Gervase Cary Elwes
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Gervase Elwes (in full Gervase Cary Elwes) (15 November 1866 – 12 January 1921) was an English tenor of great distinction, who exercised a powerful influence over the development of English music.
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[edit] Background to his career
Of the Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire county gentry, he attended Roman Catholic boarding schools and Christ Church College, Oxford, where he was active as a cricketer and violinist. He married Lady Winifrede at the age of 21. He first trained as a lawyer and diplomat, spending some years in Brussels. It was there that he began formal singing lessons at the age of 28. However he had to overcome a social convention of resistance to one of his class his making a professional career as a singer, and not until the early 1900s, in his late thirties, did he gave his first professional performances in London. His principal teachers were Bouhy in Paris (1901-1903), and in London Henry Russell and Victor Biegel, who remained his friend and teacher throughout his life.
[edit] The character of his voice
Elwes had a voice entirely in the English colouring, but with a unusual quality of sincerity and passion, and of considerable power. His diction and intonation were very secure, his delivery somewhat ‘gentlemanly’ but his phrasing long in conception and serving intense melodic inflections. His singing possessed a spiritual fervour deriving from the religious disposition of his parents, who had taken the unusual step (for their class) of conversion to Catholicism when he was five years old.
Biegel’s teaching, especially during his six-month residence at Little Billing (an Elwes estate) in 1903, completely freed and relaxed Elwes’ voice, opening the way for the sustained power and brilliance of his upper register, and the vocal stamina which enabled him to maintain great oratorio roles (for which he was much in demand) with absolute conviction through a singing career of nearly two decades. (Biegel also had a significant influence on the (very different) voice of Lauritz Melchior, perhaps also opening the ringing head tones.)
[edit] Elwes and Lincolnshire music
During the early 1900s Elwes and his wife played an important part in encouraging and organizing the provincial Music Competition Festivals in Lincolnshire (Elwes often conducting or singing), centred upon their family home, the Manor at Brigg. In 1905, at the suggestion of his friend Percy Grainger, an open competition class for Folk-singers was included. As a result many wonderful songs were collected, notably from Joseph Taylor (who made some commercial records for the Gramophone Company). Taylor was the source of the melody used by Delius for his ‘Brigg Fair’.
[edit] Gerontius and the St Matthew Passion
Elwes became the greatest living exponent (alongside John Coates) of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, which he first performed in 1904 at the Queen’s Hall under the baton of Felix Weingartner. The religious authenticity of his interpretation was immediately recognized. He performed the work 118 times in all. He was also completely identified with the role of the Evangelist in the St Matthew Passion. His appearances at the Three Choirs Festivals, and at those of Peterborough and Norwich, became annual fixtures.
[edit] Elwes and Lieder
He was the foremost English-born performer of the Brahms lieder in the first decades of the 20th century. He toured Germany in 1907 with Fanny Davies (a most celebrated pupil of Clara Schumann’s) performing lieder programmes in German, and won great approval there. He sang the Liebeslieder in Brussels in 1908 with Marie Brema, and in London gave a recital accompanied by Paderewski. Brahms remained central to his repertoire to the end, and he also performed lieder of Grieg, Dvorak and George Henschel. Early in his career he found an ideal accompanist in Frederick B. Kiddle, and they remained associated until his death.
[edit] Elwes and English art-song
But it was as singer of English art-song, the friend of many leading English composers, that he left his most permanent legacy. He was the dedicatee and first performer of (and the first person to record) the ‘On Wenlock Edge’ cycle of Vaughan Williams and many of the finest songs of Roger Quilter, both of whom wrote with his voice in mind. He had the wholehearted admiration of every generation from Charles Villiers Stanford to Frank Bridge, and their successors still acknowledge the authority of his influence. He was also a wonderful inspiration to leading British singers of his time, as their many private and published memorials of him testify.
[edit] His tragic death
Elwes died aged 55, at the height of his powers, in a horrific accident at Boston, Massachusetts, railway station, in the midst of a high-profile recital tour of The United States. He tripped and fell between a train and the platform, and died of his injuries a few hours later. The tremendous loss felt by the musical establishment, the Churches, and the population in general left the impression not merely of a great singer, but of a great man, whom many who never met him felt they knew personally through his singing. In short, he was loved.
[edit] Memorials
The Musicians’ Benevolent Fund was established as a memorial to him, and his figure became a presiding genius of twentieth-century English music. His particular association with the lyrics of A.E. Housman and the music of Elgar, and his death soon after the First World War, reinforce his embodiment of the lost Edwardian generation, perhaps the last in which his religious conviction could so thoroughly have endeared him to so many. A bust of him stood in the old Queen’s Hall (the original venue of the Promenade Concerts), until it was destroyed by German bombing in May 1941.
In 1965 Sir John Barbirolli (who succeeded the original conductor of Gerontius, Hans Richter, as conductor of the Halle Orchestra, and had played Gerontius under Elgar’s baton with Elwes performing the soul) remembered him as ‘that great and noble artist’. In addition to being a great singer, Elwes was a capital game shot, and devoted much of his spare time to shooting on his estates.
[edit] Recordings: Discography
Elwes recorded first in 1911-1913 for the Gramophone Company, and later for the Columbia Graphophone Company.
HMV
- 4-2156 Phyllis hath such charming graces (Lane Wilson arr.) 1911.
- 4-2161 Absent yet present (M.V. White) 1911.
- 4-2189 Morning Hymn (Henschel) 1911-12.
- 4-2195 To Daisies, and Song of the Blackbird (Quilter) 1912.
- 4-2232 Sigh no more, ladies (Aiken) 1912.
- 7-42004 Ich liebe dich (Grieg).
- 02379 So we'll go no more a-roving (M.V. White) 1913. (Different take coupled on HMV C459).
Columbia
- 65826 Battle Hymn (arr Stanford)/F.B. Kiddle
- 65827 Sonnet XVIII (W.A. Aiken)/F.B. Kiddle
- 6847 Blow, blow thou winter wind (Quilter)
- 6848 Fill a glass with golden wine (Quilter)
- 6849 In Summertime on Breedon (Peel)
- 6850 Now sleeps the crimson petal, and Love's Philosophy (Quilter)
- 6851 The Roadside Fire (Vaughan Williams)
- 6852 Cuckoo Song (Quilter)
- 71051 Gifts (Taylor)/F.B. Kiddle
- 71052 By Wenlock Town (Janet Hamilton)/F.B. Kiddle
- 74150 The Lake Isle of Innisfree (Ley)/F.B. Kiddle
- 74151 A Sea Dirge (Dunhill)/F.B. Kiddle
- 75329 O Mistress Mine! and Fair House of Joy (Quilter)
- 75330 Songs my mother taught me (Dvorak)
- 75357 A carol of bells (C.V. Stanford)/F.B. Kiddle
- 75360 Where'er you walk (Handel)/F.B. Kiddle
- 75419 On Wenlock Edge (Vaughan Williams)/London String Quartet
- 75420 From far, from eve and Oh when I was in love with you (Vaughan Williams)/London String Quartet
- 75421 Is my team ploughing? (Vaughan Williams)/London String Quartet
- 75422 Bredon Hill (Vaughan Williams)/London String Quartet
- 75423 Clun (Vaughan Williams)/London String Quartet
- 76089 So sweet love seemed (Piggot) and Jenny kissed me (Brougham)/F.B. Kiddle
- 76091 A Pastoral (Colin Taylor)/F.B. Kiddle
- 76092 Love went a-riding (Bridge)/F.B. Kiddle
- 76093 Lift up your heads on high (Bach)/F.B. Kiddle
[edit] Family
He was the brother of Dudley Cary Elwes II, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Northampton. His sons were Simon Elwes, a portrait artist and Royal Academician, Guy Elwes, an architect and interior designer, Rudolph Elwes, an actor, Monsignor Valentine Elwes, a Papal, and Sir Richard Elwes, a High Court judge and Recorder of Northampton.
[edit] Sources
- J. Barbirolli, The Dream of Gerontius – A Personal Note (EMI 1965).
- J.R. Bennett, Voices of the Past, 1: The HMV English Catalogue (Oakwood Press 1955).
- R.D. Darrell, The Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music (The Gramophone Shop, New York 1936).
- A. Eaglefield-Hull (Ed), A Dictionary of Modern Music and Musicians (Dent, London 1924).
- Lady W. Elwes and R. Elwes, Gervase Elwes, The Story of his Life (Grayson & Grayson, London 1935).
- V. Langfield, Roger Quilter, His Life and Music (Boydell, Woodbridge 2002).
- M. Scott, The Record of Singing, II:1914 to 1925, 172-173 (Duckworth, London 1979).
- D. Taylor, Gervase Cary Elwes, in Music Lovers' Encyclopedia (5th edn), 1950.
- (MS Source): "Elwes(Great Billing)": Northamptonshire Family and Estate collections records 1610-1921. (1749 docs. & 9 boxes, ref. E(GB) & CE(B)).
