The Black Knight, Op. 25 is a symphony/cantata

Cantata

A cantata is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir....

 for orchestra and chorus written by Edward Elgar

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...

 in 1889-1893. The librettist borrows from Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline...

's translation of the ballad Der schwarze Ritter by Ludwig Uhland

Ludwig Uhland

Johann Ludwig Uhland , was a German poet, philologist and literary historian.-Biography:He was born in Tübingen, then Duchy of Württemberg, and studied jurisprudence at the university there, but also took an interest in medieval literature, especially old German and French poetry...

.

Purpose

Basil Maine, a leading Elgar biographer, believes the purpose of the work is to create a close mix of vocal and instrumental tones. Elgar’s need to organize the loose format of the cantata by shaping it to a more rigid form is also apparent. For example, Elgar divides the text into four contrasting scenes corresponding to the four movements of a typical symphony.

Synopsis

Elgar's The Black Knight tells the story of the intrusion of a mysterious stranger into a king's court with disastrous and gruesome result.

It starts with a medieval jousting

Jousting

Jousting is a martial game or hastilude between two knights mounted on horses and using lances, often as part of a tournament.Jousting emerged in the High Middle Ages based on the military use of the lance by heavy cavalry. The first camels tournament was staged in 1066, but jousting itself did not...

 competition held in honor of the feast of Pentecost

Pentecost

Pentecost is a prominent feast in the calendar of Ancient Israel celebrating the giving of the Law on Sinai, and also later in the Christian liturgical year commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples of Christ after the Resurrection of Jesus...

: in the competition, the king’s son beats everyone in the lists until a mysterious knight arrives and challenges him, and with the sky darkening and the castle rocking, the strange knight fights and wins. Later that evening, during the banquet, the black knight returns to ask the king if he can marry his daughter and begins to dance with her, and as they dance, the little flowers in her hair mysteriously die. Later, noticing the paleness of the king's two children, the guest offers 'healing' wine to them, who collapse and die soon after drinking the poison. The old king begs the knight to kill him as he has nothing left to live for, but he refuses.

It has been observed that there seems to be no moral cause or explanation for the gratuitous evil of the stranger.

Musical Analysis

Elgar described the work as a 'symphony for chorus and orchestra', though the publishers, Novello, described it as a cantata. The four scenes correspond to the four movements of the classical symphony. There are no soloists, and the action is described by the chorus.

In the first scene, "The Tournament", Edward Elgar uses a buoyant, "open-air" theme to depict the happy crowd at the tournament. Here the composer uses a triplet figure that falls on the third beat.

The second scene begins with the orchestra playing softly. The orchestra then begins to play the knight's theme louder as he appears. Throughout the scene, the composer uses many diminished seventh

Diminished seventh

In classical music from Western culture, a diminished seventh is an interval produced by narrowing a minor seventh by a chromatic semitone. For instance, the interval from A to G is a minor seventh, ten semitones wide, and both the intervals from A to G, and from A to G are diminished sevenths,...

s which represent the knight and foreshadow the disastrous events to come. The chorus, representing the crowd, demands to know the knight's name, and there is a moment of silence before the knight answers.

In the "Dance", the themes are light and graceful. Initially, the chorus enters to describe the king's feast, but the music changes as the black knight's theme replays as he enters the hall. During the knight’s dance with the king’s daughter, his theme becomes chaotic: for example, the orchestra replays the original diminished seventh again as the flower in her hair died.

"The Banquet" begins frantically as the knight proposes a toast. Then, as the children die, the orchestra calms and plays softly. Abruptly the chorus and the king erupt with a dramatic cry as the children die. The knight’s refusal to kill the king is portrayed by unaccompanied voices. The piece ends dramatically with the return of variations on the knight’s theme at forte. At the last seven measures, only two instruments play and the sound dies away.

Composition

Many believe the composer considers the chorus less important than the orchestra. For example, the chorus borrows the orchestra’s tunes or will often double the orchestra. The words are often weakly placed and do not seem as important as the underlying music. "Words serve a mechanical purpose ... [there is] no good reason why they should not be removed". The orchestral writing, however, is competent and characteristic. For example, fear at the Black Knight is expressed by harmonic sequences and appoggiaturas which resolve downward. The composer also uses Neapolitan sixth chords to express the wickedness of the knight. Due to this unexpected compositional technique, The Black Knight is still performed all over the world.