J. P. E. HARPER-SCOTT
John Drysdale
ELGAR'S EARNINGS
254pp. Boydell Press. £50 (US $90).
978 1 84383 741 1
On the basis of what he earned from royalties and copyrights, it would seem that if Elgar had stuck to his class origins and become a pipe fitter rather than a composer of symphonies and concertos, he would have made a better and more reliable living. John Drysdale's scrupulous research, based largely on previously unexamined archives of the music publishers Novello, and Boosey and Hawkes, shows that in an exceptionally good year, such as 1904, Elgar earned the equivalent of £71,600 in today's money from Novello. The average royalty cheque over his forty-two years with the firm, however, was worth only £23,904 in the handy contemporary equivalents given throughout this book. The pipefitter's average earnings in 2011, according to HMRC figures, were £37,978.
The abuses heaped on Elgar by his devious and unscrupulous publishers – Novello in particular – are familiar from existing biographies and published letters. But Drysdale's book is the first (to my knowledge) to scrutinize a major composer's full range of earnings. Elgar's Earnings bursts with figures, which in fact spill out from the book into online income tables, but the figures themselves are supported only by a skeletal interpretation. Elgar earned very well, spent more than he could afford, and felt aggrieved that others earned more; insofar as this grievance was justified, it is accounted for by the fact that he made some bad bargaining decisions with his publishers, and had to do without income from an academic position. This is all stated in the first few pages, and in the remainder of the book we simply read the figures that support it. Disappointingly, Drysdale assumes that earnings are everything, and leaves the question of differences in class and inherited wealth between figures such as the squirish Hubert Parry and the unprivileged Elgar completely unexamined. This could have been an interesting study of much bigger economic questions, and it is a matter of great regret that it attempts so little contextualization of Elgar's income.
There is, however, enough in the detail to sustain the interest of anyone who enjoys peering into other people's financial secrets. Drysdale's narrative of Novello's exploitative relationship with their most important composer is the central focus, but there are glimpses here and there of how his marriage influenced his spending. Alice Elgar, by far his social superior, made it her business both to drive Elgar to earn enough to raise her to where she felt she belonged, and – when prevailing economic conditions ensured his failure – to spend anyway, with ostentatious and wilful disregard of reality: they bought an unaffordable mansion in Highgate and went on long foreign holidays at a time when few even among the established middle classes did so. These glimpses aside, the general absence of information as to how Elgar spent the money he earned is frustrating. It cannot all have been on the horses, even if Drysdale's list of eight noms de plume that Elgar gave to nine bookmakers in the first eleven days of May 1933 gives an indication of his readiness for a flutter.
Through performance fees, recording, broadcasting and conducting, Elgar could significantly supplement his income, although – and this is one of Drysdale's often-repeated points – not by nearly as much as was possible for contemporary painters and authors. (Composers like Parry who held university appointments earned more than Elgar, though his £100 salary as Professor of Music at Oxford was worth only around £9,000 in today's money.) Drysdale's examination of G. B. Shaw's tax returns from 1900 to 1950 is illuminating since, being close to Shaw for many years, Elgar must have been at least generally aware of the gulf between their incomes. Drysdale provides estimates of Elgar's total income over twenty years, which comes out at an average of about £130,000 per annum in 2011 terms. This represents an extremely good income, putting him in the top 1 per cent of earners by contemporary standards. But Shaw's average over the same period was more than ten times higher; today it would translate into £1.5 million a year. Invidious comparisons such as these led Elgar, who had an accurately high estimate of his artistic significance, to feel distinctly unrewarded for his labours. Like the contemporary financier who finds his £500,000 salary paltry next to his friend's £12 million, Elgar perhaps made the error of comparing his earnings with the freakish riches above rather than the great mass below. He left his understanding of humanity for his music.
The fact that Novello so slyly minimized his earnings from his publications with them encouraged him to think that he was being robbed; perhaps fixation on income from publishing blinded him to his earnings from other sources. Once he was an established figure, Novello paid Elgar a sum for the copyright and a percentage of royalties on full scores or vocal scores (for choral works). The individual parts that instrumentalists place on their music stands were excluded from these terms, however, and Novello sold them in direct competition to the vocal scores which were a principal source of his income. Their worst trick came in 1904, with Elgar on the verge of what should have been his most profitable decade, when they persuaded him to sign an exclusive agreement with them. Its 25 per cent royalty offer was superficially attractive, but signing the contract was a disastrous decision. Novello's chairman had offered the vague assurance that Elgar would continue to receive copyright payments for each new work (something other publishers were willing to offer), but this was never honoured, as Elgar noted with creditable equanimity when he terminated the contract. They were no more generous with fees from performances. The Performing Rights Society, which facilitated the collection of fees for performances, was founded in 1914, but Novello refused to join till 1936, two years after Elgar's death. On an ad hoc basis they arranged for him to receive income from the symphonies, the Violin Concerto and Falstaff, but nothing else that he published with them. Their reasoning, like Boosey's, was that collecting the performing fee might discourage amateur musicians in particular from buying their scores, particularly of vocal works. While noting that the composer's interests seem never to have been considered, Drysdale observes that "from Novello's point of view, the decision . . . made good economic sense and is understandable".
Drysdale is also sympathetic to the person Elgar described, in Woosterish tones, as one of his wife's "awful aunts", Emma Raikes. Biographers have tended to report that in a codicil to her will, written a week after Elgar's marriage to Alice Roberts, she disinherited her niece for marrying into the lower classes. Drysdale insists, however, that "she was not quite so dreadful". The codicil actually left Alice the originally intended estate in trust, which yielded around £6,000 a year (in 2011 terms) for Alice's own use. The catch was that on Alice's death, the money would go to another of Alice's aunts, never to any of Elgar's children with her. Although it is right to be accurate about the details, far from sparing Raikes any opprobrium, Drysdale's account actually makes her appear worse. This morganatic codicil was intended to save the family the ignominy of passing any scrap of its wealth on to the tainted litter of the lower orders, while granting the pure-blood last of the line the use of the money while she lived. An outright disinheritance would have been a single blow that might have been borne, but the slow drip of contempt, each payment announcing Elgar's unworthiness to consort with his betters, harassed him from 1889 to 1920: he was still protesting about it after Alice's death. Alice drew on that income to cover the costs of underwriting King Olaf and The Light of Life, in what Drysdale, ever sympathetic to her, calls "a display of selfless devotion". When Elgar received his knighthood, the years of private muttering were revealed by the words of their fourteen-year-old daughter: "I am so glad for Mother's sake that Father has been knighted. You see – it puts her back where she was".
Drysdale's own findings challenge the romantic myth that Elgar was unable to compose without Alice (what about the Third Symphony?), and retreated from the public eye. The fact is that, through musical activity such as conducting and recording, which required both undimmed vigour and an appreciative public response, his income remained at more or less its former level right up till his death. He was certainly not a spent force, and if this book puts that myth finally to rest, it will have done a great service.
No comments:
Post a Comment