15/05/2026
Saturday night's 7.30pm concert at Haslemere Hall with Haslemere Symphony Orchestra and Chorus finishes with Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934)'s The Black Knight, Op. 25.
The Black Knight was Elgar’s first of several large choral works with orchestra written before he became the famous composer of the Enigma Variations (1899). Elgar wrote this four-movement cantata, which he described as a ‘symphony for chorus and orchestra’, between 1889 and 1893, for performance at the Worcester Festival, followed in 1894 in Hereford and Walsall, and 1895 in Wolverhampton and Birmingham.
Elgar’s mother Anne passed him a love for the poetry of Henry Wordsworth Longfellow (1807-82), best known for The Song of Hiawatha. Longfellow’s 1839 novel Hyperion, inspired by his European travels, included a loose translation of Ludwig Uhland’s ballad Der Schwarze Ritter, itself derived from an existing German story about the second marriage in 1285 of Scottish King Alexander III. In 1899, Elgar sent Hans Richter, first conductor of the Enigma Variations, a copy of Hyperion, describing it as ‘the little book ... from which I, as a child, received my first idea of the great German nations’. Fittingly, early stages of The Black Knight were written on holiday with friends in Germany during summer 1889, which included hearing several Wagner music dramas at Bayreuth.
Elgar wrote that, instead of a typical cantata with multiple episodes, ‘I intended the work to be a sort of symphony in four divisions founded on the poem, different in structure to anything done before, where “the picture” is fixable for a little time the words are repeated - in dramatic parts the words “go on”: it’s not a proper cantata as such: is too important’.
Scene One describes a medieval jousting tournament at Pentecost, the action moved from the Scotland of Uhland’s original to ‘ancient Hofburg’s walls’ by Longfellow, in music reminiscent of the grandeur of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The king’s son defeats all opponents until the mysterious ‘Black Knight’ challenges him; in Scene Two, under a darkening sky, the unknown knight wins; in Scene Three, during the subsequent banquet, asks the king for his daughter’s hand in marriage, while the chorus demands to know the knight’s name. The Black Knight dances with the daughter with a lightness of touch found in French ballet music by Delibes or Gounod. Events turn sinister when the flowers in the princess’s hair start dying. The knight then offers ‘healing’ wine to the king’s two children: they collapse and die, accompanied softly by the orchestra. The old king, feeling he has nothing for which to live, begs the knight to kill him, but the knight refuses.
Like Elgar’s other 1890s choral works, such as King Olaf, Caractacus and The Banner of St George, The Black Knight was eclipsed by The Dream of Gerontius and later, more artistically sophisticated scores. By comparison, the earlier works can appear conventional: however, for their time, they took English choral music to new heights. Critically, The Black Knight was the work that convinced August Jaeger at the publisher Novello’s to take on Elgar, writing: ‘I am forever pushing … since I played through your fine Black Knight, Mr Elgar’s claim to attention … I am conceited enough to think I can recognise a good thing and see genius in musicians who are not yet dead, or even not yet well known.’ The Black Knight is full of music that heralds his famous later works, evoking grandeur without pomposity, lightness and tenderness with equal skill, colourful orchestration and vivid storytelling.
Here is the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Richard Hickox:
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet OM GCVO (2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and inte...
