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Elgar seriously considered composing an opera on a number of occasions but always claimed
to be held back by the lack of a suitable subject and librettist. Perhaps the most promising
collaboration involved no less a personage than Thomas Hardy, the celebrated Wessex
novelist, as librettist. But they could not agree on a subject, Hardy wanting to base the plot on
one of his own short stories, Elgar seeking something nobler and more heroic. Eventually, the
outbreak of the First World War put paid to the collaboration.
In his last years, Elgar, living in virtual retirement in Worcester, established a friendship with
Sir Barry Jackson, artistic director of the Malvern Festival. This friendship,
plus encouragement from George Bernard Shaw, led Elgar to resurrect a much earlier
idea for an opera based on The Devil is an Ass, a play by Ben Jonson
satirising Jacobean society and mores. Elgar settled on the more operatic title of The Spanish
Lady and set to work on sketches for the opera. At this time, he was also working on the
Third Symphony and would summon Billy
Reed, his long-time friend and leader of the London Symphony Orchestra, to
Worcester to play through the sketches of both works with him. But in reality, little of originality
emerged. The sketches for the opera were little more than reworkings of earlier pieces : from the
Shed books, unused material from the oratorios and The Crown
of India Suite, and various abandoned works. Elgar died leaving both the opera and
the symphony unfinished.
While this may be regretted in the case of the Third
Symphony, the same cannot be said of this work. Elgar issued no embargo on The
Spanish Lady and, with the consent of Elgar's daughter Carice, Dr Percy Young
arranged and orchestrated the sketches Elgar left behind to create a self-standing 45-minute long
work. In this, Dr Young was much helped by the fact that Elgar had all but completed the
libretto, drawing on material from within and beyond Jonson's play. Dr Young's reconstruction
has recently been recorded and was issued on CD with the October 1995 of BBC Music
magazine. (The disc also contains Anthony Payne's talk on the
Third Symphony.) But the recording tends to strengthen the hand of those who
believe that, by 1930, Elgar's creative powers had all but evaporated. As Elgar's only attempt at
an opera, the work has an obvious novelty value, but it fails to inspire.
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