I'm Joanna Bullivant, a music lecturer at the University of Oxford,
and this podcast explores Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius through the places that inspired it.
Gerontius is one of Elgar's most important works alongside the Enigma Variations.
It was one of the two works that launched his career and recognition as a composer of international stature,
as Richard Strauss, the German composer, said upon a performance of the work in Dusseldorf in 1982.
With this work, England has become one of the modern musical states.
And yet it would be a mistake to see Elgar's work Gerontius as simply part of England's promotion to a putative compositional Premier League.
It is a work that is bound up with issues of the composer's religious and national identity.
For one thing, it sets a poem of the same name by Cardinal Saint John Henry Newman,
a figure who proved a focal point for much of the ambivalence surrounding Roman Catholicism that characterised 19th century England.
Famously, in 1875,
Newman contributed to a public dispute over the patriotism of Catholics after William Gladstone suggested in his pamphlet to the Vatican decrees that
"no one can now become Rome's convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another."
So what Gladstone was saying here - was accusing English Catholics of - was essentially being unable to be both Catholic and patriotic,
a key accusation that would clearly have implications for Elgar.
And with that in mind, we can see something of the accusations made against Elgar's music, particularly Gerontius, of its strangeness and Englishness,
in a remark attributed to the senior English composer Charles Villiers Stanford, who is said to have complained that Gerontius "stank of incense".
Thus, the work has important connexions to Elgar's identity as part of a minority religious group in late 19th and early 20th
century Britain who were trying to establish their religious and national identity within the mainstream Anglican culture.
Moreover, Elgar made much discussed comments about the relationship of this work to his own personal sense of faith.
The work is headed with the dedication "Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam" or "For the Greater Glory of God."
The composer also signified his personal and creative achievement in the work by adding to the end of the manuscript score
A quotation from John Ruskin: "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."
However, after the first catastrophic English performance in Birmingham on 3rd of October 1900,
Elgar was distraught, writing to his friend August Jaeger:
"I have worked hard for forty years &, at the very last, Providence denies me a decent hearing of my work;
so submit - I always said God was against art and I still believe it ...
I have allowed my heart to open once - it is now shut against every religious feeling and every soft, gentle impulse for ever.
Gerontius is definitely a work which is bound up with Elgar's own developing faith in his lifetime,
with his experience as part of a minority culture, with his status as England's national composer.
But there's another aspect of the work I want to explore in this podcast,
which is the work's association with the English landscape and particularly the countryside around Worcester.
We know that in the work, as we shall see, Elgar evoked the fir trees that were so evocative in the place of his birth,
Broadheath, and also around the cottage where he composed much of the work,
Birchwood Lodge. So this is what we're going to be exploring through this tour of five places that are significant to Elgar's work,
which is Worcester Cathedral, St George's Catholic Church in Worcester,
The Firs, which is Elgar's birthplace cottage, Birchwood Lodge, and finally, the Oratory of St Philip Neri in Birmingham,
which was the home of St. John Henry Newman and now houses Elgar's original autograph manuscript, in the course of this journey.
What we'll try to do is gain insights into not only Elgar's work itself,
but into the culture, community and places that nurtured his creativity and that all contributed to making this work, The Dream of Gerontius, possible.
So I want to start our story before we delve back into the history of the work with the modern Worcester itself.
I'm here just at the edge of the high streets where William Elgar, Elgar's father's music shop, stood just over there.
And we're also by this civic statue of Edward Elgar showing his central city to Worcester.
And this is right in the heart of the city, directly opposite the cathedral, really cementing that connection,
that historic importance of to the city and his relationship with Worcester Cathedral itself.
We're now going to move over to the cathedral grounds and inside the cathedral
itself to discover more about Elgar's association with this historic building.
So we're now inside Worcester Cathedral. I'm here with Samuel Hudson, Director of Music at Worcester Cathedral.
And could you please start by telling us something of Elgar's association with the cathedral in his lifetime?
Of course. So Elgar had a close association with the cathedral and with Worcester.
His father had a music shop on the High Street here now just yards from where Elgar's statue is.
And as a young man, Elgar played the violin in the Three Choirs Festival Orchestra and then went on to have a
lot of his larger-scale works performed and sometimes premiered here in the cathedral.
So it was a building that he was familiar with throughout his life.
Is it correct to say as well that he had many friendships with key people who were associated with music in the cathedral?
Absolutely, yes. And he knew Sir Ivor Atkins very well indeed.
He was the director of music here, one of my predecessors, for 50 years.
So he did come into contact with lots of musicians of the time and indeed those of the neighbouring cathedrals in Hereford and in Gloucester.
And were there any tensions with Elgar's associations and his works here, given that he, as a Roman Catholic,
he wasn't a worshipper here, and that his religion also came into aspects of his music, such as notably in the case of Gerontius?
Yes, there was there was a period, I believe, where the text of The Dream of Gerontius was altered to fit the performance inside the cathedral.
And I think, indeed, a period where it wasn't performed as well. So we've sort of got past that now.
And Gerontius is one of the great pieces that is performed regularly here by a number of different groups.
But I think that did probably come into the equation in our lifetime.
Also, perhaps we could then turn our attention to the window here, which actually depicts a scene from The Dream of Gerontius.
So could you could you tell us more about how this window came to be in the cathedral when it was created and what it's signifying?
Of course. So the window was installed in 1935. So just a year after Elgar's death, it was designed by A K Nicholson,
and it depicts the main scenes from the narrative of The Dream of Gerontius.
The bottom of the window you have Gerontius surrounded by his friends and by the priests,
above that you have the Soul of Gerontius and his Guardian Angel, and the sides at the bottom
you've got various saints. So this is Saint Wulstan and Saint Oswald, who are saints associated with Worcester.
And then you've got Saint Cecilia as well, of course, the patron saint of music.
And then at the very top of the window is New Jerusalem, the heavenly city.
Obviously, with Christ in the middle, as you've said,
these difficulties or these tensions over the Catholic content of Gerontius are not something that's felt today.
And what do you think the importance of Elgar for this building, for the town of Worcester, for the worshippers here is today?
Well, I think Elgar is still a massively important figure for us here in Worcester and certainly is one of the cathedral's musicians.
I feel that very strongly. We still perform a lot of his music.
And it's wonderful to to walk through the cathedral and think that this was
the first place that some of the great pieces by Elgar were heard and in fact,
that he himself had such a close association with the building and knew the building so well.
So I think that more widely the people of Worcester, the congregation at the cathedral and the
musical groups associated with the cathedral will also feel that link with Elgar and are very,
really proud to continue to perform his music.
So as we heard from Samuel Hudson, Elgae remains a really significant figure associated with the cathedral and a source of pride in Worcester,
a famous son associated with the history and the cultural achievements of the city and the cathedral.
We also heard about his association with the Three Choirs Festival,
a long running choral festival which alternates every three years between the cathedrals of Hereford, Gloucester and Worcester.
And we heard also of his association with organists of Worcester Cathedral, such as Ivor Atkins.
There is a strong association there, a strong connection. And yet also, as we heard, there are also tensions.
Elgar scholar Charles Edward Maguire has noted the window would not have been deemed
appropriate at the time of the 1902 performance because of its overtly Catholic content.
Newman's poem depicts the death of Gerontius - the name signifying simply old man - while a priest in assistance asked for the prayers of Mary,
mother of God. After death, the Soul of Gerontius is lifted up by his Guardian Angel towards the enthroned Christ in heaven,
the scene depicted in the Elgar window. However,
the soul finds himself unready to behold his Lord and instead is lowered into the waters of Purgatory by
the Guardian Angel to be aided again at the throne of Christ by masses on earth and prayers in heaven.
These references to the saying of masses on Earth and prayers for the intercession of Our Lady proved a
distinct sticking point when the work came up for performance as part of the Three Choirs Festival in 1932.
And indeed, the festival had some form in this area,
having refused to perform works with their original Latin texts in the past and referring to Beethoven's
Mass in C as a "service" at one point in its history. For this 1902 performance of Gerontius,
all these various references to masses to the Virgin Mary had to be omitted and other sections had to be mumbled by the singers.
So this is a real palpable reminder of what it meant for Elgar to be working as a Catholic
composer in an Anglican culture and trying to break into that culture as a musician.
It's also worth noting the centrality of the statue of Elgar in the city centre just by the cathedral and the Elgar
window can give this impression or that this was the heart of where Elgar lived his life as well as created his music.
But in fact, this was not his childhood place of worship. And in order to discover that, we have to go elsewhere.