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Once again, less than two months after James Levine’s great reading of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Symphony Hall audiences heard a truly unforgettable performance—on the very highest level in nearly every respect and even miraculous in some—of a very great work, Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. Even the widespread neglect of this great work in America offered an advantage of sorts. Hearing it out of its secure context in the repertoire of the English choral societies, one could more readily appreciate its universality, its power to move audiences in purely human terms, beyond its ostensible religious, particularly Roman Catholic, origins. However, as rich as its musical and spiritual rewards were, the event posed just as many questions, above all, why is the music of Elgar so dismally neglected in this country, when critics have singled Elgar out as the most international of British composers?* In his own time, he was regarded as the true successor to the great German symphonists, and Gerontius itself enjoyed its first successes in Germany. Its freedom from religious specificity, the universality of its effect on audiences, poses another question. If it isn’t a church work, just what sort of music is it?
Since Elgar wrote it on commission for the Birmingham Triennial Festival, it falls inevitably into the mainstream of the English oratorio tradition, and it took a honored place in that tradition after its first few years, following its disastrously ill-prepared premiere at the festival. However, Elgar particularly disliked it when people called it an oratorio. He liked the term “sacred oratorio,” which occurs on some early concerto programs, even less. In fact, as Diana McVeagh observed in her recent book, Elgar the Music Maker (not cited in the program notes!), in her analysis of Gerontius—the most penetrating we now have—he was eager to avoid an overtly pious intent. In fact Elgar’s attitude towards religion was deeply ambiguous, even hostile, in his bitterness after Gerontius’ initial failure. He had grown up with a painful consciousness of his disadvantage as a Catholic in Worcestershire, a stoutly Protestant county. His father, who had converted to Roman Catholicism in order to get a job as organist at Worcester Cathedral, was a fiercely anti-religious man, who despised Anglican, Catholic, and dissenter alike. Yet, when offered the Birmingham commission, he reached for Cardinal Newman’s intensely spiritual and Catholic poem as his text. First of all, Fr. Knight, one of his early mentors, had given him a copy of the poem. Later, in 1884 and 1885, when news of the siege of Khartoum and General Gordon’s gallant death seized the headlines, Elgar was as moved by the story as any of his compatriots. In his last months Gordon, a devout evangelical Anglican, took special comfort in reading Newman’s poem, and he sent his annotated copy back to England before the end. Elgar was particularly struck by this, and he and Alice Roberts, later his wife, read it often together. Gordon, as a hero and an Englishman’s Englishman, had a powerful effect on the acceptance of the poem by the public at large, if not of Roman Catholics, although McVeagh notes that fewer than a half-dozen of the 350 choristers at the first performance knew about its existence. Elgar’s admiration for Gordon inspired him to plan a Gordon symphony at one point early in his career, but not feeling ready for such a task, he gave the idea up. Perhaps it was Gordon’s cachet that gave Elgar confidence, as he set to cutting and adapting Newman’s text into the tight, dramatic libretto of his work, in spite of the advice of his agnostic advisor, August Jaeger, to avoid anything exuding an odor of Catholicism, which were “likely to frighten some d----d fools of Protestants.” As it was, all the “Joseph and Mary” (as Jaeger described it) alienated English listeners only mildly. The modernity of the work, as well as its difficulties for even first-rate performers, proved to be more of a challenge, but within a few years it had acquired a secure place in the repertory. In the midst of the Great War and its avalanche of death, it had a strong consolatory appeal, alongside, ironically, Brahms’ A German Requiem.
Following Newman’s Aeschylean thrust, Elgar strove to cast the mystery of death as a drama accessible even to the agnostic. Only the previous year, he had created a fundamentally modern work—one which is far more revolutionary than it seems—in his “Enigma” Variations by setting his persona as composer afloat, so to speak, among the perceptions of various friends. In Gerontius, using an overtly Roman Catholic text in Protestant England, described in 1891 as “the least in sympathy with the present time” of 19th century poems, he freed the concepts of death, judgement, and the afterlife, at least dramatically and emotionally, from sectarian doctrine. Even a Buddhist can find something to identify with in the work. Most justly and importantly, McVeagh stresses Gerontius as “the meeting point of the English Choral and German Romantic movements, to be set alongside Schumann’s, Liszt’s, Berlioz’s and Busoni’s Faust music; Wagner’s Parsifal, Mahler’s Resurrection and Eighth symphonies; and Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung.” Drawing parallels with Vaughn Williams and Britten, she asserts its place “as sacred music drama...with Verdi’s Requiem, Parsifal, and the Symphony of Psalms.”
Although there is virtually no performance tradition on this side of the Atlantic,* Colin Davis achieved results from the Boston Symphony and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus which compares bravely to his great 2005 reading with London Symphony Orchestra and chorus, available as a recording from LSO Live. Although Symphony Hall lacks some of the clarity and intimacy of the Barbican, Sir Colin elicited his characteristic lean textures from both orchestra and chorus. In the Levine era the orchestra has made extraordinary progress in its ability to adapt to a visiting conductor’s preferences of tone and balance, serving Sir Colin as well as Bernard Haitink or Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos. When Sir Colin conducted the orchestra years ago they were not so adaptable. The clarity of inner voices and their jewel-like color were extraordinary, as were the enthusiasm and expressiveness of all players in this unfamiliar music. Sir Colin’s firm control allowed the full expressiveness of Elgar’s music to unfold at a freely moving pace. Lightness and an easy animation were characteristic of both the texture and the tempo of his approach. Rather than compromise the seriousness of the work, this opened up its dramatic and spiritual force. Free from traditional conventions, this was clearly a contemporary and cosmopolitan approach. However, if one listens to Malcolm Sargent’s classic 1945 recording, one will note that Sargent, in his somewhat more rhetorical, but fully cogent way, is equally concerned with keeping the music moving. Sir Colin’s firm grasp of structure was especially illuminating in the Parsifal-like Prelude and marked the path for the rest of the work.
Sarah Connolly, mezzo-soprano was exceptionally moving in her portrayal of Gerontius’ guardian angel, in which she balanced sympathy and super-human poise. Her control of phrasing and tone seemed just right for the music, although her top notes were occasionally a trifle white. Gerald Finley, who doubled the parts of the Priest and the Angel of the Agony, sang these darker roles with a powerful restraint, which likewise seemed exactly right. His beautifully balanced and coherent voice, with its handsome leathery color, is a magnificent and expressive instrument. Afterwards I heard more than one listener say that his parts, doubled as they were, were all too brief.
The renowned Heldentenor Ben Heppner as Gerontius, although he was in fine voice, proved the only disappointment in the performance, as slight as it was. His creamy top was well integrated with his lower registers, which was a great advantage in Gerontius’ brutally exposed high passages, and he sang most expressively, but with with what I perceived as a certain disengagement. After Vinson Cole’s deeply felt Gerontius at Bard this past summer and a recent hearing of Heddle Nash’s great performance under Sargent, this detachment proved rather disturbing. Perhaps he doesn’t believe in any of it, or perhaps it had something to do with his musical approach to the part. Both Nash, who set the standard for Gerontius in his time, and Cole took Newman’s text as their point of departure, as did Elgar, who held the poem in great reverence, whatever his feelings about the religion in which he had been baptized, and they made every word clear and paid scrupulous attention to the divisions and shape of each phrase of English or Latin text, never letting us forget that we are listening to a great English poem. Heppner, on the other hand, followed a standard operatic approach and favored musical lines in his interpretation, focusing on diction and poetic phrasing only in passages deemed worthy of special emphasis, for example in “Sanctus fortis, Sanctus Deus...” in Part I, but in Part II...
I can no more: for now it comes again,
That sense of ruin, which is worse than pain,
That masterful negation and collapse
Of all that makes me man...
What poetry! And in this Heppner’s performance was second to none. As handsome his voice and and polished his musicianship, I was disappointed that he could not go all the way all the time.
I mentioned earlier that there was a miracle in this performance, and that was the singing of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. One will hear magnificent performances of the choral parts of Gerontius in Britain, where it belongs to the standard repertoire, but to hear an American chorus, who haven’t sung it since 1981, master every aspect of this difficult score with such musicianship and sensitivity, is astonishing. They sang without scores, as is their custom, projecting consistently perfectly understandable diction in the rich, but somewhat washy acoustic of Symphony Hall, perfect intonation, clarity, a vast range of dynamics and color, moving expressivity, and inspired commitment to Elgar’s masterpiece. For example, in the textural clarity and tonal beauty of “Holy Mary, pray for him...” or the quality of their staccato notes and the immaculate detailing of the counterpoint in “From the sins that are past, From Thy Frown and Thine Ire,” the fugal passages of the Chorus of Demons, or the pianissimi of the Chorus of Angelicals. This was the most impressive choral feat I have ever heard, and John Oliver and every singer in the chorus should feel immensely proud of its unique quality. And, I’m sure, Colin Davis can take some credit for this as well.
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*The only earlier performance of it by the BSO occurred in 1981, under Colin Davis’ direction, like the current one. Elgar received a fine sesquicentennial tribute in the 2007 Bard Music Festival, Bard’s first devoted to an English composer, but it was surprising that no work of Elgar was performed at Tanglewood, although one of his most eloquent interpreters, Mark Elder, was a guest conductor there—as he will be, fortunately, in Boston later this month.
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