Elgar INTRODUCTION AND ALLEGRO

Edward Elgar INTRODUCTION and ALLEGRO for Strings Op. 47 (1905) Full score

Edited by Bruce Wood

NOVELLO

Novello Publishing Limited part of the Music Sales Group 8/9 Frith Street, London W1D 3JB tel: 020 7434 0066 fax: 020 7287 6329 Exclusive distributor: Music Sales Ltd, Newmarket Road, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, IP33 3YB tel: 01284 702600 fax: 01284 702592 Web: www.chesternovello.com e-mail: promotion@musicsales.co.uk All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain No part of this publication may be copied or reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Novello & Company Limited

EDITORIAL PREFACE The seed of the Introduction and Allegro was planted by August Jaeger, who, in October 1904, suggested that Elgar should write a short piece for the newly established London Symphony Orchestra. ‘Why not,’ he wrote, ‘a brilliant quick String Scherzo ...? a real bring down the House torrent of a thing such as Bach could write ... a five minutes work would do it! ... You might even write a MODERN FUGUE for strings ... !’1 Nearly three months passed before Elgar took up the idea; when he did so he set about creating a much bigger work than had been envisaged.

On 26 January 1905 he wrote to Jaeger that he was ‘doing that string thing in time for the Sym. orch. concert’;2 this was a mere six weeks before the event, scheduled for 8 March. He worked at a furious pace, dispatching the first ninety pages of the manuscript score to Novello on 6 February, the remaining fortyone pages a week later, and only eleven days after that returning the corrected proofs of the tutti parts. (The full score, and the parts for the solo quartet, were not engraved until after the first performance.) He was still adjusting details while dealing with the proofs – of which, unfortunately, not a single page is known to survive.

But those changes were only the latest in a series of revisions which can be traced in the autograph full score (London, British Library, Add. MS 58015). This is not a definitive fair copy but rather a final working draft. It is written in greyish ink; in several places Elgar evidently hastened to get the bare bones on paper before returning to flesh the passage out, and there are occasional erasures and alterations. His customary precision, however, was unaffected: the copy editor at Novello had very little to do but pencil in a sprinkling of missing accidentals, delete a small number of redundant ones, and note an occasional ambiguity. As Elgar dealt with the few resulting queries he also made extensive revisions, going through the entire score twice.

First, in pencil, much thicker and heavier than that of the copy editor, he made numerous changes to the bowing and slurring, modifying some of the dynamic and expression markings and, in a few places, altering the actual notes. Next, in green ink, he further overhauled the tempo, dynamic, expression, bowing and articulation markings, added to the fingering, modified various note-values and rhythms, and elaborated certain details of scoring in the process occasionally cancelling or confirming an earlier pencilled revision. Finally he resorted to red ink, apparently intending merely to jot down on the flyleaf some helpful advice to the engraver of the parts (‘... save as many staves as possible, e.g. the Violini primi can go on one stave until bar 7 ... Mind the ‘turns’: remember the ‘Solo Quartet’ sits apart, so that the tutti players cannot turn for them’); but with pen in hand he could not resist, even at this late stage, yet more touching up thickening the scoring of the second chord in bar 51, and inserting arrows indicating that the two tutti Violin II parts in bars 102-104 and 248- 250 should be interchanged.

He was still not finished: by the time he came to mark the proofs of the tutti parts he had decided upon some further refinements. In bars 179 and 183 he inserted in the score, in the same green ink as before, the anacrusial figure in the viola, cello and bass parts; he added a somewhat sheepish marginal note offering an alternative, simpler revised reading for the cello and bass should his preferred one prove too difficult to squeeze into the already engraved parts, but insisting that the viola part be altered. In view of the amount of green ink already in the autograph, presumably there was a further note in the parts themselves drawing the attention of the engraver to these instructions. And Elgar made yet more changes, as he did in

several other works, when correcting the proofs of the score itself. (By that time, of course, the tutti parts were already in print; they must have been reprinted to reflect this final state of the work, and existing stocks destroyed, for no uncorrected or hand-corrected are known to survive.) These very late revisions and additions are not numerous, and most of them concern minutiae such as fingering, but there were two significant changes to the notes themselves: in the autograph score, astonishingly, the second and third of the emphatic chords in the opening bars, whose bare fifths are a defining feature of the work, contain a minor third in one or other of the cello parts, with no sign of any cancellation or emendation! Since Elgar used the manuscript when conducting the première and at least one other early performance,3 it seems clear that minor triads were indeed heard on those occasions, the open fifths being substituted only later, when the score was engraved.

Space here does not allow a full description of Elgar’s sketches for the work (contained in British Library, Add. MSS 47903, 63153, 63154 and 63156), but two points are worth mentioning. Firstly, the idea which seems to have given him most trouble was the leaping descent heard at the opening: Add. MS 63154 contains several attempts at outlining the definitive form of this figure, as heard in bars 105 106. In contrast, essential features of the central fugue are fluently sketched in Add. MS 63156 with the countersubject and all the inversions already clear. Secondly, the celebrated ‘Welsh’ tune, first heard in bars 18- 25 on the viola, and widely regarded as a quintessential string melody, is sketched in Add. MS 63153 (f.13) with the explicit designation ‘Cor Ang’, and with accompanying parts marked ‘2 Flutes Solo’ and ‘Wind’.

As for the printed score, it is not known whether Elgar corrected all the proofs himself or whether, as with the parts, he had the assistance of his friend John Austin. Whatever the truth of the matter, the result is impressively accurate, though a few errors inevitably escaped into print. Nearly all of them are tiny; most involve bowing slurs, or inconsistencies of articulation markings between exposition and recapitulation (something easily explained by Elgar’s dispatch of the manuscript in two instalments). One of them, however – an octave acciaccatura wrongly replicated from an adjacent part, making an entry decidedly awkward (bar 250, Violin II; cf. bar 104) – has no doubt puzzled or irritated many a violinist over the years. In this new edition, which in the absence of proofs necessarily relies on the autograph alone, such obvious slips have been corrected; but the changes which Elgar must be presumed to have made when dealing with the proofs of the score have, of course, been retained.

Bruce Wood School of Music University of Wales, Bangor Summer 2003

1 2 3

Jerrold Northrop Moore, Elgar and his Publishers: Letters of a Creative Life, Vol. 2 (Oxford, 1987), p.595.

Ibid., p.607.

He had written to Novello on 24 February asking for the score to be stitched in readiness (ibid., p.612).

To his friend PROFESSOR S. S. SANFORD, Yale University, U. S. A.

Duration: circa 14 minutes

INTRODUCTION and ALLEGRO for Strings (Quartet and Orchestra)

Š 2006 Novello & Company Limited

03/06