3 - Immuring and immured tonalities: tonal malaise in the First Symphony, Op. 55

Summary

Hepokoski's analysis and a Hepokoskian analysis

We have already begun to develop an approach fitted to a particular work, and when the object of study is Elgar's First Symphony there are additional complications. How are we to analyze a piece in four movements, whose middle movements are joined, and which makes such a point of beginning and ending with a ‘motto’ theme in A♭, but spends most of its time with other material and in or on unrelated keys (A minor, D major, and D minor being especially notable)? This question is not limited to analysis of early modernist music. Despite its grounding on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the archetypal four-movement narrative, Schenker's Ursatz does not explain how musical arguments are carried over the gaps between movements, or even why there are usually four movements in a symphony instead of, say, seven or two. Both Jonathan Dunsby and Nicholas Marston have tried to answer these questions in analyses of smaller pieces, but I know of no comparable attempt to stretch the Ursatz over a whole symphony. The present study, with its deliberately sceptical view of single-movement, Beethovenian–Schenkerian goal-orientation, offers an analysis of Elgar's First Symphony that argues for a four-movement Ursatz. As we shall see, the music itself compels and therefore supports such an interpretation.

Elgar's principal structural tool in the First Symphony is the opposition of two powerful tonal centres, the one ‘immuring’ (A♭), the other ‘immured’ (D).