So we've now come to The Firs, Elgar's birthplace cottage, in Lower Broadheath near Worcester,
and we can see actually that in some ways we might think of this as a very idyllic surrounding,
and yet the building itself is a very modest cottage.
It was extended at a later date, but this was really this was quite a humble place to be born.
But talking of idylls, you really get a sense of the beauty of the natural surroundings in which we're in here.
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."
And yet we can see something of why this place proved such an inspiration for
Elgar in setting The Dream of Gerontius and its mystical heavenly setting,
when we look around us today. As Jerrold Northrop Moore has pointed out,
Elgar was only two years old when the family moved back into the centre of Worcester.
The memory of this place cannot have been so much a conscious memory as, as he puts it, "a state of mind."
And yet we know from things that Elgar said and did later how important this place was him was for him throughout
his life because he actually chose this place to be preserved as a museum of all the houses that he lived in.
And when Elgar was made a baronet, Sir Edward Elgar, he chose the title First Baronet Elgar of Broadheath.
So we've now come to this particular spot at the very end of Elgar's garden, and the hedge is lower here.
And you can just look across and see straight towards the Malvern Hills.
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.
But it's also here that we get this clump of Scotch firs that we know were particularly evocative to Elgar.
They're now bisected by a road and we can hear some of the traffic passing there.
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.
So firstly, a friend of his wrote to him in 1920, having visited Broadheath,
and when Elgar responded in his letter, even though this was nearly 70 years after he'd moved out of Broadheath,
he took the time to describe this very spot.
"So you have been to Broad Heath. I think you did not find the cottage.
It is near the clump of Scotch firs. I can smell them now in the hot sun.
Oh, how cruel that I was not there. There's nothing between that infancy and now and I want to see it."
So what Elgar describes in this evocative little passage from his letter is a very sensuous memory and association.
So the memory of being here at The Firs at Broadheath is something that he can smell - that evocative scent of the fir trees -
and this is very interesting in relation to The Dream of Gerontius, because both the poem and the music are incredibly sensual.
So in Newman's poem, not only is the language very evocative and immediate,
but also the Soul of Gerontius is describes things like being able to hear and see and feel,
despite it being a soul, rather than having a body through which to experience the senses.
And equally, one of the much discussed aspects of Elgar's music is his indebtedness to Wagner and the fact that Wag-
nerian musical language in the 19th century was considered to be highly sensual to to the points of eroticism.
So we see this as very much part of the work
is this if evocation of the senses and how one can experience still experience aspects of the natural world,
such as landscape, the movements of trees, the smell of trees and so on.
There's a particular moment in the music in which this comes out really clearly.
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
Elgar clearly takes his time and he really makes a big thing of how he's going to set this,
so we have this sort of very special orchestration with the harps,
And we also we can associate this with his experience of the wind rushing through the trees with these very evocative natural surroundings,
which are here at The Firs, at Birchwood Lodge, where the work was mainly composed,
and that his school, Spetchley Park as well, which features pine trees rather than fir trees.
And it's also worth thinking as well about how this this evocative language about landscape
actually relates to the substance of Gerontius and particularly this life of the soul,
the journey of the soul after death. Because as Matthew Riley has pointed out, in English poetry,
there was a long tradition of associating the rustling of the wind with spiritual awakening.
And there are also there were also etymological traditions in biblical language,
associating wind and breath in particular with the experience of the soul, with the very fact of the soul.
So the word pneuma, for instance, is an example of this.
So I think really being here, we can start to make those connections between the Elgar and Newman's insights into the journey
of the soul and the language of their natural surroundings that they used to express that.
And we're now going to go and see Birchwood Lodge and the surroundings of that cottage in order to continue that exploration.
So we're now at Birchwood Lodge, which is the country cottage in this secluded area near Malvern,
where Elgar did much of the actual composing of The Dream of Gerontius.
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.
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
Penny, who had been immortalised as Dora Bella in the Enigma Variations, that Elgar was very focussed
and secluded in his study on the first floor of the cottage while he was composing the work.
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
was totally uninterrupted and would merely need to emerge for snacks and caffeine intake when the moment struck him. From her image there,
we don't get much sense of Elgar's enjoyment of these surroundings, which again, even more so than The Firs are so natural,
and there's such a palpable sense of, for example, "the trees singing" as Elgar once put it.
But what we did, we do know that this place was important when he was and he was thinking about his
surroundings when he was composing this from things that he wrote in the manuscript.
So at two points in the score, in his annotations -
so these scribblings that aren't part of the musical text to be performed, if you like - Elgar specifically mentions Birchwood.
So at the first point, as the text being sung at that point says "Alleluia from earth to heaven,"
Elgar writes underneath this "Birchwood Lodge in summertime."
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.
So the other reference lay slightly later on is where we get this moment where the music's like a thunderclap.
So we get what we call a sforzando of this loud emphasis in the music followed by quiet.
And so at this point, Elgar writes "Birchwood Lodge in a thunderstorm."
So really, these are less kind of evocatively serious references to the soul than some of the things that we've discussed thus far.
But they're more sort of showing the human experience of writing this work and Elgar sitting doing
this work and thinking about where he was thinking about his experience and reflecting sort of somewhat
humorously in a very human way on these little observations of where he was and appreciating this place as
he looked out of his study window towards the Malverns and towards the track where he would cycle down,
which is where we are now with he wanted to go towards the village.
And so finally, we're going to be going to the Oratory of Philip Neri in Birmingham to see Elgar's
manuscripts and learn more about the association of his work with that place.