Interview
with Sean Rafferty, ‘In Tune’ , 1st June 2007
In
Haven…
SR ..written
by his wife Alice, and their marriage is the topic of a
new play which promises to blow the lid off one or two things,
but we shall see. Peter Sutton wrote it and Gene David
Kirk is the director and they are taking it round various places
that are very strongly associated with Elgar. Before we
come on to the mystery you threaten to have solved, Peter, what
did you find when you were looking at the relationship between
Elgar and his wife Alice, because on the face of it it was a
socially unequal match and one wonders just how they got together.
PS Socially,
it was certainly an unequal match, yes, but at a personal level
it must have been much more equal. Certainly Alice had
huge respect and admiration for all of Elgar’s music. Now
whether you can say the same about Elgar and his respect for
Alice’s poetry is another matter; he set a lot of her poems
of course, and it began at a fairly equal level with that relationship
between his music and her poems. Elgar perhaps moved on
and maybe Alice did not move with him. But she may also
have sacrificed herself, her own writing, to his music.
SR Well, she wouldn’t
have been the first woman to have done that, I think, in the
world of music or anywhere else. Gene, what did you find
when you were putting this play together about the things that
went on in the household, because in the Enigma Variations,
which we’ll come to in a moment, there are other figures,
female figures, and one wonders what wife Alice made of that.
GDK I think wife Alice played the Victorian wife
right up until the end. She put up with Elgar’s muses
all the way through their thirty years together but the longest
muse of all of course is Alice Stuart and it seems to be for
the greater good of the music Alice would put up with it throughout
his life. And there’s this wonderful maidservant
they had, Sarah, who was, I suppose, the glue in the family that
kept it all together and said nothing but saw all and that’s
wonderful for theatre.
SR Yes. So are there
shocking revelations at all about the Elgars and this or are
you taking a reverential view?
PS We’re certainly
not taking a reverential view; we’re exploring this thirty-year
marriage and the 15-20-year relationship with Alice Stuart Wortley
so if there are revelations there then the audience will divine
them between the lines of what is said. But we’re
not coming up saying ‘This is a shocking revelation’. No,
no, no, we’re exploring the truth of those relationships.
SR So, for instance,
an Alice Stuart Wortley who was a muse. Is ‘muse’ a
polite Victorian way of saying something deeper, or not?
PS It could be. But
again, we’re not going to give you a definitive answer
on that because we don’t think that that is what we need
to do in this play. The point about the play is the tension
in those relationships and it’s the emotional relationships,
we’re not concerned about the physical. There were
certainly very very strong emotional ties .
SR Yes. And who picked
up the emotional pieces do you think, Gene, after the Second
Symphony, for instance, when it didn’t go well at all,
and Elgar was in a terrible black state? Was it his wife
who picked up the pieces or did he look elsewhere?
GDK I think his wife picked up the pieces. I
think – and I live by this in the way I’ve put the
play together – that if you look at pictures of Elgar he’s
not a libertine. You look at pictures of Picasso, and that is
the man who has had that kind of relationship through his art,
without going into the nuts and bolts of what that means. But
Elgar, I believe, was a gentleman throughout his life, and his
passion and his – I suppose – his energies, are all
in his music. I don’t think he actually executed
it through his muses.
SR Well, we also have the
promise of yet another look into the mystery of the Enigma
Variations. Maybe we should just leave a question
mark hanging over this while we have one of the Enigma Variations
and because this has actually got a very close connection with
the cast of the play, hasn’t it?
PS It has, indeed,
yes. The co-producer and one of the actors is a lady called
Katrina Norbury. Now she is related by marriage to Winifred
Norbury who was the subject of EV number 8.
Enigma Variation No 8…
SR …He
said it was suggested by an eighteenth-century house and the
Norburys, particularly Winifred and Florence, but I think particularly
Winifred, the more
musical of them, and there’s a Norbury, Katrina Norbury,
involved in the play Elgar and Alice, which is about
to hit the hotspots which Elgar would have known. … Gene,
what did you feel when you finished putting the play together?
What did you feel about Elgar as a musician and a man?
GDK I thought, a brilliant musician and a very dark,
troubled man as a character, incredibly sad, yet incredibly gifted. I
think it time and time again, the greatest artists seem to have
the blackest cloud hanging over them and I feel that just where
he came from in life and where he ended up there’s an overwhelming
sadness to his life but it is celebrated through brilliant music.
SR All sorts of things overcome
but of course what people will want to know now is if you have
cracked the secret of the Enigma Variations. No
one seems to know about either the theme or as he told it, a
theme that goes but is not played with these variations and everyone
has tried it: they said it’s Rule Britannia, it
could have been a stave from the Bach B minor mass, Beethoven,
possibly something by Stanford, a bit of Mozart’s Prague
Symphony, everybody’s had a go and some things almost
fit, as an overlay. What have you discovered? Come
on, spill the beans.
PS We have discovered – or
we have had the inspiration – or Elgar has told me, when
he woke me up at 5 o’clock one morning what this theme
that goes through and under is. I suspect we’ve all
been looking in the wrong place, and in the play he will tell
us and, to anticipate, all I can say, I think, is that you have
to bear in mind that he played with words as well as music and
that I think is the area in which to look for the solution to
the Enigma.
SR So
he’s given us
a clue then, in what he’s said about it?
PS I’m giving
you a clue now. In the play, Elgar actually reveals what this
enigma is.
SR Are many people going
to believe it?
GDK Everybody.
PS Absolutely
everybody. Several Elgarians have looked at the script
and have said it’s perfectly credible. I believe
it, Gerald Harper, who is playing Elgar, believes it, and
certainly everyone who has been in the rehearsal room believes
it.
SR Is there any point now
in our trying to break your fingers ..
PS No, I’m afraid
not. No… that’s as far as we’re going
to go.
SR Seriously,
did you have a little flash of something when you thought of
that?
PS Yes, yes, quite
seriously. And I do seriously believe that I have found a truth
in what we’ve put in the play as a solution to that enigma. I’m
absolutely convinced of it.
SR Well, we will have to wait
and find out. It’s about the man, it’s about
Alice, obviously, as well, it’s about his life and it’s
about his spirituality. We finish with music from The
Dream of Gerontius. I think he was given a copy of
Newman’s great epic poem, which he knew anyway, as a wedding
present by the priest of St George’s when they were married
in Brompton Oratory. What of the man do you see in this
music?
PS In this music we still
see him as a Catholic believer, although the poem is a little
bit outside perhaps the Catholic mainstream and that would have
been what attracted Elgar because it was very much a personal
revelation, one man’s vision, it wasn’t just what
was said from the altar or the pulpit that attracted him. We
know as time went on he got into The Apostles and The
Kingdom, his faith wavered, and so, perhaps, did his musical
creativity in the religious area. That is explored in the
play too.
SR How much music
do you put into the play, or do we get much at all?
GDK Yes, there’s the theatrical opening and
ending but within the play we’ve managed to feed music
in to make references to, I suppose, the competition between
words and the music, and I think it’s beautifully written
by Peter and wonderfully executed by the actors.
Softly and gently,
Gerontius… |
