Ardor and Ambivalence in Edward Elgar’s Setting of John Henry Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius

On 3 October 1900, the first performance of Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius took place at the triennial Birmingham Music Festival, at that time the most prestigious such festival in Britain. 125 years later, Gerontius remains among the most highly regarded and frequently performed religious works for large chorus and orchestra, alongside the oratorios of Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn. But the piece’s current canonical status disguises both the contentiousness of Elgar’s decision to offer a setting of Cardinal (now Saint) John Henry Newman’s 1865 poem, and the very mixed critical reception Gerontius received at its premiere, due in part to the difficulty of the score and the inadequate preparation of the performers. Subsequent performances elsewhere, particularly in Germany, established Gerontius’s place in the repertoire, but not before Elgar had reacted to its initial failure with a famously violent outburst against the God to whose glory the work was dedicated: ‘I always said God was against art & I still believe it.’ The beginnings of Elgar’s loss of his previously ardent faith can be traced to this devastating experience.

Both Elgar’s choice of subject-matter for the commission and the approach he took to composing it may be understood as expressing his desire for personal and professional freedom, making my proposed paper highly relevant to this year’s AAR Presidential Theme. Most obviously, by choosing a text by the best-known English Roman Catholic of the nineteenth century, to fulfil a commission from a festival established in an Anglican church and dominated by Protestant music, Elgar claimed a freedom to identify himself as Catholic in a society in which Catholics were still socially and professionally disadvantaged. And by choosing to set that text not in a manner familiar from the nineteenth-century ‘English oratorio’ of Sullivan, Stanford and Parry, with self-contained arias, ensembles and choruses, but in a fashion more reminiscent of Wagnerian music drama, with lengthy spans of continuous music, Elgar emphasised his freedom from the parochial British musical scene and his kinship with the continental European mainstream. But more significantly still, perhaps, the way in which Elgar interpreted Newman’s text asserted his freedom to challenge the Catholic faith in which he had been raised. By abridging the poem in such a way as to emphasise the frailties of the dying Gerontius rather than the heaven his soul aspires to reach, Elgar opens up space for the expression of doubt.

In recent years Elgar’s interpretation of Newman’s poem has attracted renewed critical attention. Charles Edward McGuire (Elgar’s Oratorios: The Creation of a Narrative, Ashgate, 2002) explores the insights to be gained by viewing Gerontius through the prism of Wagnerian music drama, while also clearly identifying the respects in which Elgar departs from Wagner’s model. J. P. E. Harper-Scott (Edward Elgar: Modernist, Cambridge University Press, 2006), approaching Gerontius from the standpoint of a music analyst, notes the provisional nature of its tonal resolution: Elgar cannot end in E flat major, the key associated with God’s presence, since Newman’s narrative ends in the transitional state of purgatory – hope is present but not certainty. Byron Adams (‘Elgar’s Later Oratorios: Roman Catholicism, Decadence and the Wagnerian Dialectic of Shame and Grace’, in Byron Adams (ed.), Edward Elgar and His World, Princeton University Press, 2007) relates both Newman’s original text and Elgar’s musical response to it to the fin de siècle ‘decadent’ movement, suggesting that Elgar’s attraction to this subject-matter was in part caused by the strong feelings of shame he experienced – over his modest social origins, his lack of formal education, and, crucially, his identity as a Catholic in a Protestant-dominated society. Jeremy Begbie (‘Confidence and Anxiety in Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius’, in Martin V. Clarke (ed.), Music and Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ashgate, 2012), notes the work’s ‘unresolved oscillation between confidence and anxiety, a striving and a shrinking, a reaching forth and a holding back’ (p. 198), interestingly relating this trait to the anxiety that Elgar and others experienced over the theological implications of the view of purgatory implied by Newman’s text.

I propose to build on the work of these and other scholars of music and theology by offering a reading of The Dream of Gerontius that shows how Elgar’s music, rather than simply illustrating or reinforcing Newman’s narrative, offers the possibility (in the words of the Music and Religion section’s Statement of Purpose) of ‘constructive and transformative meaning-making’. I will focus in particular on the work’s ending, from the point where Elgar seems to illustrate the Angel’s promise to Gerontius (‘Yes, for one moment thou shalt see thy Lord’) with an outburst for the full orchestra that lasts for less than a second (Elgar instructs that ‘for one moment must every instrument exert its fullest force’, and the marking of fffz is followed immediately by one of piano). The remainder of the score, though extraordinarily beautiful, is subdued in tone. By using the expressive resources of the orchestra so sparingly, and by eschewing the opportunity to set texts that might have required a more affirmative musical expression (e.g. the ‘Gloria’ that concludes the prayer of the Souls in Purgatory in Newman’s poem), Elgar conveys his ambivalence about the implications of his Catholic faith even during this most ardent celebration of all that it offers.

My paper will draw not only on research into Elgar’s theological preoccupations and compositional practice, but also on the understanding of The Dream of Gerontius I have gained from conducting it in concerts. My next performance will take place in November 2025, a month after the 125th anniversary of the premiere and the week preceding the AAR Annual Meeting. For this forthcoming concert I will use, for the first time, the new edition of the score and performing materials recently prepared by Iain Farrington and published in 2022 by the Complete Elgar Edition. I will incorporate the insights into Elgar’s working practices gained from working with this new edition into the paper proposed here.