Sea Pictures

Elgar finished scoring his Enigma Variations in February 1899 and immediately began work on an orchestral song-cycle for the Norwich Festival that October. He composed the cycle around "Love alone will stay", a short song for voice and piano he had written some years earlier to words by his wife, Alice. She revised the poem to give it a maritime flavour and changed the title to "In Haven (Capri)". This became the second song in the cycle. Elgar then set four other poems to do with the sea, each by a different poet, in the manner of Berlioz's Les nuits d'été,^[2] and later favoured by Mahler.^[3]

The composer's literary taste in selecting the verse has been adversely criticised: his biographer Michael Kennedy has written, "Today these songs have only to appear in a programme for someone to castigate the words of the poems Elgar chose to set", and adds that so far as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sabbath Morning at Sea" and Adam Lindsay Gordon's "The Swimmer" are concerned the criticism is justified.^[4] The music critic Andrew Farach-Colton describes these two poems as "creaky and overblown" and Roden Noel's 'Sea Slumber-Song' as "excessively alliterative" and "simply mediocre".^[2] Elgar took the view that it was preferable to set second-rate poetry to music, "for the most immortal verse is music already".^[5]

The premiere took place on 5 October 1899 at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival with Elgar himself conducting and Clara Butt singing, dressed as a mermaid.^{[6][n 1]} The work was a success with the critics and the public. "The cycle went marvellously well", Elgar reported afterwards.^[2] The reviewer in The Musical Times wrote:

Butt gave the first London performance two days later at St James's Hall, with Elgar at the piano. On 20 October Ada Crossley performed the work for Queen Victoria at Balmoral.^[9] Programmes at the Elgar Birthplace Museum document eleven performances between the premiere and June 1901. Soloists included Butt, Crossley, Muriel Foster, Gertrude Lonsdale and Helene Valma.^[7]

At the time he was composing Sea Pictures Elgar had temporarily fallen out with his usual publishers, Novello and Co, and he offered the new work to Boosey and Co, who bought the copyright for £50, with a royalty payment of 3d a copy for any of the songs published separately.^[10] They also secured the Cockaigne overture, and the Pomp and Circumstance Marches Nos. 1 and 2.^[11]

Elgar's music went out of fashion in the mid-twentieth century, and Sea Pictures fell out of the regular concert repertoire. The Record Guide, published in 1955, gives no recordings of the work among the sparse Elgar listings.^[12] The leading contralto of the post-war years, Kathleen Ferrier, did not like the work,^[13] although other singers performed individual numbers from it at five Henry Wood Promenade Concerts in the 1950s.^[14] The conductor Sir John Barbirolli continued to champion the work. He said to Kennedy, "He [Elgar] makes you see the sea lapping over the beach, you can almost feel the pull of the tide."^[15] It was his recording of Sea Pictures with Janet Baker and the London Symphony Orchestra made in 1965 and coupled with the Cello Concerto with Jacqueline du Pré that reintroduced the cycle to popularity.^[2]

The first recordings of "In Haven" and "Where Corals Lie" were made on 10 November 1922, by Leila Megane (contralto) with Elgar conducting the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra.^[16] The same artists recorded the remaining three songs on 8 January 1923.^[16] These acoustic recordings were made for The Gramophone Company and appeared under the His Master's Voice label, on two discs D674-5.^[16] The five recordings were reissued on CD by Pearl Records in 1992.^[17] Later recordings:

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A 1920 recording of No. 4, "Where Corals Lie" by Clara Butt

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