Leonard Slatkin
Leonard Slatkin
Leonard Edward Slatkin is an American conductor and composer.-Early life and education:Slatkin was born in Los Angeles to a musical family that came from areas of the Russian Empire now in Ukraine. His father Felix Slatkin was the violinist, conductor and founder of the Hollywood String Quartet,...
.
Structure
The Symphony, in four movements, takes about 55 minutes in performance.- Allegro molto maestosoMaestosoMaestoso is an Italian musical term and is used to direct performers to play a certain passage of music in a stately, dignified and majestic fashion or, it is used to describe music as such. The term is commonly used in relatively slow pieces; however, there are numerous examples - such as the...
- The symphony opens in a sweeping sequence of parallel open fifths and octaves (the first seventeen bars of which Elgar left in full score) building to a march rhythm. By contrast the second subject is "sublimely wistful". There is an exposition repeat indicated by Elgar, and a calm new theme for strings introduces the development section, which later has a lively theme for the horns. A march section in B flat minor follows. After the recapitulation, the coda brings together the main themes and the movement ends with a majestic C major conclusion based on the opening theme. The movement, taking about sixteen minutes in performance, though on a large scale, is shorter than the equivalent movements of Elgar’s first and second symphonies.
- ScherzoScherzoA scherzo is a piece of music, often a movement from a larger piece such as a symphony or a sonata. The scherzo's precise definition has varied over the years, but it often refers to a movement which replaces the minuet as the third movement in a four-movement work, such as a symphony, sonata, or...
: allegretto
- The scherzo is in great contrast to those of the first two symphonies, both of which are fast and forceful. It is, however, the movement of which the sketches provided the clearest indications of Elgar’s intentions, and the gentle wistfulness is in a recognisable Wand of YouthWand of YouthThe Wand of Youth Suites No. 1 & No. 2 are works for full orchestra by the English composer Edward Elgar. The titles given them by Elgar were, in full:-History:...
style. A light dance-tune with a prominent part for the tambourine recurs like a rondo. There are two contrasting episodes, the second of which features an A major theme in pastoral vein.
- Adagio solenne
- Elgar wrote that the opening bars of the slow movement would "open some vast bronze doors into something strangely unfamiliar". The first main theme is elegiac, the D major second subject offering gentler contrast. The recapitulation emphasises the brooding first theme, and the movement ends with a single solo viola note, marked fine; "this is the end" Elgar said of this phrase.
- Allegro
- The opening of the finale returns to the heroic tone of the start of the symphony with a rousing fanfare (scored by Elgar). It is the movement of which the least original Elgar material exists, and Payne was obliged to contribute a quantity of original music. The martial opening theme has a subsidiary theme in Elgar's nobilmente vein. The climax of the movement is a large-scale crescendo-decrescendo modelled by Payne on "The Wagon Passes" in the Nursery SuiteNursery SuiteThe Nursery Suite is one of the last compositions by Edward Elgar. Like Elgar's The Wand of Youth suites, it makes use of sketches from the composer's childhood.There are seven movements and a coda:...
. The hushed ending dies away in a long pianissimoPianissimoPianissimo is an Italian word, meaning "very soft". It can mean:*Pianissimo, refers to the volume of a soft sound or soft note.*Pianissimo Peche, a brand of Japanese cigarettes made by Japan Tobacco....
note from the tam tam.
Recordings
The first recording was made for the NMCNMC Recordings
NMC Recordings is a British recording label which specialises in recording works by living British composers.-History:The composer Colin Matthews founded NMC in 1988, with financial assistance from the Holst Foundation. NMC is an abbreviation for "New Music Cassettes", which refers to the intended...
label by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Andrew Davis
Andrew Davis (conductor)
Sir Andrew Frank Davis CBE is a British conductor.Born in Ashridge, Hertfordshire to Robert J. Davis and his wife Florence J. née Badminton, Davis grew up in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, and in Watford. Davis attended Watford Boys' Grammar School, where he studied classics in his sixth form years...
, in October 1997 four months before the first public performance. Subsequent recordings have been made by:
- Bournemouth Symphony OrchestraBournemouth Symphony OrchestraThe Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra is an English orchestra. Originally based in Bournemouth, the BSO moved its offices to the adjacent town of Poole in 1979....
, Paul DanielPaul DanielPaul Daniel CBE is an English conductor. He is particularly noted for performances and recordings of opera and of British music....
(2000, NaxosNaxos RecordsNaxos Records is a record label specializing in classical music. Through a number of imprints, Naxos also releases genres including Chinese music, jazz, world music, and early rock & roll. The company was founded in 1987 by Klaus Heymann, a German-born resident of Hong Kong.Naxos is the largest...
) - London Symphony OrchestraLondon Symphony OrchestraThe London Symphony Orchestra is a major orchestra of the United Kingdom, as well as one of the best-known orchestras in the world. Since 1982, the LSO has been based in London's Barbican Centre.-History:...
, Sir Colin DavisColin DavisSir Colin Rex Davis, CH, CBE is an English conductor. His repertoire is broad, but among the composers with whom he is particularly associated are Mozart, Berlioz, Elgar, Sibelius, Stravinsky and Tippett....
(2001, LSO Live) - BBC National Orchestra of WalesBBC National Orchestra of WalesThe BBC National Orchestra of Wales is a Welsh symphony orchestra and one of the BBC's five professional orchestras. The BBC NOW is the only professional symphony orchestra organisation in Wales, occupying a dual role as both a broadcasting orchestra and national orchestra.The BBC NOW has its...
, Richard HickoxRichard HickoxRichard Sidney Hickox CBE was an English conductor of choral, orchestral and operatic music.-Early life:Hickox was born in Stokenchurch in Buckinghamshire into a musical family...
(2007, Chandos)Chandos RecordsChandos Records is an independent classical music recording company based in Colchester, Essex, in the United Kingdom, founded in 1979 by Brian Couzens.- Background :... - Sapporo Symphony OrchestraSapporo Symphony OrchestraThe Sapporo Symphony Orchestra is a professional orchestra based in Sapporo, Japan. The Orchestra has its nickname “Sakkyo” and is a full member of “Association of Japanese Symphony Orchestras.”-Outline:...
, Tadaaki OtakaTadaaki Otakais a Japanese-born, British-based conductor. He studied composition, theory, and French horn, at the Toho Gakuen School of Music, and later was a conducting student of Hideo Saito....
(2008, Signum Classics)