From fiasco to celebration: the story of Gerontius’ dream, revolutionary music for choral | classical music

nEcola Hytner’s new film, The Chorale – out in UK cinemas today – culminates in an unconventional rendition of Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. Alan Bennett’s screenplay is an affectionate portrayal of a choral community in a small Yorkshire town during the First World War. While searching for non-German pieces of music, choirmaster Dr. Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes) despairingly settles on Gerontius.

Perhaps it was Elgar’s reputation as a pillar of the British establishment – ​​he appears briefly in the film, in a supporting role to the extravagantly moustachioed Simon Russell Beale – that reassured members of the fictional Bennett committee that this would be a safe choice. But when Guthrie begins teaching the unfamiliar score, they realize they have been deceived by Sir Edward’s aristocratic character. They expected something solidly English, but instead encountered Catholic, foreign music and annoying theatrics.

Bennett’s screenplay is full of characteristic whimsy—at one point, the choral members give a pitch-perfect rendition of Gerontius as they run through the streets, a scenario that is difficult to believe given the complexity of Elgar’s choral writing—but it is nonetheless rooted in a secure understanding of the work’s turbulent and controversial history.

Much controversy came from Elgar’s choice of text. John Henry Newman wrote his long narrative poem in 1865, after converting to Catholicism, which had seismic consequences for him and the Church of England. It depicts the character of an everyman (the name “Gerontius” is taken from the Greek word for old man) experiencing the moment of death. He meets an angel who shows him the face of God, before sending him to purgatory with the promise of eternal glory afterwards. “It’s not a big story,” complains one Guthrie choir member—but the requirement to represent the inhabitants of purgatory, a condition not recognized in Protestant theology, proves too uncomfortable for many of the choir members.

Elgar, a Catholic, had long wanted to write the poem, but he feared, with some justification, that anti-Catholic prejudice might doom his efforts to failure. Its premiere at the triennial Birmingham Festival in 1900 was plagued by bad luck. The original choir conductor – the wonderfully named Charles Swinnerton Heap – died suddenly a few months before the first performance. His replacement, William Stokely, was incompetent and virulently anti-Catholic, and his hostility to the piece, combined with the minstrels’ ignorance of Newman’s poem, doomed the first performance to disaster. Even conductor Hans Richter, one of the most famous conductors of the era, seemed uncomfortable, perhaps because Elgar was so last-minute with the orchestration that Richter had the full score shortly before rehearsals.

The Birmingham Choir’s rendition of the complex choral writing was slammed by critics, many of whom were lukewarm about the piece itself. This experience shook Elgar’s hitherto devout faith: “I had once allowed my heart to be open,” he told his friend A. J. Geiger, “the Nimrod” in Variations of the Riddle, “it is now closed against all religious feeling.” The bias remained in the years that followed. Many Anglican cathedrals approved the Mount Gerontius only on the condition that explicitly Catholic features were deleted from the text, such as the prayer to the Virgin Mary. King Edward VII refused to attend the London premiere because it was held in Catholic Westminster Cathedral.

But after a disastrous premiere in Birmingham, two performances in Düsseldorf salvaged the work’s reputation, and by the end of 1903 Gerontius was being shown in Chicago, New York and Sydney as well as throughout the United Kingdom. In 1916, the year the choir takes place, six performances were given under Elgar on successive nights at the Queen’s Hall in London. The King and Queen Alexandra were among the large crowds, and the race raised nearly £3,000 for the Red Cross war effort. Therefore, for a wartime amateur choral community, Gerontius would have been a fashionable although admittedly very bold choice.

Elgar’s career was at this point at its peak. His ode to the coronation of Edward VII in 1902 combined his famous melody of Pomp and Circumstance with the phrase “land of hope and glory” and made him indisputably Britain’s most famous composer. In the following years he received a knighthood and several honorary doctorates, unveiled the long-awaited First Symphony, and succeeded Richter as principal conductor of the newly founded London Symphony Orchestra.

Although Elgar is often described as quintessentially English, he was better aware of musical developments in continental Europe than most of his contemporaries. Europe returned the compliment. Guthrie’s remark to his skeptical patrons that “Elgar in Germany is a god – he’s up there with Wagner” is perhaps somewhat exaggerated, but it reflects the extraordinary esteem in which Elgar was held in Germany after Gerontius’s victory at Düsseldorf. He has been routinely described as the most important English composer since Henry Purcell. Richard Strauss raised a toast at the second performance in Düsseldorf to “the first English Progressive, Sir Edward Elgar.” Richter paid tribute to him at the opening rehearsal of the First Symphony as “the greatest modern composer – and not only in this country.”

Elgar’s affinity with German music, and with Wagner in particular, was profound. He and his wife Alice regularly visited the festival founded by Wagner in the Bavarian city of Bayreuth. The couple loved Bavaria and felt accepted there, thanks to its predominantly Catholic population. Elgar’s music was strongly influenced by what he heard at Bayreuth: The Ring, Tristan and Isolde, and especially Parsifal.

The singers in The Choral are just as influenced by the peculiar musical language of Gerontius as they are by Catholicism. The influence of Wagner’s “Theatrical Festival Dedication Play” can be felt in every aspect of Gerontius: its harmony, its vocal oratorio, its use of leitmotifs indicating particular themes or ideas, and its architecture: like the Parsifal works, Gerontius’s two parts are continuous periods of music rather than divided into separate recitatives, arias, and choruses.

This sense of musical continuity, almost unprecedented in religious work for the concert hall, was one of the reasons Elgar rejected Gerontius’s designation of an ‘oratorio’, the term generally used for a work for solo singers, chorus and orchestra that treats a religious or biblical theme. Although the piece is sometimes described as an oratorio in music history books and program notes, Elgar himself claimed that “there is no word yet invented to describe it.” [it]”.

Elgar’s Wagnerianism is also evident in Gerontius’ consistently dramatic treatment of his subject. The choral singers, no less than the soloists who take on the roles of Gerontius, the angel, the priest, and the angel of suffering, are always called upon to play characters of flesh and blood, whether friends of the dying Gerontius, demons jealous of his soul’s apparent quick path to heaven, or angels calling from heaven. And the music presented to them is sensitive to all the nuances of Newman’s text while also evoking the extraordinary visions he describes. Gerontius sounds closer to opera than to the oratorios of Elgar’s immediate English predecessors, with its often adopted construction and cardboard characterization.

In “The Chorus,” the singers follow this observation to its logical conclusion by deciding—a decision to Elgar’s fictional disgust—to stage their performance and furnish it with costumes. Staging Gerontius wouldn’t be an entirely strange proposition for a professional company – the English National Opera staged a “concert” at the Royal Festival Hall in 2017 – but it’s questionable credibility to think it could have worked in the dilapidated conditions in which the film’s singers work. Elgar’s music stretches the abilities of amateur singers to the utmost; It is difficult to believe that the singers of 1916 had any sufficient room to act.

But paradoxically, it is here, when the film is least acceptable from a musical point of view, that the film is most emotional. Gerontius is sung by a young man, Clyde (Jacob Dudman), who lost his arm in the war. Elgar complains that Gerontius must be an old man, but Clyde tells him that it’s young people who are dying now, which is why he’s wearing a soldier’s uniform. The priest objects that there is no such place as purgatory; Clyde angrily replies that there is no man’s land he just returned from.

Clyde himself, and not just the character he plays, finds solace in the singing of the angel – here represented by a nurse – and in the powerful image of social cohesion evoked by the coming together of the choral forces for the work’s tender finale. This sense of community, as Hytner points out, is all the more poignant because it is shattered just hours after the performance: in the film’s closing shots, the boys who had joined the choir to sing Elgar are recruited and leave for the front.

Gerontius undoubtedly transformed British music – he influenced composers such as Vaughan Williams and Walton, and Britten made clear his admiration in heartfelt performances with Peter Pears – but it can be said that he also transformed British society. By allowing Newman’s Catholic theology to be articulated in Anglican cathedrals and widely disseminated, he certainly encouraged greater ecumenical understanding. By presenting music of extraordinary intensity and fervor, Elgar helped explode the myth of Victorian emotional restraint, three months before the Queen’s death ended the era.

Today, the work is performed regularly all over the world, and there is no shortage of wonderful recordings (John Barbirolli and Adrian Boult’s interpretations with Dame Janet Baker are legendary; among recent versions, Mark Elder with Halle in 2008 and Nicholas Colon with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, released earlier this year, are especially recommended). However, there is still a danger that Gerontius’ knowledge itself will produce a more comfortable experience than Elgar intended or that Newman’s story implies. The rough-and-ready narration of the action given by the singers in The Choral, with all the comedy in the film, reminds us of Gerontius’ revolutionary potential.