Lost in translation?

Stephen Johnson takes a look at how large-scale British works have fared in the hands of overseas conductors, from the composers' own day to ours

- Stephen Johnson

Music, we’re often told, is an international language. If a composer is viewed as having a distinctly national voice, this can be a strong selling point in other countries; yet it can work the other way, leaving even the sympathetic listener with the sense that performances outside a composer’s own patch can somehow lack a certain authenticity.

That seems to have been the fate of a lot of British orchestral music for a large part of the 20th century – but, and this needs to be stressed, not for all of it. Take Edward Elgar for example, for many quintessentially, even problematically, English. Yet at the height of his fame, during the Edwardian era, it was quite different. Having famously flopped at its 1900 Birmingham premiere, Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius was taken up enthusiastically in Germany by the conductor Julius Buths (who even made his own translation). Buths’s performances in Düsseldorf in 1901 and 1902 were so successful that Germany’s then leading modernist, Richard Strauss, arranged a banquet for Elgar and toasted him as England’s first ‘Meister’. The use of that highly charged word is more than a token of approval – it means, in essence, ‘He’s one of us!’.