An uneasy truce with God
Elgar's three major religious oratorios, all written for the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival, are being performed this weekend to mark his 150th anniversary. Christopher Morley looks at the background to them...
In his youth, Elgar acquired a healthy, pragmatic attitude to religious worship, thanks to the example set by his father.
Elgar senior, the organist at St George's Roman Catholic church in Worcester, where Edward had been baptised, would regularly nip out on a Sunday morning for a pint during the sermon.
Religion was always a presence in life's routine, both as a system of belief and as a source of income, whether as church organist or composer. A fairly steady flow of religious music came from Elgar's pen right up to the onset of the First World War in 1914.
The horrors of that carnage, combined with the rather self-pitying disappointment he felt at the negative critical reception given to some of the works dearest to him, led Elgar to affect the pose of hardening his heart against God. During the rest of his life the only original religious music he composed was a couple of Christmas carols.
But the reality that during his first half-century Elgar's Catholicism was important to him is confirmed by the fact that his new wife Alice, daughter of a staunch military Gloucestershire squirearchy but now almost entirely disowned by her relations, converted to the faith soon after the birth of their daughter Carice.
Alice always indulged her husband in what-ever ways she could find, whether by inventing a nauseating "baby-language" for the two of them to share, by going over the top in her uncritical enthusiasm for every note he ever produced, by encouraging his friendship with beautiful, inspirational women - and by making this huge step which alienated her from her roots for good.
The Elgars were on close terms with a variety of churchmen. Among those who visited them at their suburban villa in Alexandra Road, Malvern Link, was the Reverend Edward Capel-Cure, a Worcester curate who provided Elgar with the libretto for his first oratorio, The Light of Life, telling the tale of Jesus restoring sight to the blind man.
Commissioned for the Worcester Festival of 1896, the oratorio, later acquiring the more Catholic title of Lux Christi, was dedicated to the much-respected Charles Swinnerton Heap, who travelled daily from his home in Clarendon Road, Edgbaston, to teach and conduct choirs all over the Midlands.
The choice of a setting of The Dream of Gerontius, Cardinal Newman's visionary poem describing a man's death at the end of a long life lived to the full and the subsequent sojourn of his soul in Purgatory, came late to Elgar, commissioned to provide a choral work for the 1900 Birmingham Triennial Music Festival.
A few years earlier the subject had been suggested to Dvorak, one of the festival's most illustrious regular visitors, and almost immediately rejected.
Now Elgar, who had been mulling the idea over for some time, eventually decided upon Gerontius as late as New Year 1900, for performance in Birmingham Town Hall barely nine months later.
Elgar set to work enthusiastically on the composition. Always a literary man, he took pleasure in lengthy and earnest discussions at Birmingham Oratory with clergy who had known and worked with Cardinal Newman there, and gradually the work took its form as a two-part "sacred cantata", the first section telling of Gerontius' troubled death, the second describing how his soul proceeds to judgment and in fact begs for the cleansing waters of purgatory before it can be made worthy to be in the ineffable presence of God.
At the end of his score, completed on August 3 1900, "at Birchwood in summer", Elgar appended this quotation from John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies:
"This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved and hated, like another: my life was as the vapour, and is not; but this I saw and knew; this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory".
The musical language of Gerontius is more operatic than the traditional four-squaredness which had cramped oratorio in England ever since post-Handelian times.
Wagnerian harmonic richness, particularly the piercing chromaticism of Parsifal, blends with arias of an almost Verdian passionate fervour (the tender interchange between the Soul of Gerontius and his Guardian Angel could almost pass as a love duet), the solos punctuated by choruses of vivid dramatic character.
Nothing like this had ever been known in English festival choral music.
But it would be in safe hands, with Swinnerton Heap, hugely sympathetic to the modern Wagnerian idiom, charged with rehearsing the Birmingham Festival Chorus.
Unfortunately a huge blow came when this overworked, still comparatively young man collapsed and died when rehearsals had barely started.
What followed is well-known. W.C.Stockley, only recently retired, was recalled to coach the remainder of the rehearsals. Unfortunately he was out of sympathy with the Catholic sentiments of the work, its style was beyond him, choral parts (single-line copies only, with no means of finding one's bearings in such a demanding work) came through piecemeal, and there was only one complete rehearsal with soloists, chorus and orchestra, too much even for the vastly experienced Wagnerian conductor Hans Richter to mould into success.
The performance on October 3, 1900 was a disaster, and even though many of the audience, including the critics, could sense the stature of the work, Elgar wrote despairingly:
"I have worked hard for 40 years and at the last, Providence denies me a decent hearing of my work: so I submit - I always said God was against art and I still believe it. Anything obscene or trivial is blessed in this world and has a reward... I have allowed my heart to open once - it is now shut against every religious feeling and every soft, gentle impulse for ever."
It would fall to German enthusiasts, not least the advocacy of Richard Strauss, to give The Dream of Gerontius its due recognition and confirm it as the masterpiece it is.
Meanwhile a commission for the next Birmingham Festival, to be held in 1903, followed, and this time Elgar had more time to prepare.
Simultaneously whilst mulling over Gerontius he had been pondering a huge trilogy based on events after the Resurrection of Christ, and now he was able to plan what was due to be its opening part.
After the controversial subject of Gerontius (early performances in Worcester Cathedral had had to be bowdlerised of their Popish references to the Virgin Mary and the Litany of Saints in order to get past the Dean and Chapter), Elgar was on safer ground by drawing his material from the Bible.
His interest in the apostles and their ministry had been roused during his childhood, when Francis Reeves, headmaster of Littleton House school near Powick, which Elgar attended between 1868 and 1872, remarked to his pupils: "The Apostles were poor men, young men at the time of their calling; perhaps before the descent of the Holy Ghost not cleverer than some of you here."
And it was this humble, simple aspect of Christ's followers which was the chief attraction for Elgar. He felt an immense sympathy for the flawed, sinning characters of Mary Magdalene and Judas Iscariot, and this identification with the Apostles as human beings is a major characteristic of the two oratorios which followed.
Two oratorios, not the projected three: The Apostles, dealing with events after Christ's resurrection, was the 1903 Birmingham commission, followed in 1906 by The Kingdom, which tells of Pentecost and the preaching of the Word. Elgar prepared the libretti for both works himself, enjoying the intellectual exercise of compiling a text drawn not only from the New Testament, in various versions from across he centuries, but also from other sources and learned theological writings.
But by indulging himself so much in these researches, Elgar put himself under time-pressures when it actually came to producing the music. Though much of the musical material is very fine, with well-developed use of Wagner's Leitmotif methods, some passages in both oratorios convey the suspicion that Elgar had been burning the midnight oil too much.
Whatever the reasons, plans for the final oratorio, The Last Judgment, no less, originally mooted for the 1909 festival, were quietly dropped.
n Sakari Oramo conducts the CBSO, the CBS Chorus, guest choirs and soloists in The Dream of Gerontius (tomorrow 7.30pm), The Apostles (Saturday 7pm) and The Kingdom (Sunday 3pm) at Symphony Hall. All details on 0121 780 3333.
