Frankie Perry ‘Elgar’s Postcards’
This talk considers Edward Elgar’s engagement with the picture postcard – a medium often overlooked for its ephemerality but which constituted a multimodal ‘communications revolution’ (Gillen 2023) of the late-nineteenth century.
Elgar’s lifetime saw the invention, rise in popularity, and ‘golden age’ of the picture postcard, and the composer keenly adopted the medium: he sought out postcard stands when travelling, annotated pictures to mark places he visited, and readily deploying the postcard’s classic trope: ‘wish you were here!’.
But how might Elgar’s surviving postcards nuance our understanding of his life and music?
600+ picture postcards sent, collected, or received by the Elgar family – mostly from the 1890s-1920s – are now held across several correspondence collections (mostly at the British Library), and in a set of family scrapbooks and a dedicated postcard album at the Elgar Birthplace Museum.
These different presentations of the postcards reflect the medium’s complex status as an object of communication and/or souvenir, and bring challenges in compiling and analysing them at scale. Both digital methodologies and the data-rich world of existing Elgar scholarship help here: drawing upon transcriptions of Elgar’s correspondence by Martin Bird and digitised copies of the postcards, I share work-in-progress examples of how textual analysis and geospatial representation of this large and relatively structured corpus can shed light on aspects of Elgar’s communication with his family and friends, and on his international and regional tours as a composer and conductor.
I then consider whether shifts in modes of communication and thought associated with the postcard might find a corollary in late-Romantic constructions and perceptions of musical theme. A first case study begins with a set of commissioned postcards displaying thematic incipits from Elgar’s major oratorios. Then, I ask how literally we might take the notion of the ‘picture-postcard work’ when set against postcards from Elgar’s holidays in Bavaria (From the Bavarian Highlands, 1895), a Mediterranean cruise (In Smyrna, 1905), and Alassio and elsewhere in Italy (In the South, 1904).
Frankie Perry works part-time on the 'Elgar's Themes' digital musicology project at the University of Oxford, and part-time in Music Collections at the British Library. She has held special collections cataloguing and curatorial roles at the BL since 2021, and held a postdoctoral role on the University of York 'InterMusE' project in 2023. She completed a PhD in Musicology at Royal Holloway following prior study at St Anne's and St Catherine's Colleges, Oxford.
Her most recent publications include collections-based research around the archive of the singer Cullen Maiden for the RMA Research Chronicle, and a chapter on 21st-century re-imaginings of Schubert's 'An die Musik' for The Oxford Handbook of Arrangement Studies.