A Song for Morecambe

/ Memories / Morecambe /

Record Number: 001.000

Record Type: Text/Image

Caption:

A SONG FOR MORECAMBE

On 14 July last year in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London the Crouch End Festival Chorus presented an evening of work by the Lancaster-based contemporary composer Howard Haigh and by Edward Elgar. The part-songs by Elgar had either been premiered in the Winter Gardens as part of Morecambe Musical Festival (Evening Scene, There is sweet music, My love dwelt in a northern land and As torrents in summer) or else in the case of Weary wind of the west were specially written for it, this last song becoming Elgar’s song for Morecambe.

Between 1903 and 1907, Elgar was to be found in the Winter Gardens at no less than four Morecambe Musical Festivals (1903, 04, 06 and 07) as both conductor and reluctant adjudicator.

The festival itself had begun in 1893 through the initiative of the Rector of Holy Trinity Church, Charles Vincent Gorton and bank manager and organist at St Lawrence’s Church, Robert Howson. Howson was also conductor of Morecambe Madrigal Society.

Elgar’s involvement with the festival came about through an approach in 1901 by one of the existing adjudicators, W. G. McNaught who wrote inviting Elgar to attend and, more importantly, asking him to compose a piece for the festival. McNaught described the ‘finest choral performers I have ever heard’, the ‘three thousand competitors’ and how the ‘magnificent hall holds more than five thousand people’. McNaught also enclosed a letter from Canon Gorton.

Elgar’s reputation was by this time well established. McNaught’s letter awaited him on his return from the premier of his concert overture Cockaigne (In London Town). His Pomp and Circumstance Marches 1 and 2, the oratorio The Dream of Gerontius, the five songs Sea Pictures and what is today Elgar’s best known work, Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma), had all appeared in the previous couple of years. In a sense, Elgar had no need of the amateur performances he had relied upon as stepping stones earlier in his career yet, remarkably, he agreed to McNaught’s request.

The idea for Elgar’s song for Morecambe was proposed by Canon Gorton during a lengthy correspondence. It was to be a setting of Thomas Edward Brown’s poem Weary Wind of the West. Brown, a Manx poet, scholar and theologian spent many years on the mainland where he wrote of his beloved island to which he eventually returned in retirement. His poems were published in a collected edition in 1900 which included Weary Wind of the West.

Weary wind of the West
Over the billowy sea –
Come to my heart, and rest!
Ah, rest with me!
Come from the distant dim
Bearing the sun’s last sigh;
I hear thee sobbing for him
Through all the sky.

So the wind came,
Purpling the middle sea,
Crisping the ripples of flame –
Came unto me;
Came with a rush to the shore,
Came with a bound to the hill,
Fell, and died at my feet –
Then all was still.

Saturday 2 May was the big day. Alice Elgar wrote of a ‘Wonderful evening, huge hall crowded, music beautiful’ and of the new song ‘Weary Wind most beautiful.’ The Musical Times’ correspondent wrote that ‘The music is not exceptionally difficult, but it is exceptionally effective.’ Elgar’s treatment of the singers as instruments of an orchestra was remarked on later – ‘There was a festive supper at Morecambe the night before Weary Wind of the West was first sung, and I can see still the quiet amusement in Elgar’s eyes as one of the basses, in allusion to that descending octave figure in the bass part ‘Fell, and died at my feet’, said in blunt Lancastrian doric, ‘Making bloomin’ double-bass fiddles of us.’

For Morecambe Musical Festival to have tempted Elgar to attend and, moreover, persuade him to write a new song especially for the competition was quite a coup. It reflected many things: the festival’s high ambition which drove its early success, the chance for Elgar to escape briefly the pressures of the London musical world and to return in a sense to his musical roots.

The experience clearly left its mark on Elgar too for he famously commented in The Musical Times in July 1903 that ‘the living centre of music in Great Britain is not in London but somewhere further north’.

Edward Elgar was knighted in 1904. Robert Howson died in 1905 at the age of 52 while Canon Gorton drowned under somewhat mysterious circumstances in the River Wye in 1912. Morecambe Musical Festival was disbanded shortly after its 100th gathering in 2004.

Elgar’s setting of Weary Wind of the West can be found on at least a couple of modern CDs. Elgar – Choral Songs with the London Symphony Chorus conducted by Vernon Handley is available from Hyperion while Elgar: Part Songs with the Finzi Singers is on the Chandos label.

Peter Wade

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