The Beau Brummel mystery

The mystery of the lost Beau Brummel music

In 1928 Elgar was asked by the actor-manager Gerald Lawrence to provide incidental music for a new play entitled Beau Brummel, written by Bertram P. Matthews, in which Lawrence was to play the starring rôle. Elgar obliged, although he had by that time virtually given up composition, and the play was premiered at the Theatre Royal in Birmingham on 5th November 1928. Elgar himself conducted the orchestra on the First Night.

One short excerpt from the score, the ‘Beau Brummel Minuet’ was published in 1929, but the rest of the music subsequently vanished. The playscript was also never published and only the typewritten original survives. This playscript, newly typeset, plus an introductory editorial essay, can be downloaded as a PDF (see below).

VIEW OR DOWNLOAD BEAU BRUMMEL PLAYSCRIPT

You can also read a separate article giving further details about Gerald Lawrence.

VIEW OR DOWNLOAD GERALD LAWRENCE ARTICLE

Until 2011, virtually no effective research on Beau Brummel had been carried out by Elgar scholars. It was believed that the play had only been performed in Birmingham, and that the incidental music consisted of the Minuet and little else. Searches for the lost music were carried out in Birmingham but with no success.

All the hitherto unknown facts about Beau Brummel were first revealed in the issue of the Elgar Society Journal for December 2011. A summary of the most plausible hypothesis for the disappearance of the music appears in the Journal for April 2016 and a further suggestion for the disappearance in the issue for December 2020 (click on links to view).

These articles revealed for the first time that :

(i) The play had not only been performed in Birmingham but had subsequently gone on tour both in the UK and in South Africa (so searches in Birmingham had been doomed to failure from the start).

(ii) Contemporary newspaper reports indicated that the music was at least as extensive and resourceful as had been Elgar’s previous incidental music, for the play Arthur (this is available from Acuta Music in a concert score entitled ‘King Arthur Suite’). The reviews implied that the music was memorable and of high quality.

(iii) The full score would have been at least 100 pages long, possibly as much as 200.

In contrast to previous received opinions about the Beau Brummel music — that it was a minor piece, of which the Minuet was the main component — the 2011 investigations suggest that Elgar’s score was a significant work, possibly with crucial implications for his later compositional technique and output. Newspaper reports imply that it was similar to a film score, with music played underneath the dialogue and illustrating the stage action.

The question today is : what happened to the music?

It appears that Elgar allowed Gerald Lawrence to keep the performing materials, consisting of the orchestral parts and a piano-conductor score (probably in Elgar’s own handwriting). The chance of these materials having survived is remote (Lawrence died in 1957 and, since Beau Brummel’s creation, had lived in three residences in Hampstead (London) and also in Exmouth (Devon)) — but they could have been passed on by him to his daughter (the well-known actress Joyce Carey (d.1993)), his third wife (actress Madge Compton, real name Madge Mussared (d.1969)) or any other member of his family.

As regards the composer’s manuscript orchestral full score, it is fairly certain that Elgar was in possession of this around 1930, but it had gone by the time of his death in 1934.

It is possible that Elgar gave the Beau Brummel score to a friend as a gift, as he did with several other scores dating from this period of his career. It is more likely, however (based on available evidence) that it was given away for some commercial purpose such as publication. Elgar had many professional friends and contacts, and the Beau Brummel score could have been given to any one of them, maybe with a request for that person to make it into a performable concert Suite. Alternatively Elgar may have intended to recycle the Beau Brummel music into other projects (as he did with the music for Arthur) and destroyed the original score so as to cover his tracks. A third possibility could be that the full score was given to a film company for whom Elgar in late 1933 was engaged to write a movie score, but was prevented from doing so by Illness. This last possibility seems the most plausible, taking all available evidence into account.

The chance of the full score still surviving, although slim, must be counted as slightly better than that for the orchestral parts.

It is just possible that the Beau Brummel materials, comprising full score and/or orchestral parts and piano-conductor score, still exist. If they do, they are probably now in the hands of non-musicians (the descendants of the original protagonists) and their artistic significance (as containing hitherto unknown music by the mature Elgar) — quite apart from their very considerable financial value — may not be recognised by their current owners.