Mark Elder always seemed to me to be one of the coolest conductors, and it wasn’t just because I was friends at school with one of his brothers. His comments in 1990 about the traditional Proms selections – e.g., Land of Hope and Glory – being inappropriate in the context of the beginning of the first Gulf War certainly endeared him to me. Whether or not one supported the war, there was certainly nothing to relish in its outbreak, and the fact that he was dismissed from his gig as a conductor for one of the Prom performances only made him the more revered as a martyr to common sense and decency. I am certainly glad that he rebounded from this setback and has had a very successful career since, earning a knighthood a few years back.
I just googled Elder as a result of thinking about classical music and war. I had happened upon descriptions of Sir Malcolm Sargent and his work during the Second World War using classical music (frequently German music, one might add) to rally the British in the face of the Blitz. My grandparents wrote in their letters to their two sons (who were serving or about to serve in the armed forces) about the various concerts they went to, some of them put on by Sargent’s London Philharmonic Orchestra. That had led me to look up Sargent, whose music I had listened to (most particularly his version of Peter and the Wolf, narrated brilliantly by Sir Ralph Richardson) growing up. It turned out that when war broke out Sargent was in Australia and he had just been offered a contract to work for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation; he decided instead to return to Britain to use classical music to raise public morale. Sargent became a household name largely as a result of the reputation he gained during the war, playing on in defiance of bombs dropping, and so forth.
This connection between classical music and war intrigued me. Many of those to whom the LPO took their music would have been unfamiliar with classical music concerts – but the element of “we are all in this together” may have helped transcend class boundaries, in the way that the Royal Air Force – the main resistance to Nazi Germany at the time – with its much more open and less hierarchical structure and ethos (than the Army), was also doing. Flash Harry, as Sargent became known, clearly presented a different image of Britain to the British public than that with which they had been familiar.
But what stuck with me was the significance of classical music at the time and the attempt being made by Sargent to use it for a larger public good. It was the sittlichkeit that would bind a fragmented civil society together in its hour of need. Thinking about this role for classical music reminded me of Mark Elder’s brush with the establishment in 1990. This brush might be viewed as a product of Elder’s concern (though of course he might see it altogether differently) that music might be used in inappropriate ways in the pursuit of jingoism.
Interestingly, I suppose, Elder’s biography had elements of Sargent's in it. Elder made his name first in Australia and also has been the conductor for the Hallé symphony orchestra based in Manchester, as Sargent was for a brief time in the war. Be that as it may, a mere coincidence, I googled Mark Elder, partly to see what had become of him recently, but also to find out what more I could learn about the 1990 events.
What I came upon was a rather interesting Guardian article from October 2001, three weeks after 9/11. He had put together a series of concerts for Bridgewater Hall in Manchester that would comprise compositions that had been influenced by or composed during wartime; his article discussed the various pieces and the context in which they were now to be performed. The list of composers included a number of different fellows, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Britten, Elgar, and Richard Strauss among a host of others. This was a timely series – prescient even – given the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that occurred on September 11th. Elder ended his article with a flourish:
Whenever I conduct a piece of music, it is important for me to understand the circumstances that brought it to life. But I am still puzzling over the "Leningrad" symphony: Shostakovich was such an enigma as a person, and he conceived his music to contain more than one layer of meaning. This past three weeks, looking at the pictures in the papers of the rubble that was the World Trade Centre, I have found myself wondering what else those attacks will leave us. How will our creative life respond, over the next 20 years, to what happened there?
This seems an interesting question to me. Ten years later, how are we responding to those events in our creative lives? While Sargent would certainly be seen as someone who was brought to prominence by WWII and then symbolized in many ways a Britain that was trying to stave off decline, I wonder what Elder might symbolize for Britain, for the west, etc., in the aftermath of 9/11?
One other thing that occurs to me, though, is the need for relevance — understanding “the circumstances bringing music to life”, does seem important; but also its corollary is very important, ensuring that music has life in current circumstances. One of the things that Sir Mark does in Manchester, apparently, is ensures that all area children have access free concerts (and he has also managed to break the tradition of evening wear for audiences, which is also striking at some of the elitism of classical music culture).
Music, History – it’s all very important stuff. There’s a time and place to be a Sargent, calling for courage in the face of a Blitz; and a time to be an Elder statesman, calling for reason in the face of blind allegiance; but there is always the need to make in-roads into the lives of people – whether it is “Classical Music in the Slums” or El Sistema, to open the doors to opportunity – to provide a bit of sittlichkeit for those caught in the quagmire of civil society. Scattered sparks, perhaps, but important ones without a doubt.
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