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火浴重生的英国交响曲传奇。
企鹅三星带花评价。
艾尔加（Edward Elgar,1857-1934）英国作曲家，自幼随父亲学钢琴与小提琴，异常勤奋，主要靠自学掌握了多种乐器的演奏，尤以小提琴见长。1885年承父业任伍斯特教堂风琴手。
艾尔加的出现，他不但在外来音乐的冲击下，寻找出自己的音乐骄傲；更让以其音乐为中心的“大英风格”登上国际舞台，得到主流音乐的认同。这位英国国民乐派的大将，1857 年出生于博得海斯的阿尔斯特夏，是管风琴师与音乐经纪人之子。他自幼受到中产阶级的音乐教育，异常勤奋，主要靠自学掌握了多种乐器的演奏，尤以小提琴见长。
他的音乐朴实自然，富于创新精神，对英国音乐的发展很有促进。其妻卡罗琳·艾丽丝·罗伯茨对他帮助极大，其成功之作几乎全是在婚后创作的，著名的有：大合唱《杰龙修斯之梦》、《b小调小提琴协奏曲》、《第一交响曲》、《第二交响曲》、《e小调大提琴协奏曲》、合唱曲《黑色骑士》和《奥拉夫国王》等等，他的艺术毫不偏狭，思维极为宽广，曾受德国浪漫主义的影响，风格庄严而淳朴，英国人民把他看作是英国的贝多芬。
他一生忠心耿耿地为提高英国的音乐水平而努力，1904年曾封为爵士并获功绩勋章。此外，还获剑桥大学、牛津大学、坎脱勃莱及美国耶鲁大学音乐博士学位，1924年被聘为英王御前音乐教师。
比起将主题隐藏起来，还为第十三段变奏的主角打上三个星号（＊＊＊）的「谜语变奏曲」（Enigma Variations, Op. 36, 1899），英国作曲家艾尔加生前未完成的「第三号交响曲」更令人费尽猜疑；留下这样一个迷团，其实并非大师的本意。
艾尔加是公认的英国管弦乐大师，不过，正当艾尔加事业到高峰时，自从一直在背后支持创作的夫人于1920年去世，艾尔加对于音乐创作变得意态阑珊，往后他的音乐事业虽未中断，但仅止于唱片的录制，前人作品的总谱校订，与小型作品的创作，足以展现作曲家实力的大型作品则付诸阙如。一九三二年，剧作家萧伯纳（George Bernard Shaw）为了鼓励消沉多年的好友重拾创作意志，说服了英国广播公司（ＢＢＣ）向艾尔加提出交响曲的作曲委托。艾尔加随之展开创作，第三号交响曲的轮廓逐渐在一张张手稿中浮现，一次家庭聚会中，艾尔加还偕同伦敦交响乐团首席，透过钢琴与小提琴的合奏向朋友门展示第一乐章的雏形。
只遗憾大师的作曲工作因癌症被迫中断。起初，艾尔加虽意识到自己可能无法如愿完成作品，仍乐观地向他的主治医师表示假使没有人可以代他继续完成，往后也会有其他人写出更好的作品。但随着病情加重，艾尔加的态度开始变得消极，为了不让人随意拼凑未完成的作品，他示意自己的女儿和朋友将所有的手稿销毁，明确交待说：“没人可以了解它，最好把它烧了”。众人没有照办，但承诺不会让作品有被任意修补的机会。
1993年，ＢＢＣ委请研究艾尔加作品多年的音乐家佩内（Anthony Payne, b. 1936）整理第二乐章谐谑曲（Scherzo）的片段，做为研讨会演出之用，这首交响曲才首度以断简残篇的形态与世人见面。原先艾尔加的家属坚持贯彻大师的遗愿，谢绝佩内对第三号交响曲的遗稿再做进一步的补缀，然而事情很快有了转圜，因为艾尔加这些草稿，在2005年就会丧失著作权而成为公共财产，到时候任何人皆可以任意对其加油添醋，与其为无可预知的未来烦恼，还不如先让佩内这位专家作出结论。1998年ＢＢＣ交响乐团在安德鲁戴维斯（Andrew Davis）指挥下，首演了佩内依艾尔加草稿「精制」（Elaborated）的第三号交响曲，距艾尔加动笔有65年之久。
艾尔加当年跨四个乐章进行作曲，留下的141张草稿，对所有乐章的创作思维皆留下蛛丝马迹，像第一乐章最初17个小节，即是艾尔加亲手完成的手笔，因此后人得以借此了解乐器编制规划。但很多地方只写下简单的动机，或仅注记发展的概念，甚至有很多的空白，因而佩内除了访问少数仍在世的相关人士获得有限线索，也要绞尽脑汁进行补笔，尽可能揣摩艾尔加的创作构想。经历了编汇、创造首尾乐章，以及推断慢板乐章的后半部，同时让谐谑曲长出肌理、拓展规模等种种挫折和探索，前后38年终于从艾尔加死后的遗稿中，重新建构了《第三交响曲》的演奏版本，此曲于1998年由Andrew Davis指挥ＢＢＣ交響樂團首演时，被认为是一部极为杰出的交响曲。同时佩内“病态的举动”也引起了部分业内人士的非议。
对于第四乐章的发展部（Development）与尾声（Coda），艾尔加未留下任何提示，让佩内必须做更大胆的假设。最后佩内决定引用艾尔加创作第三号交响曲前不久所谱写的「儿歌组曲」（Nursery Suite, 1930）里，由安静推展到喧闹，终至管絃樂力道迅速消退的The Wagon Passes段落，做为填补终乐章大片空白的概念。乐章的尾声，音乐由高潮的强音急转直下，微弱的音符溃散在空气中，让艾氏第三号交响曲的重现，仿如大梦一场。
现在这个版本是由保罗·丹尼尔指挥的伯恩茅斯交响乐团（1893年成立的全英乃至世界知名的管弦乐团，有欧美多个国家巡回演出记录，并录制了多套唱片）演绎的。指挥保罗·丹尼尔的领导能力令人印象深刻，掌控能力神乎其技，结构性令人信服！他通过不同的节奏与语法被融合在这首交响曲内，并且结构并没有因此而妥协！毫无疑问，这是个青春活力却充满想法的版本，这个录音可以说将所有的乐迷对艾尔加《第三号交响曲》的好奇心，都一一满足了比起任何过去的录音听来都更有艾尔加的味道以及紧凑的戏剧效果。
Edward Elgar (1857 - 1934) – Anthony Payne (b. 1936)
Symphony No.3
Elgar's last major completed work was the Cello Concerto Op, 85, finished on 8th August 1919. The death of his wife Alice on 7th April 1920 shattered him: he described himself as 'a broken man'. The music he wrote between then and his own death on 23rd February 1934 was all on a small scale: the Severn Suite, the Nursery Suite, piano pieces, songs, and orchestral transcriptions. He did, however, embark on two major projects that never progressed beyond the stage of sketches an opera, The Spanish Lady, with a libretto by Sir Barry Jackson, Director of the Malvern Festival, based on Ben Jonson's play The Devil is an Ass (begun in 1929), and a third symphony On 7th January 1932 Elgar's staunch ally George Bernard Shaw, who for years had been trying to persuade him to compose another symphony, wrote. 'Why don't you make the BBC order a new symphony? It can afford it.' A few months later Elgar was seriously considering Shaw's suggestion; on 29th June GBS wrote, on a postcard, 'Why not a Financial Symphony? Allegro: Impending Disaster. Lento mesto: Stony Broke Scherzo: Light Heart and Empty Pocket. Allegro con brio: Clouds Clearing.'
Rumours started to spread. On 4th August Walter Legge, then Editor of the Gramophone Company's house magazine The Voice, wrote to Elgar that he had heard, on what he believed to be 'very reliable authority', that 'you have practically completed a third symphony' .Elgar promptly retaliated. 'There is nothing to say about the mythical Symphony for some time, probably a long time, possibly no time, - never.' At a tea party during the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester a month later Elgar was said, by the critic H. C. Colles, to have referred to the symphony as 'written', but said it would be pointless 'to finish up the full score since no one wanted his music now'. On 30th September Shaw wrote to Sir John Reith, Director General of the BBC, reminding him that in 1823 (actually 1822) the Philharmonic Society in London had offered Beethoven ￡50 for the manuscript score of a new symphony, and that in 1827 the Society sent him ￡100; he was dying and he said 'God bless the Philharmonic Society and the whole English nation.' GBS described this as 'by far the most creditable incident in English history' and suggested that 'the BBC, with its millions, could do for Elgar what the old Philharmonic did for Beethoven. You could bring the Third Symphony into existence and obtain the performing right for the BBC for, say, ten years, for a few thousand pounds. The kudos would be stupendous and the value for money ample.' The conductor Sir Landon Ronald acted as go-between, and the formal commission, offering a fee of ￡1,000, payable in four quarterly instalments, was made to Elgar in November. At a dinner in London's Guildhall on 14th December, immediately after the last of three BBC concerts celebrating Elgar's seventy-fifth birthday (on 2nd June 1932), Ronald announced the commission publicly. The next day Fred Gaisberg, Recording Artists Manager of the Gramophone Company, wrote to Elgar about the possibility of recording the work immediately before or after the first performance (the following autumn?) but received an evasive reply, ending 'as to Sym. III - ?'.
Very little of the symphony, even in the form of sketches, seems to have existed at the time. On 5th February 1933 Elgar's close friend and biographer W .H. Reed (Leader of the London Symphony Orchestra from 1912 to 1935) made the first of many visits to 'Marl Bank', Elgar's house in Worcester, with his violin, to play through, with the composer at the piano, as much of the work as there was: sketches for the first movement, including a transition 'which I had to play countless times in every conceivable manner'; the second movement, 'in place of Scherzo', of which 'he must have had the main theme... (very light and rather wistful) in his mind for some years, as I have seen it scribbled in his scrap books in various forms'; the slow movement, based on a 'broad, dignified and very expressive melody... [in which] he exhorted me to "tear my heart out each time we repeated it". I was never able to induce him to write down the continuation, but I was allowed to playa bar or two (looking over his shoulder) from the fragments on one or two other scraps of MSS. but I could never prevail upon him to divulge in what order they were to appear.' The finale was open to various possible readings, but 'he never played anything to show in what manner it should end, not even improvisation, but would leave off suddenly and abruptly when we arrived near that part, and say, "Enough of this; let us go out and take the dogs on the Common." Also, he would be very restless and ill at ease, and would not discuss the symphony any more, and it would be quite a while before he became calm and resumed his normal good spirits' Shaw and his wife Charlotte, Basil Maine (Elgar's first biographer) and Gaisberg were among the people to whom Elgar played (either by himself or with Reed) parts of the symphony, or even possibly an attempt at all of it, often in conjunction with excerpts from the opera.
When the BBC's first cheque for ￡250 arrived on 25th March, Elgar wrote to Reith. 'I am hoping to begin "scoring" the work very shortly... up to the present the symphony is the strongest thing I have put on paper.' On 27th April Adrian Boult's assistant, Owen Mase, wrote to Elgar asking if the symphony would be ready in time for the first concert in the BBC Symphony Orchestra's 1933-34 season, on 18th October. Elgar hedged once more, saying that no announcement about the first performance should be made at this stage. Mase then suggested May 1934 as an alternative; Elgar, in bed recovering from 'a sudden bad turn two days ago', wrote to say that he liked the idea. On 20th September he had another 'bad turn', as a result of which he was told that he must go to a nursing home to undergo 'some small operation'. As though he instinctively realised the seriousness of the situation, he wrote, on 7th October, to Reith 'I am not at all sure how things will turn out and have made arrangements that in case the Symphony does not materialise the sums you have paid on account shall be returned. This catastrophe came without the slightest warning as I was in the midst of scoring the work. Perhaps it will not be necessary to refer publicly to the Symphony in any way at present; we will wait and see what happens to me.' The operation revealed inoperable cancer and work on the symphony ceased. As he told his physician, Dr Arthur Thomson: 'If I can't complete the Third Symphony, somebody will complete it - or write a better one - in fifty or five hundred years.' On 2Oth November the faithful Billy Reed went to see him. 'It was evident that he was trying very hard to speak; and gradually and at long intervals the words came from him. "I want you... to do something for me the symphony all bits and pieces... no one no one... don't let anyone tinker with it... no one could understand. .I think you had better burn it.", Reed then said 'I don't think it is necessary to burn it: it would be awful to do that. But Carice [Elgar's daughter] and I will remember that no one is to try to put it together. No one shall ever tinker with it" we promise you that.'
In the last 42 pages of Elgar as I knew him (Gollancz, 1936) Reed reproduced, in facsimile, many of the most important and substantial of Elgar's 127 pages of sketches (then in the BBC archives) which had accompanied his article, 'Elgar's Third Symphony' in The Listener of 23rd August 1935 Other sketches are reproduced in Robert Anderson's Elgar in manuscript (The British Library, 1990), and, most important of all, in Anthony Payne's indispensable monograph Elgar's Third Symphony: The Story of the Reconstruction (Faber and Faber, 1998). Many of them date from earlier in the composer's life and were originally intended for other works, notably the fragmentary oratorio The Last Judgement and the incidental music for Laurence Binyon's play Arthur. Their quantity and variety account for Basil Maine's shrewd comment after spending some time with the composer in August 1933. 'He relied partly on the sketches (so disjointed and disordered as to be a kind of jigsaw puzzle), partly on memory, partly I imagine on extemporisation. During the improvised (or memorised) passages, it was possible to think that one was beginning to share Elgar's vision, but the experience was so clouded and so fleeting that it could not possibly be re-captured by means of the sketches alone... In the process of bringing forth a new conception every creative artist waits for that final moment of crisis which determines the greatness or ordinariness of the achievement. If the work is to be great, in that moment there comes the flash which lights up all the previous processes of thought, gives them unity, and orders their final relationship. It is my conviction that, in this last adventure, Elgar was still waiting for that final moment. The last revealing light had not yet broken upon his mind Or, if it had, it broke when he lacked the physical strength to set down the signs. This would explain the moody restlessness which came upon him after he had been playing some of the symphony to me...' As Diana McVeagh wrote, some twenty years later, 'His mosaic method of construction is clearly seen in the sketches for his big works, which seem to have started from scraps and sections on individual papers with no intelligible indication of their order, but which ultimately were pieced together into his design The sketches for the unfinished last works suggest that the scraps came into being easily enough but that the effort of final organisation was too great lack of concentration, not of inspiration, was what held back the Third Symphony and The Spanish Lady'
Anthony Payne first came across Elgar as I knew him in 1972, and when he looked at the sketches he was (as he writes in his Introduction to the full score of his 'elaboration of the sketches of Elgar's Symphony No.3'), 'immediately fascinated by the power and vitality of the music. It simply leapt from the page, and although most of the sketches were in short score, I immediately began to hear orchestral sounds in my head. ..It was music that seemed to me to show Elgar in inspirational flight, and it gave the lie to received opinion that he had become a spent force after the death of his wife.' Payne was, of course, aware of the embargo on 'tinkering', but this did not prevent him, now and then, from 'musing over the sketches in the privacy of my own room'.
In November 1993, however, Paul Hindmarsh of BBC Manchester asked if he would be interested in 'putting the sketches into some sort of shape for workshop performance'. The BBC sent him photocopies of the complete sketches (by now housed in the British Library), which showed that Reed had overlooked 'many pages of considerable interest'. By this time he had already completed the Scherzo, and with the aid of the 'new' sketches he completed the Adagio, (writing the last bar on 23rd February 1994 - the sixtieth anniversary of Elgar's death, as he later realized) Soon after this the Elgar family decided, after much deliberation, that they could not, in all honesty, over-rule the composer's death-bed wish. The situation seemed hopeless, but then the family relented and gave their blessing to Hindmarsh's programme, provided that Payne's 'tinkerings' were not alluded to. It was broadcast in March 1995 (and later issued on CD, coupled with Percy Young's 'completion' of The Spanish Lady). The next day, thinking that that was the end of the affair, Payne suddenly realised that four pages of faintly outlined fragments in the sketches were intended for the first movement's development section, and was able to complete both the development and the coda In the summer of 1995, realising that Reed's book and the sketches it contained would be out of copyright in 2005, at which point anyone could legally 'construct' the symphony, the family decided to commission from Payne a complete version He then wrote out the full orchestral score of the first three movements and the beginning of the finale. It was while doing this that he became more consciously aware of the overall sweep of the symphony 'It was different in its sheer breadth of emotion from any of [Elgar's] other symphonic works. There was the raw vigour and magic lyricism of the opening movement, the use of a lighter manner in the second which went far beyond his established symphonic practice, and the searing intensity of the Adagio, tragic in its import, while the finale revealed a world of chivalric action and drama. All this was at the back of my mind as I faced the last and greatest obstacle: nowhere did Elgar leave a hint as to how his symphony was going to end. I had to compose the whole of the development section and the coda, much as in the first movement, but without helpful pointers, and I had to envisage the work's ultimate goal - the toughest assignment of all, involving visionary concepts if I was to be true to Elgar's creative bravery.'
Elgar wrote out the first seventeen bars of the first movement in full score, and also a nine-bar passage leading back to the exposition repeat; the remainder of the exposition is written in short score, more or less complete in harmonic texture and with occasional indications of the instrumentation. The magnificent, surging main theme in 12/8 and with prominent open fourths and fifths in contrary motion ('music which sounds as if it has always been going on, as the sound of the sea, or the wind in the trees - inevitable music' in Reed's words) is balanced by a hauntingly lovely second subject (Cantabile, E flat major) on the first violins, which Elgar associated with Vera Hockman, a young violinist he came to know in 1931 Payne's version of the development (referred to above) makes use of various short motifs familiar from the exposition (notably the rhythmic ascending figure first heard on the first violins in bar II) and the first subject itself. There are various changes of mood and tempo, and more emphasis is placed on the tonic key of C minor than there was in the exposition (only eight bars), though about two-thirds of the way through there is an important episode (Alla marcia, B flat minor) based on a single rhythmic bar sketched by the composer. The recapitulation curtails the first subject and re-introduces the second in the tonic major a classical touch complementing the repeat of the exposition. 'Near the end', as Elgar put it, the two main subjects are skillfully combined.
The Scherzo (or as Elgar headed it, 'in place of Scherzo') is in the form of a rondo with two episodes and a coda The refrain, in A minor, has a persistent chirupping motif on the first violins which Elgar took from the incidental music he wrote in 1923 for Arthur The episodes, in G and A major and, on the whole, more lightly scored, are separated by a return to the refrain (developed and expanded by Payne, who also adds discreet references to the chirrups in the coda).
The absence of any development sketches for the Adagio (in C minor) and 'the breadth of the material which the sketches have bequeathed to us, means that a development section would prolong the movement out of all proportion We should be thinking of a bipartite structure, with an exposition and varied recapitulation.' The first subject (of which Elgar said in a letter to Ernest Newman in December 1933 that he was 'fond enough to believe that the first two bars, with the F sharp in the bass, open up some vast bronze doors into something strangely unfamiliar') is the grand, sombre paragraph with which the movement begins; the second, prefaced by a short, gentle transition, here scored for muted strings, is its warm, expansive but shorter counterpart in D major. Payne felt that it would be appropriate to conclude this exposition with one of those Elgarian passages - 'extraordinary moments of fantasy, dense with quiet activity', admitting that 'this was pure speculation on my pall, but I went ahead and composed such a passage' The varied recapitulation brings the second subject back in E flat (moving to C), elaborating the 'fantasy', and ends with a desolate coda, whose final phrase on one viola, lightly accompanied, Elgar wrote out in pencil and showed to Reed as he lay dying', All he said (with tears streaming down his cheeks) was - "Billy - this is the end"'.
Anthony Payne's most formidable obstacle was to decide how the symphony was meant to end. 'Reed said that the finale was going to be "fiery" and "rugged"; certainly the opening is an unequivocal call to arms, and the first four bars give us the last remaining passage which Elgar fully scored' Combined with a busy arpeggio passage, it paves the way for a vigorous first subject, with a gentle pendant (or 'companion theme' as Reed nicely described it) Elgar's sketches contain three pages of material (all from Arthur) containing a number of interleaved themes as suitable for the second subject; several of these are combined here, and there is a closing section in ]2/8 'It was not even certain what basic structure Elgar had in mind for his finale', Payne writes in his Introduction, 'although I felt that the breadth of the expository material in the sketches pointed towards a sonata form This could be enriched by incorporating into the development a ravishing G minor interlude whose placing in the movement is not precisely indicated in the sketches As it now stands, the passage seems to have strayed from some rondo sub-stratum and yields a structural ambivalence which I hope is worthy of Elgar's symphonic thought. As for the symphony's closing pages, I decided to dare all in honour of Elgar's unpredictability. What if he had thought to place the haunting repetitions of 'The Waggon Passes' from his recently completed Nursery Suite into a broader symphonic context? The finale's main subject actually suggests this kind of treatment, and it would lead the music away into some new visionary world, spanning the years between the composer's death and my attempted realisation of his sketches. I trusted my intuition and went ahead and wrote.'
At the end of The Story of the Reconstruction Payne writes, of the closing bars 'I also tied up one or two loose thematic ends to strengthen the web of the work’s symphonic dialectic. The allusion to the first movement’s open fourths in the Scherzo’s uncanny cadence is picked up with a further reference, given to the first violins over the final C minor chord. At the same time, the basses and bassoons quietly resolve the cadence which the the solo viola had left hanging in id-air at the end of the Adagio. Finally, with the whole of the rest of the orchestra silent, I left a quiet note fro the ram-ram resonating in space, something of a personal signature – I had ended a work of my own that way some years earlier – but also a tribute to Elgar’s thematic use of percussion which had always fascinated me.’
The score was published by Boosey & Hawkes to coincide with the first public performance (at which a hundred copies of the score were sold) by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Davis in London’s Royal Festival Hall on 15th February 1998.
Robin Golding
曲目：
01. 第一乐章：很庄严的快板 I. Allegro molto maestoso
02. 第二乐章：谐谑曲：小快板 II. Scherzo: Allegretto
03. 第三乐章：隆重的柔板 III. Adagio solenne
04. 第四乐章：快板 IV. Allegro
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发表于 2024-12-9 08:28:44