Sue Hadley String Playdays

Lately we played Elgar’s ‘Chanson de Matin’ in a quartet version one Friday night at the Mary Ward Centre and our first violinist actually claimed not to know it! I played a simplified version a while ago as an exam piece and I was privileged to play it at a church concert just over a year ago, and so I have a few thoughts about it, recorded in my practice notebook while I was learning it.
 
Sue asked me to share my thoughts, so I thought this might be a suitable place to do so. These reflections are solely my own, inspired by my reading of the music and you are welcome to take issue with them or comment in any way.
 
What Mr Elgar would say to them, who knows? It’s a piece for violin and piano, also for string orchestra, and we know it as clear and sweet, a cold white sound - with some passion and a lot of reflection. However when I play it on the viola, it has a much more womanly feel to it and it is much less coy about the meaning of the passionate parts.
 
Eduard, writing in that time when anything romantic, impassioned or risqué sold better if given a title in French, was known to Mrs Elgar as ‘Edu’, and his tightest musical trick is to keep passion buttoned up with the power of sweetness. It’s all about being English a hundred years ago. Not for nothing is it called ‘Chanson de Matin’. (Yes, he named it that to go with ‘Chanson de Nuit’ but you could think about that, too.) In fact the subject matter of Chanson de Matin is the first waking thoughts of husbands everywhere and how they are realised, happily but with due regard for English decency and decorum.
 

The sweetest little tune begins with the suggestion of fluttering curtains and a dewy green garden beyond them. This lasts the first 29 bars and ends with tentative enquiries as to whether Mrs Elgar might be in the mood. Oh joy, it seems she is and the emotion deepens and almost escapes, but it is brought back under control – by bar 56 the opening theme again brings the sweetness back, and I have pencilled 'cute' in my copy.
 
All is calm again – you have joined the Brownies. But then the Brownies turn into pirates and it all begins again. This time it won’t be denied and there is a high F natural on the G string (you violinists will know it as a C natural on the D string because you play this of course in G major, while we violas playing the girl version are in C).
 
That note is when he gives in to it and it starts from there. We only escape full expression of our joy by resorting to harmonics – ah, that buttons it up again. For a few bars. The climax is thin and sweet and pours very quietly all over the upper two strings, first down and then all the way up.... There is a chink of silence, then you run run run, falling over the hem of your pyjamas, get out of there, start your English day.
 
But you don’t regret it – you recall and smirk with quiet satisfaction, then the last E on the A string (violins B on the E string) grows with its crescendo to a ‘so sue me’ confidence and the final forte ‘plink’. Chanson de Matin by Edward Elgar, who knew a thing or two, in 1899.