Amongst the great composers, Edward Elgar’s intimacy with the violin stands out. In his compositions he is one of very few to be specific in his bowings, and in his early life his ambitions were focussed towards performance rather than composition. When he began studies with Adolf Politzer in 1877, his teacher believed that as a violinist, Elgar had the potential to be one of the leading soloists in the country. By Elgar’s own account having witnessed the leading virtuosi at London concerts felt that his own playing lacked a full enough tone and so his ambitions evolved towards conducting and ultimately composing. Hence, it was at the height of his ambition as a would-be virtuoso that this friends from the Worcester Amateur Instrumental Society presented him with a bow to mark his 21st birthday. A (lost) testimonial that once accompanied the bow reads:
We, the undersigned, members of the Worcester Amateur Instrumental Society, request your acceptance of a Tubbs Violin Bow, as a testimonial of the kindly feeling and regard we have towards you. We likewise take this opportunity of expressing the hope that you may by continual perserverance, eventually attain an eminence in the profession for which you have evinced so great a love and aptitude.
The bow has a ferrule that is engraved for Edward William Elgar’s full inititals – EWE and a on the facets of the octagonal adjustor it reads Presented by the Worcester Amateur Instrumental Society Jun 1878. Elgar’s relationship with violin playing was a tempestuous one. When living in Hampstead he decided to buy an elabourate billiard table with special lighting, resolving to pay for the table by selling his Gagliano violin. His wife Alice was assigned the mission of selling it, writing in her diary that ‘she felt such a traitor to the thing she loves’. Elgar was not without a violin, and continued to play on one by Henry Lockey Hill, but in November 1921 he approached Albert Sammons, the champion of his violin concerto, and presented him with the 1878 Tubbs bow before a performance at the Queen’s Hall. Tersely he wrote in his diary “Sammons’ orch Concert 8. Gave him my old bow”. His daughter wrote “Father presented Albert Sammons with his own old presentation bow – so nice but S. not so thrilled – curious.”
It goes without saying that the bow makes for a delightful relic of Elgar, and I’m going to admit of my total delight in performing Dream of Gerontius with it whenever I have the opportunity. The day I got the bow I hurried to a rehearsal with one Elgar-specialist conductor (who shall remain nameless) for a performance of The Music Makers, to hear him tell the string sections about how the strings were gut and the bows were lighter in Elgar’s day. It was the kind of genius half-truth that got an amateur orchestra to do exactly the right thing, so under no circumstances did I want to break the illusion, but with any technical commentary from a conductor my reputation meant I had the eyes of the whole orchestra on me to see if I agreed or not . It would have been hard enough to keep a straight face on a normal day of the week, but I had to admit to him later in the pub that the rather heavy bow I had in my hands contradicted his claims at the most fundamental level. But apart from the fun of it, what does it tell us about Elgar? Anything at all…? I think so.
One of my adventures with the Tubbs bow has been meeting other musicians who have found their “Elgar bow”, I was a little alert to this at first, since there is only one such bow, but in the times I have encountered this really is about the kind of Tubbs bow that seems to naturally pull that tip-heavy sound that is not just particularly to Elgar’s string writing, but that is evident in his orchestral writing – particularly in those great sluggish expressions of wind playing. James Tubbs made several models of bow, and amongst them are a particular sort with a massive head. This is one of them, and so I discovered are the ones that musicians tend instinctively to call their “Elgar bow”. When I first lent the bow to Katie Smith, a really interesting violinist who is deep-diving into historic approaches to the bow and has the talent to do them justice, I had to ask her if she was hamming it up at her postgraduate recital at the RAM, because when she used the Elgar bow for Sospiri and Chanson du Matin it provided such a radically different colour and shape of notes to any of the other bows that she was using, and a sound that was far closer to Elgar’s broader orchestrated soundworld. I was firmly told that it was exactly as it should sound. This was much in keeping with other experiences that I had witnessed, and one of my conceits in as a violin dealer has been to quietly suggest the bow to musicians to play a little Elgar without giving away the provenance until after they’ve put it down. The weight and balance of the bow always appeals to them. At the same time it has a certain sluggishness that makes me feel that I’d prefer to play other bows for other music, but then I’m spoiled rotten for bows.
There is a paradox that emerges. The bow was made in 1878, and although it feels great for Elgar, Walton, Delius, Vaughan Williams and any of that school of British composers, it predates them. Neither is it a unique one-off bow, for a good proportion of Tubbs bows are to this large-headed model: There are plenty of Elgar(esque) Tubbs bows to be found. I think the answer lies in broader questions of the national sounds that were developing at the end of the nineteenth century. Readers may already know about the specifics of the Russian or French Bassoon for the beginning of the Rite of Spring (composed by a Russian performed on a French one), and this is the tip of the iceberg of how manufacturing and particular national influences were contributing to the idea of a national sound. Pipe organs in churches vacillated (I dare not dig deeply into the details) between a sound-world that worked for English choral music or the Continental ideas of the organ’s sound filling the room as a substitute for the awe of the divine. Elsewhere more prosaic manufacturing considerations led towards particular sounds. The singular rise of the brass band in the English tradition created other kinds of options that we eventually see in Elgar’s own writing that were less obtainable in mainland Europe (Elgar’s trombone is in the Royal College of Music Museum). The best guess is that Tubbs, just as much as Elgar the violinist in 1878 was engaged in finding a violinistic response to the English sound as orchestral societies emerged out of the variety of resources that existed. By this time that heavy form of playing was developing as the English reacted to Gounod (who was bizarely popular at the time by comparison to modern day tastes), Schumann (who Elgar adored), Brahms (championed amongst violinists by Joachim in England), all in turn responding to the great innovations of the industrial revolution and particularly the foundations of Berlioz’s Traite de l’Orchestra. Hence even the violin could be conceived of as partial to change. The works of that would come from English composers after the 1880s of which Elgar is prime, were simply reacting to a sound-world and orchestral possibilities that had developed during this time.
If I am right, this says something profound about the bow, and gives Elgar’s decision to present it to Albert Sammons in the light of a visceral connection to his compositional sound-world. It also may forgive Sammons’ “not so thrilled” response – most Tubbs bows are more conventional than this. Did the so nice bow remain a keepsake in Sammons’ possession? We simply cannot say, for there is no recording history passed down with the bow. But bear with me for a little while and compare his 1929 recording of the concerto (conducted by Henry Wood) to Menuhin’s in 1932 (LSO conducted by Elgar) and I think you’ll agree with me that Sammons’ bow sticks to the strings whilst Menuhin allows his bow to slip off every stroke.
To my ear and my experience, that speaks of the tip-heavy nature of this bow. It is the constant adhesion to the strings in his 1940 recording of Salut d’Amore. I am sure Sammons’ could have played just as Elgar wanted with anything at all, but in these recordings I hear the qualities that come so naturally out of this design of bow, and so whilst it is too much of a stretch to say that we can hear this bow on these recordings with a total sense of certainty, there is absolutely no reason to think it isn’t. Moreover, think its true to say the recordings intimately convey the articulation that Elgar intended and that are so inherent in the bow he was given on his 21st birthday. Perhaps uniquely I am not sure there is another bow that tells us more about a composer’s desires than this.
The bow was well-known all the way through the 1990s – when Albert Cooper wrote a 1986 article on Albert Sammons for The Strad he described the bow: “Elgar was extremely grateful for Sammons’ interest in the Concerto and in 1921, prior to a performance of it in the Queen’s Hall, presented Sammons with the bow made by James Tubbs in 1878, which he had received for his association with the Worcester Orchestral Society many years before.” However Cooper was discrete as to who owned Sammons’ instruments and when they passed away, the bow came to Sotheby’s in the early 2000s where despite the engraving it was unidentified and sold as an ordinary Tubbs. The testimonial was gone (there is reason to believe it may once again turn up), but it remained with a James Tubbs & Son wooden case. These were ephemeral, so we would not expect them to be original to the bow, and were used to post bows or bring them for re-hair. Alfred Tubbs worked with his father from 1888 to 1909, the dates that are relevant to this label, and there are postal labels on the outside that give an address of a client in Sunderland. Nevertheless, I found by chance that there is a faint pencil inscription on the inside of the lid that is invisible to the naked eye and gives the initials A.S., an address in [St] Georges Terrace, London that all conforms to the box belonging to Sammons. Bearing in mind that the box was second-hand by more than twelve-years (they still make useful boxes a century on) from when Tubbs & Sons was an active concern it still adds a little weight to the story. After the bow was acquired in auction it ended up on long-term loan to the Royal Academy of Music, where the difficulties and fragility of violin bows meant that it remained largely kept behind glass, and serving no benefit to music and restricted the ways that it could be learned from, much to the frustration of the owner. At length I had an instrument that the owner of the bow was particularly keen to make his own. To my surprise he suggested a deal in which the ownership would pass to me with the solemn undertaking that it would not be sold until after his decease, and that I should make it judiciously available. It’s was a pleasure to meet his requirements.
