Poor old Elgar. If it's not enough that Schoenberg has been discovered using his tunes as counterpoint exercises, his fizzer is about to be removed from the face of the £20 note, and any bill bearing his moustachioed countenance will no longer be legal tender after June 30. Worse, he only managed 11 years of monetary magnificence, compared with 23 for Shakespeare, one of his predecessors. Who knows how long Adam Smith, his replacement who started appearing in our wallets three years ago, will last in these economically straitened times? Perhaps staring at Smith's periwigged pomposity and a wee slogan of capitalist efficiency ("The division of labour in pin manufacturing … ") will help us through the recession better than looking at Elgar and nostalgically dreaming of the Cello Concerto and the Malverns.
But it's a shame there's currently no musical presence on any of the Bank of England's legal tender. There are other compositional candidates for the £20 note in the future: what about Purcell or Parry, Tallis or Tippett, Britten or Bax? Or for a truly radical gesture, imagine a £20 note with Her Maj on one side and Sid Vicious on the other. Anyway: I'm keeping at least one Elgarian 20 as a reminder of a time when I could find Sir Edward in my wallet as well as on my iPod.
