Why Elgar is not worth the bother

It's the 150th anniversary of Edward Elgar's birth today, an ideal occasion to write about why I don't like his music.

You see, I'm inherently suspicious of anyone who is very little (if at all) known outside their own country - Z-list celebrities certainly, but also those composers who are adored by a given nation but unheard of elsewhere. The ones who wrote little beyond operetta make up a high proportion of these as it's a genre which doesn't travel well, not helped by the relative poor quality of the music. Please don't go telling me that Gilbert and Sullivan is high art because I will shoot you down. The fact the latter wished more attention were paid to his serious music says a great deal.

Now even I wouldn't put Elgar in this category; the amount of light music he wrote is comparatively small compared to his other output. It's not even a case of disliking him on account of political incorrectness (displayed by works such as The spirit of England which, to be fair, are typical of the Imperial English view of the world): true, there are times when he can be insufferably English, but this was a man who didn't actually like the association of his Pomp and circumstance March no. 1 with Land of hope and glory. That said, his outlook was so limited that little of his music is known outside the English(-speaking) world.

If we limit ourselves to purely instrumental works (which have a greater chance of international acceptance because of the lack of any text to get in the way), the Pomp and circumstance Marches can be, in the wrong hands, little better than bombastic Sousa marches. Even at their best, they appear po-faced when compared to the fun of Walton's efforts (Crown Imperial, Orb and sceptre and the like), which can be taken as satirical swipes at the genre. Only the 'cello concerto escapes such jingoism, and that's largely because of Jacqueline du Pré, whose association with the piece has (in Britain, at least) sadly become mired in sentiment. The same is of the Enigma variations, which would be his greatest orchestral work if it weren't for the dreadfully English nobility of Nimrod.

The fact I don't like the thickness of his textures is very much a personal matter, in the same way as I don't much care for the German Romantics, but at least they're not always so pompous and humourless. Wagner seems just as bad until you hear bits of Die Meistersinger or the beautiful chamber music of the Siegfried-Idyll, while Strauss maintained his youthful outlook far beyond Der Rosenkavalier. Even Brahms, another one I have litte time for, wrote a sublime violin concerto amid all the more turgid stuff.

Great artists create for the world. Elgar didn't and thus cannot hope to be among them.