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So we've now come to The Firs, Elgar's birthplace cottage, in Lower Broadheath near Worcester,

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and we can see actually that in some ways we might think of this as a very idyllic surrounding,

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and yet the building itself is a very modest cottage.

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It was extended at a later date, but this was really this was quite a humble place to be born.

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But talking of idylls, you really get a sense of the beauty of the natural surroundings in which we're in here.

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The authors, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, in their book Good Omens, quipped that "Heaven is not in England, despite what certain poets may think."

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And yet we can see something of why this place proved such an inspiration for

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Elgar in setting The Dream of Gerontius and its mystical heavenly setting,

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when we look around us today. As Jerrold Northrop Moore has pointed out,

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Elgar was only two years old when the family moved back into the centre of Worcester.

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The memory of this place cannot have been so much a conscious memory as, as he puts it, "a state of mind."

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And yet we know from things that Elgar said and did later how important this place was him was for him throughout

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his life because he actually chose this place to be preserved as a museum of all the houses that he lived in.

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And when Elgar was made a baronet, Sir Edward Elgar, he chose the title First Baronet Elgar of Broadheath.

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So we've now come to this particular spot at the very end of Elgar's garden, and the hedge is lower here.

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And you can just look across and see straight towards the Malvern Hills.

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And here is the statue of Elgar that's been placed on this bench with me, who's forever looking out of the garden into them.

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But it's also here that we get this clump of Scotch firs that we know were particularly evocative to Elgar.

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They're now bisected by a road and we can hear some of the traffic passing there.

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But we can we know how important these were to Elgar and actually specifically to Gerontius us from a couple of observations that Elgar made.

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So firstly, a friend of his wrote to him in 1920, having visited Broadheath,

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and when Elgar responded in his letter, even though this was nearly 70 years after he'd moved out of Broadheath, 

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he took the time to describe this very spot.

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"So you have been to Broad Heath. I think you did not find the cottage.

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It is near the clump of Scotch firs. I can smell them now in the hot sun.

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Oh, how cruel that I was not there. There's nothing between that infancy and now and I want to see it."

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So what Elgar describes in this evocative little passage from his letter is a very sensuous memory and association.

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So the memory of being here at The Firs at Broadheath is something that he can smell - that evocative scent of the fir trees -

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and this is very interesting in relation to The Dream of Gerontius, because both the poem and the music are incredibly sensual.

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So in Newman's poem, not only is the language very evocative and immediate,

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but also the Soul of Gerontius is describes things like being able to hear and see and feel,

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despite it being a soul, rather than having a body through which to experience the senses.

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And equally, one of the much discussed aspects of Elgar's music is his indebtedness to Wagner and the fact that Wag-

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nerian musical language in the 19th century was considered to be highly sensual to to the points of eroticism.

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So we see this as very much part of the work

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is this if evocation of the senses and how one can experience still experience aspects of the natural world,

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such as landscape, the movements of trees, the smell of trees and so on.

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There's a particular moment in the music in which this comes out really clearly.

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So the line in the poem at the time is "The sound is like the rushing of the wind, the wind amongst the lofty pines" and

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Elgar clearly takes his time and he really makes a big thing of how he's going to set this,

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so we have this sort of very special orchestration with the harps,

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And we also we can associate this with his experience of the wind rushing through the trees with these very evocative natural surroundings,

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which are here at The Firs, at Birchwood Lodge, where the work was mainly composed,

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and that his school, Spetchley Park as well, which features pine trees rather than fir trees.

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And it's also worth thinking as well about how this this evocative language about landscape

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actually relates to the substance of Gerontius and particularly this life of the soul,

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the journey of the soul after death. Because as Matthew Riley has pointed out, in English poetry,

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there was a long tradition of associating the rustling of the wind with spiritual awakening.

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And there are also there were also etymological traditions in biblical language,

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associating wind and breath in particular with the experience of the soul, with the very fact of the soul.

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So the word pneuma, for instance, is an example of this.

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So I think really being here, we can start to make those connections between the Elgar and Newman's insights into the journey

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of the soul and the language of their natural surroundings that they used to express that.

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And we're now going to go and see Birchwood Lodge and the surroundings of that cottage in order to continue that exploration.

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So we're now at Birchwood Lodge, which is the country cottage in this secluded area near Malvern,

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where Elgar did much of the actual composing of The Dream of Gerontius.

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And again, there's this association with the experience of having trees and woods all around, as Alice Elgar wrote very evocatively to a friend.

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He liked to go to a secluded country locations when he wanted to work seriously on a project. We know from a friend of the Elgars, Dora

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Penny, who had been immortalised as Dora Bella in the Enigma Variations, that Elgar was very focussed

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and secluded in his study on the first floor of the cottage while he was composing the work.

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So she recounts how Mrs Elgar would make up a tray with a thermos of coffee on it and leave it outside the study door so that Elgar

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was totally uninterrupted and would merely need to emerge for snacks and caffeine intake when the moment struck him. From her image there,

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we don't get much sense of Elgar's enjoyment of these surroundings, which again, even more so than The Firs are so natural,

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and there's such a palpable sense of, for example, "the trees singing" as Elgar once put it.

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But what we did, we do know that this place was important when he was and he was thinking about his

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surroundings when he was composing this from things that he wrote in the manuscript.

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So at two points in the score, in his annotations -

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so these scribblings that aren't part of the musical text to be performed, if you like - Elgar specifically mentions Birchwood.

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So at the first point, as the text being sung at that point says "Alleluia from earth to heaven,"

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Elgar writes underneath this "Birchwood Lodge in summertime."

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So exquisite is Birchwood Lodge that this reference to moving from earth to heaven is one that caused Elgar to note it at this point.

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So the other reference lay slightly later on is where we get this moment where the music's like a thunderclap.

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So we get what we call a sforzando of this loud emphasis in the music followed by quiet.

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And so at this point, Elgar writes "Birchwood Lodge in a thunderstorm."

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So really, these are less kind of evocatively serious references to the soul than some of the things that we've discussed thus far.

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But they're more sort of showing the human experience of writing this work and Elgar sitting doing

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this work and thinking about where he was thinking about his experience and reflecting sort of somewhat

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humorously in a very human way on these little observations of where he was and appreciating this place as

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he looked out of his study window towards the Malverns and towards the track where he would cycle down,

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which is where we are now with he wanted to go towards the village.

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And so finally, we're going to be going to the Oratory of Philip Neri in Birmingham to see Elgar's

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manuscripts and learn more about the association of his work with that place.