Many an unfinished work by a major composer speaks more strongly to the imagination of music lovers than any number of completed pieces by inferior artists. The mystique that surrounds such symphonies as Schubert’s B minor and Mahler’s 10th, or Puccini’s “Turandot” holds us in the thrall of the might-have-been, looking for answers even when we know none will ever be forthcoming.
Such a mystique surrounds Edward Elgar’s Third Symphony, which had its Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiere in an elaboration of the composer’s sketches by Anthony Payne Thursday night at Symphony Center, more than half a century after the composer’s death. Andrew Davis conducted.
The British composer completed two big symphonies during his lifetime. At the time of his death in 1934 he left 141 pages of sketches for a third. These materials lay untouched until the early 1990s, mainly out of respect for the dying composer’s deathbed request that no one be allowed to “tinker” with them.
But things began to change after Payne, a composer, critic and lifelong Elgarian, began nosing into the sketches. He fleshed out some of them purely as an academic exercise when a full reconstruction seemed impossible. His eventual conclusion, supported by the BBC, that beneath Elgar’s jumble of jottings lay the torso of an important late-Romantic symphony gradually weakened the resistance of Elgar’s heirs. Payne forged ahead with fresh resolve. Thus was the BBC Symphony able to give the world premiere of the Elgar/Payne Symphony No. 3 in London, under Davis’ direction, in February 1998.
The symphony quickly became the hit of the London concert season, while a Davis/BBC recording on the NMC label jumped to the top of the classical charts on both sides of the Atlantic. NMC has also released a fascinating companion disc in which Payne discusses his methods, with performances of the sketches on violin and piano.
There will always be those who raise the question of whether it is right to defy an artist’s intention of suppressing his own work. Similar qualms were raised over Deryck Cooke’s “performing version” of the Mahler 10th. Like Cooke before him, Payne rightly argues that the strength of the original materials more than justifies his realization — further, that Elgar’s final music belongs, in a broad sense, to the world. But it took someone of Payne’s creative empathy and intuition to bring that music to life.
The Elgar/Payne Third should lay to rest the hoary notion that Elgar was a burned-out case in his final years. Nearly an hour in length, the epic symphony is bursting with memorable ideas, from the heroic defiance of the opening to the visionary quality of the final pages. The Scherzo is a kind of woodland idyll, light and airy in contrast to the surrounding movements. The world-weary Adagio is suffused with Elgar’s typical sense of solemn nobility; full of unsettling chord progressions, it ends quietly, magically, in midthought. The finale, which involved the greatest amount of guesswork on Payne’s part, breathes chivalric majesty.
Nobody can pretend this is exactly how the Third Symphony would sound if Elgar had lived to complete it. Does that matter? Of course not. In building a symphonic frame for the sketches, Payne has given us an absolutely convincing “new” piece of mature Elgar, so seamless that one cannot tell what is Elgar and what is Elgar/Payne. Davis knows and loves Elgar’s music and it showed. His fervent and imposing performance whetted everybody’s anticipation of his arrival here in September 2000 as music director and principal conductor of Lyric Opera. Payne was present to share in the enthusiastic ovation.
A program devoted to composers’ last thoughts began with Mozart’s final piano concerto, No. 27 in B-flat, K.595. Swiss pianist Andreas Haefliger, in his CSO debut, brought a cultivated sense of classical style, musical taste and proportion to the keyboard, even if it often seemed as if he were walking on musical eggs.
The program will be repeated at 1:30 p.m. Friday, 8 p.m. Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. Phone 312-294-3000.
