Edward Elgar
The Dream of Gerontius
Mikel Toms searches out the best recordings of a dramatic oratorio that revolutionised British choral music and won many admirers abroad
The work
In 1900, Edward Elgar was flushed with the success of the Enigma Variations, premiered just one year earlier. After years of musical struggle, things were looking up for this jobbing, provincial violin teacher. Over the course of the previous decade, he had produced a series of well received, large-scale choral works, including Caractacus and The Light of
Life, and when the Birmingham Music Festival approached him to write a new choral work, he had already made his mark as one of the most respected of emerging
British composers. The Dream of Gerontius, however, would propel him to international fame and is now widely considered to be his masterpiece, arguably the greatest work of English choral music ever written.
Like the death of the eponymous Gerontius, The Dream’s birth was no straightforward matter. Elgar had owned a copy of Cardinal Newman’s 1865 poem The Dream of Gerontius for a number of years and had long toyed with the idea of setting it to music. The poem was a huge success when it was first published, but by the time Elgar came to set it its popularity had waned and its overtly Catholic take on the afterlife would have ruffled not a few Anglican feathers.
Elgar composed quickly, largely completing the work at the small cottage he and his wife Alice rented at Birchwood. An idyllic woodland retreat just outside
Malvern, Birchwood must surely have coloured his setting of the famous line in which Gerontius compares the sound of the House of Judgement to ‘The summer wind among the lofty pines’.
He was composing to a tight deadline, however, and the first performance was plagued by mishaps. The choirmaster, Charles Swinnerton Heap, died shortly after rehearsals began and was replaced by the aging William Stockley, who wasn’t equal to the task and who, in any case, didn’t try to mask his distaste for the subject matter. Hans Richter, the conductor, only received the full score one day before orchestra rehearsals began and only one of the soloists was in good voice on the day. Although the press generally conceded that a decent work had been presented, it was widely accepted that the first performance had been a disaster.
The German conductor Julius Buths was in the Birmingham audience and recognised that Gerontius merited a decent hearing. It was Buths’s performances in Düsseldorf in 1901 and ’02 that alerted the British musical world to the fact that Elgar had indeed produced something extraordinary. The occasions were a huge success, Elgar was fêted as a hero and was presented with two enormous laurel wreaths which he and Alice somehow managed to lug back to Malvern. Richard Strauss wrote ‘I raise my glass to the
Although the press generally conceded that it was a decent work, its premiere was a disaster
welfare and success of the first English progressivist,
Meister Elgar’. If the Catholic
Elgar hadn’t arrived before, the Anglican establishment had no choice but to concede that he certainly had done so now.
Part I of The Dream portrays the dying moments of Gerontius, whom Elgar thought of as an everyman: a devoutly religious man, but a sinner, not a priest. His friends gather round and pray for him while he begins to experience the sensation of his soul separating from his body. He realises that his final hour has arrived (‘Novissima hora est’) and a priest sends him on his journey into the afterlife (‘Proficiscere, anima Christiana’).
In Part II, Gerontius, now simply called the Soul, awakes to find himself in the afterlife and meets his guardian angel who is leading him towards the House of Judgement. They encounter a chorus of demons and then a chorus of angels sings ‘Praise to the Holiest in the Height’. The Angel of the Agony intones a prayer of intercession on behalf of the Soul who then sings ‘I go before my judge’. Accompanied by one of the most emotionally devastating single chords in the whole repertoire, Gerontius sees God and receives his judgement. The Angel takes him down to Purgatory, promising to return in the morning to lead him to Heaven (‘Softly and gently, dearly ransomed soul’).
Gerontius isn’t an oratorio in the conventional sense. It isn’t drawn from
a biblical text and is conceived as an uninterrupted drama instead of being divided into separate musical numbers. It has more in common with Wagner than with Mendelssohn or Handel. This was something altogether new, and it’s worth remembering that in 1900 this was modern, even shocking music.
Gerontius established Elgar as the leading British composer of his day but its Catholic depiction of Purgatory and its invocations of the Virgin Mary also underscored his outsider status. Few, though, would argue with Elgar’s own assessment, appropriating John Ruskin’s celebrated quotation, that The Dream of Gerontius represented the ‘best of me’.
Turn the page to discover the recommended recordings of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius