"DREAM CHILDREN," TWO PIECES FOR SMALL ORCHESTRA: Op. 43
These pieces, published in 1902, are prefaced with the following quotation from the paper in Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia entitled "Dream Children; A Revery":
"... And while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and still receding, till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech: 'We are not of Alice, [48] nor of thee, nor are we children at all.... We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been.'" [49]
Elgar's music, "for pianoforte or small orchestra,"[50] is in two slightly contrasted parts: (1) A pensive andante movement in G minor, and (2) a livelier allegretto in G major, which, however, changes to andante and closes, with grave sentiment, molto lento.[51] The correspondence between the dominant moods of the essay and the characteristics of the music are obvious and easily perceptible. The pieces were "sketched long ago," says the composer [writing in June, 1907], "and completed a few years back." The first performance was at a Queen's Hall Promenade Concert, London, September 4, 1902.
No more searching and effective commentary could be written upon this music than that of Mr. Vernon Blackburn, though its delicately stated meanings do not lie always upon the surface:
"Sir Edward Elgar can go further than the great English prose poet, and in his music he delves into the finest things of the life of childhood; not the precocious things, not the interrogatory matters which so often puzzle the brains of elder people, but simply the artless questions of childhood which are answered never—it is those things which appeal to Sir Edward, yet, with his infinitely fine sense of musical suggestion, are still never answered. We can easily see why it is that Elgar chooses out of a great system of idealistic writing to limit himself for once within the boundaries of childhood, just the thoughts and the dreams of youth, that wonderful period in life; after all, the thoughts and dreams of youth do not go further than the theories of manhood, and Sir Edward Elgar therefore reaches a point of interrogation which ranks among all those many questions which in music seem to us to continue, from the time of the Abate Martini, through the questionings of Gluck, past the art of Mozart and Schumann, right unto the present day.
"Elgar called into life the children of his dream just as all the greatest of modern composers may for the listener revive the feelings that have been closed behind the gate of his mind. The children of his dreams touch a musical paternity that may be ranked among the things that issue from the paternity of thought. Such a great musician as Edward Elgar may well dream of those children who stand on the edge of the horizon, towards whom he beckons to come over the sea of silence—who never come, but who allow him to dream of the mystery of that which is sometimes forever denied, but which is at all times the inspiration of highest thought."