in earnest in late 1899, less than a year before the scheduled premiere. When he'd finished the vocal score, in June, he wrote to a friend, "I think you will find
far beyond anything I've yet done." He was right about that. Elgar's setting of Newman's poem had been preceded by four large-scale dramatic vocal works:
(1898). All four display glimpses of originality and greatness, yet all are hampered by dramatically awkward texts that often blunt their potential emotional power. Of course, the same could be said of Verdi's "galley operas," and like those imperfect gems, Elgar's pre-
oratorios and cantatas deserve to be better known, especially as each was a crucial step in the composer's development and paved the way for
. Even the earliest of them,
, sounds unmistakably Elgarian, with its vaulting melodic arches, rhythmic swagger and orchestral effulgence.
(1906) — the two completed parts of an unfinished trilogy of oratorios that was to have culminated with
. Neither of these sustains a comparable level of spiritual fervor. Indeed,
stands apart from the British oratorio tradition altogether, not least because it is through-composed rather than being divided into recitatives, arias and choruses. (Elgar did not want his work to be labeled an oratorio at all, though he eventually ceded the point to his publisher.) The distinction stems directly from Newman's poem, which is less a narrative than a metaphysical dialogue portraying the death of a pious Catholic "Everyman" and his soul's subsequent journey to judgment and Purgatory. The wonder of Elgar's setting is that it gives dramatic shape and direction to the text without violating its unworldly character.
Perhaps because of its spiritual quality, countless commentators have noted
Gerontius's debt to
Parsifal. There's no question that Elgar borrowed freely and openly from Wagner's vast musical arsenal. The composer was, arguably, more devout a Wagnerite than a Catholic, and all of his big vocal works are buttressed by a structural system of leitmotifs. Yet, though it may be instructive to trace the progress of these motifs — particularly in
Gerontius, where they are developed and transformed with especial mastery — this will only reveal one facet of the work's genius. As Arthur Johnstone wrote in
The Manchester Guardian following
Gerontius's premiere, "The symbols, though employed in the Wagnerian manner, are nevertheless thoroughly original, taking us into an atmosphere and a world absolutely remote from all that is Wagnerian."
Put another way, it is the flow of images and ideas, and their intricately detailed yet elusive evocation, that enthralls the listener. In his last moments, for example, Gerontius sings just three brief phrases, yet these fragments somehow convey exhaustion, resignation, fear and acceptance, along with twinges of physical pain. Then, after a gaping silence, comes a stern B-flat-major chord from the clarinets, bassoons, horns and trombones, and the Priest begins the "Proficiscere," an incantation imploring Gerontius's soul to go forth upon its journey. "Go from this world! Go, in the Name of God," he sings. But Elgar writes a diminuendo beginning on "Name," and the word "God" is intoned
piano, as the music slips magically into D major. And so the journey begins, led by gently marching contrabasses (who hold firm to the home note D), as the harps and upper strings create a shimmering, fragrant cloud of intoxicating harmonic richness and textural delicacy.
Gerontius overflows with such miraculous moments, many of them small. There's the lilting lightness of the Soul's awakening at the beginning of Part II, where the vocal line seems to dance with the words "I feel in me / An inexpressive lightness, and a sense / Of freedom," yet the effect somehow remains one of rapt stillness. Even the score's most theatrical moment — when the Soul comes directly before God — is handled with surprising concision. Elgar wisely omits the lines of the poem in which the Angel describes how the Soul is "seized / And scorched, and shriveled ... and now it lies / Passive and still before the awful Throne," leaving it entirely to the orchestra to depict this unimaginable scene. In a mere eleven bars, Elgar gathers a massive, relentless crescendo that culminates in a shattering chord: "For one moment," the composer marks in the score, "every instrument [must] exert its fullest force." Achingly dissonant, the chord quickly resolves and subsides, as the Soul cries out, "Take me away," in a sustained, high-lying phrase that echoes Gerontius's death. The effect is literally breathtaking, as we are given no time to recover from the blinding flash of judgment before we must share in the Soul's agony as he realizes he's unworthy of heaven.
Actually, Elgar's original vision for this scene was considerably more subdued, as he thought that it would be vulgar to try to suggest even a momentary glimpse of the Almighty. But August Jaeger, the composer's most trusted musical confidant — and the beloved "Nimrod" of the "Enigma"
Variations — vociferously disagreed. Jaeger told Elgar, "Heavens! But what is your gorgeous orchestra for? And why should you be
dull and sentimental at such a
supremest moment? ... Here is your
greatest chance of proving yourself
poet, seer, doer of 'impossible' things — and you shirk it. Bah!" It took further needling before Elgar eventually came around.
Jaeger was prescient about another aspect of
Gerontius,
as well. Before the score was even complete, he warned the composer, "You must not,
cannot expect this work of yours to be appreciated by the ordinary amateur (
or critic) after once hearing. You will have to rest content, as other great men had to before you, if a few friends and enthusiasts hail it as a work of genius." In the end, more than a few musicians and critics immediately hailed
Gerontius as a masterpiece, but the long-anticipated first performance was anything but a success.
It should have gone well. The conductor at the Birmingham Festival premiere was none other than Hans Richter (friend of Wagner and Brahms), who had led the premiere of the "Enigma"
Variations and then enthusiastically promoted Elgar's music in Germany. But due to delays in the printing of the score, Richter did not receive a copy until the day before the first rehearsal. To make matters worse, the choir was in a state of disarray, as their conductor had died just a few months earlier. During the rehearsals that followed, an increasingly desperate Elgar continually berated the choristers, which only made them more nervous. On the morning of the premiere (October 3), Richter spoke to the musicians, declaring his belief in Elgar's genius and urging everyone to do their very best. But he was visibly worried and during the performance chose unusually slow tempos in an attempt to keep his forces under control. The result was chaos, as most of the reviews made sure to point out. Herman Klein of London's
Sunday Times wrote, "A more perfunctory rendering of a new work it has never been my lot to listen to at a big festival." E. A. Baughn of
The Morning Leader praised the music but had nothing but contempt for the choir, who "sang as if Mr. Elgar's music meant nothing." Elgar, whose spirit was all too easily deflated, was despondent. "I have worked hard for forty years," he wrote to Jaeger, "and at the last, Providence denies me a decent hearing of my work.... I have allowed my heart to open once…. It is now shut against every religious feeling and every soft, gentle impulse
for ever."
Forever is a very long time, and less than a year after the ill-fated premiere,
Gerontius was heard again. In May 1901, Elgar conducted an abridged version in his native Worcester. By the end of 1903,
Gerontius had been performed throughout the U.K. and as far afield as Düsseldorf, Darmstadt, Chicago, New York and Sydney. The critic of Chicago's
Daily News described it as a "great choral composition, neither oratorio nor cantata.... [It] is such a departure from the timeworn form of the sacred musical drama that its presentation was in the nature of a revelation."
The trouble with writing a "revelatory" work such as
Gerontius is that it raises the bar considerably.
The Apostles and
The Kingdom both strived yet failed to reach it — perhaps because they were, at essence, oratorios in the conventional sense. Yet it remains odd that a composer who could tell a story with such gusto as Elgar does in his 1913 "symphonic study,"
Falstaff, and who could create a gripping drama from virtually no narrative at all (as he did in
Gerontius), was unable to write an entirely effective, traditional, large-scale music-theater work.
At various points in his career, Elgar seriously considered writing an opera. In 1913, he approached Thomas Hardy as librettist, but the two men couldn't agree on a subject. Then, in 1929, he asked his friend George Bernard Shaw to provide a text, but again nothing came of it. During the last years of life, when he was composing only intermittently at best, Elgar worked on a setting of Ben Jonson's play
The Devil is an Ass. With some assistance, he developed a complete working libretto under the title
The Spanish Lady. But the music that remains consists largely of fragments, some adapted from sketches made as early as the 1870s. The English musicologist Percy Young has fashioned these scraps into a forty-five minute mini-drama. Some of it is charming, even if it's not exactly stage-worthy. Indeed, one can discern a far more complex and compelling narrative in the surviving sketches for the Third Symphony, which also comes from the composer's final years.
Under the circumstances, it would be easy to declare that Elgar was simply not naturally suited to compose for the stage. But this does him a disservice, for in works as disparate as
King Olaf and the First Symphony, he demonstrates that his dramatic instincts are sure. Perhaps it's fairer to say that, like Brahms, the stage that suited Elgar best is to be found in the theater of the imagination.
ANDREW FARACH-COLTON
is a freelance writer based in New York.
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