"PASSED WITH HONOURS"
Self-taught I sing; 'tis Heaven and Heaven alone Inspires my song with music all its own.
From Homer's Odyssey
WHEN THE Public Orator of the University of Cambridge thus apostrophised Edward Elgar in 1900 he intended generosity, but the term "self-taught" has more generally been applied in a derogatory sense. If Elgar was self-taught then so was Bach and so was Mozart. I suspect that those who adjudge Elgar to have been self-taught have been guilty of inaccurate definition. It is true that Elgar did not go to Oxford or to Cambridge. Nor --except for one fortnight--did he go to Leipzig to study, although that was his early ambition. He depended, almost entirely, on the resources of Worcester and on his own inflexible determination. We shall, I hope, conclude finally that this was his salvation.
Mr. Cardus, whose devotion to Elgar is above suspicion, gives voice to a further misconception. "I can think of no greater composer who took his rise from an environment as unpromising to his art as Elgar's when he was a young man. England, in those years, was solemnly and surely 'Das Land ohne Musik.' Elgar lived for long in his formative years in the narrowest of holes and corners of culture--Worcester and the West Country, not amongst the yokels thereof but in the presence day by day of the dull middle classes."1 This kind of comment Elgar eventually answered himself. In 1930 he wrote a foreword to Hubert Leicester Forgotten Worcester. In it he protested--"I am said to have 'left the humdrum atmosphere of Worcester for' etc. I object to this. I deny that my atmosphere could be exactly humdrum while
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