Edward Elgar, D.H. Lawrence: What Is New?

I wrote this prose-poem this evening and feel it deserves a home. If it is outside the frame, as they say these days, just let me know, delete it and I will understand.-Ron Price, Australia
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A MAN’S CREATION IS THE MAN

D. H. Lawrence, writing in 1916 during the Great War, felt that two thousand years of civilization were collapsing before his eyes. "So much beauty and pathos of old things," he wrote were "passing away and no new things coming: my God it breaks my soul." He did not see any new things coming, although he hypothesized many things he would have liked to see, new political arrangements, now ways of organizing society, ways expressed in his letters to Bertrand Russell.

There was, of course, much that was new;(a) for example, (1) 1915--The Victor Talking Machine Co. introduced a phonograph, the Victorola. By 1919, Americans spent more on phonographs and recordings than on musical instruments, books, periodicals and sporting goods; (2) January 25, 1915. First transcontinental phone call was made; (3) July 27, 1915. Direct wireless service between the U.S. and Japan was established.; (4) October 21, 1915. The first transatlantic radio-telephone communication is made between Virginia and the Eiffel Tower in Paris; (5) December 10, 1915. The One-Millionth Model T is produced by Ford; (6) 1916-Electric clocks were introduced; (7) 1916--The average price of a new car was $600. A Model T cost $360. There were over 3.5 million cars on the road; ( May 15, 1918--First airmail flights were started between New York City and Washington, DC.; (9) 1919. The Radio Corporation of American (RCA) was established; (10) 1920. KDKA, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was the first commercial radio station. Its first broadcast was the presidential election results; and (11) ‘Abdu’l-Baha, the Son of the Founder of the Baha'i Faith, wrote His Tablets of the Divine Plan in 1916-1917, the seminal document that laid the Plan for the spread of the Baha’i Cause throughout the planet and for the foundation of the nucleus and pattern of a new world Order. At the end of April 1919 these Tablets were unveiled in New York at the Hotel McAlpin at the Baha’i National Convention.

On the music front in May 1919 the pre-eminent British composer of his generation, Edward Elgar, had his three new chamber works premiered. Adrian Boult wrote that these chamber works possessed "a new note of fantasy, of freedom and of economy."(b) From May through early August 1919 Elgar composed his Cello Concerto. I find ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Tablets of the Divine Plan, like Elgar Cello Concerto, spare and concentrated. ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s argument was not a musical one like Elgar’s, but a spiritual one. ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s themes, like Elgar’s, were memorable and its argument cut deeper. Both Elgar’s work and ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s were haunted by an autumnal sadness and the sadness of compassion not pessimism.-Ron Price with thanks to: (a) Duke University Digital Collection, Internet, 29/8/'08 and (b) Elgar: Cello Concerto--Creating A Classic—How Elgar Came to Write the Concerto," At an internet site, 28 August 2008.

After reading Elgar Unmasked
by Dr. David C. F. Wright at an
internet website this evening, I
began to question the aptness
of the analogy I made in above
in the prose section of my poem.
The number of musicians who
hated Elgar’s music includes
many famous names of much
and considerable literary weight:
Herbert von Karajan said:"I don’t
know what is better, the moment
before Elgar begins or the great
relief when it is all over."I believe
that a man’s music is the man
himself. It is the same for artists,
poets and writers of factual matters
or matters of spiritual belief.
Charles Dickens wrote about social
issues in his novels because that is
the way he felt about them. ‘Abdu’l
Baha wrote about the mission of the
North American Bahá’ís, His view
and conception of future pioneering
plans, their role and their spiritual
destiny in the realization of that
Wondrous Vision which constituted
the brightest emanation of His Father’s
Mind and the fairest fruit of the fairest
civilization the world had yet seen.(1)

(1) Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha’u’llah, Wilmette, 1974(193, p. 48.

Ron Price

29 August 2008