Falstaff (Elgar) - History and Critical Reception

History and Critical Reception

In 1912 the Leeds Festival commissioned Elgar to write a new work to be performed the following year. Before the première Elgar told a reporter, "I have, I think, enjoyed writing it more than any other music I have composed and perhaps for that reason it may prove to be among my better efforts". It was first performed at Leeds on 1 October 1913, conducted by the composer. The Musical Times commented, "the work is unsurpassed in modern music for variety, effectiveness and sureness of orchestral writing." The London première was on 3 November 1913, at the Queen's Hall, conducted by the dedicatee, Landon Ronald. The Times said of the London première that it was played to "a not very large but very enthusiastic audience" and subsequently Falstaff has remained less popular than other major Elgar works, though much loved by aficionados. Music and Letters noted in its obituary of Elgar that though "a majority would call Falstaff his greatest work" most people would "say they like the Enigma best." Even during Elgar's lifetime, the musical scholar Percy Scholes wrote of Falstaff that it was a "great work" but "so far as public appreciation goes, a comparative failure."

Sir Donald Tovey viewed Falstaff as "one of the immeasurably great things in music" with power "identical with Shakespeare's," and the 1955 reference work The Record Guide described Falstaff as "the only tone poem of its day that suffers nothing by comparison with the best of Richard Strauss's works in the genre". George Bernard Shaw wrote that " made the band do it all, and with such masterful success that one cannot bear to think what would have been the result of a mere attempt to turn the play into an opera." Others were less impressed with the work. The dedicatee, Landon Ronald, admitted to John Barbirolli, "Never could make head or tail of the piece, my dear boy." After a performance by the New York Philharmonic in 1983, the critic of The New York Times opined that the conductor "could not do much, in fact, to rescue the character's spirited braggadocio from the programmatic detail that smothered the music." The well-known Elgarian writer Michael Kennedy criticised the work for "too frequent reliance on sequences" and an over-idealised depiction of the female characters. Even Elgar's great friend and champion, W. H. Reed, thought that the principal themes show less distinction than some of Elgar's earlier works. Reed acknowledged, nevertheless, that Elgar himself thought Falstaff the highest point of his purely orchestral work.