Content area
Full Text
Alan Houtchens
Janis P Stout
A REMARKABLE NUMBER of musical settings of poems about war were composed during the twentieth century, which could well be characterized as a century of wars. Benjamin Britten's War Requiem (1961), integrating several of Wilfred Owen's bitter anti-war poems into the traditional Latin rite of the Requiem Mass, is probably the best known of these and perhaps even the great work in the genre. Charles Ives's setting of the most popular single poem of World War I, John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields," may be the most ambiguous. 1 Among the most direct must be numbered Edward Elgar's The Spirit of England (1915-17), a three-movement work treating poems by Laurence Binyon, the prolific and once highly respected, though now little-known, poet and scholar. 2
The first of Binyon's poems in Elgar's triptych was published within a week after England entered the war. Its title, "The Fourth of August," commemorates the date of England's declaration of war on Germany. 3 The second, "To Women," and the third, "For the Fallen"--a poem that has held an unequaled place in British memorials to the war dead--were written before the end of the year 1914, after England had suffered great losses in the First Battle of Yprés and the Race to the Sea, which had all but wiped out the original British army, but before Binyon or anyone else had any conception of the griminess, misery, and devastation into which Europe was about to descend. 4
Trembling, though they did not known it, on the brink of what Paul Fussell identifies, in The Great War and Modern Memory, as a great transformation in the literary perception of warfare, Binyon and Elgar produced what could well have become a work stranded on the far side of an ideological gulf, but which has continued to be regarded as one of Elgar's great choral works. The purpose of this article is to facilitate an understanding of the aesthetics and the rhetoric of the poems and the music, and to raise a series of questions relating to the nature of their shared aesthetic and the ways in which aesthetic and rhetorical dimensions converge. Clearly, poetry and music function in The Spirit of England rhetorically for the purpose of...