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Fifty years have passed since Elgar’s setting of Cardinal Newman’s poem ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ was first performed at the Birmingham Festival. This great music now holds an established place in the general repertoire of choral societies: indeed, so secure is its present position that it is easy to forget how chequered has been its career in the half century, to what accidents it has been a prey, under what misunderstandings it has suffered—and does still suffer.
When ‘Gerontius’ first appeared, Elgar was just beginning to attract attention as a national rather than as a provincial composer, very largely because of the enthusiasm Hans Richter had shown in conducting the ‘Enigma Variations’. Though the forty-three year old composer at this time, therefore, commanded a certain amount of respect among musicians, his new work must have seemed a strange affront to the old, but extremely vigorous, oratorio tradition of choral singing, well nurtured on a staple diet of Handel and Mendelssohn. Even Parry and other composers of the English musical renascence of the last two decades of the nineteenth century had made no really significant advance in this genre, and while Elgar refrained from describing ‘Gerontius’ as an oratorio (although the proportions of the work make this seem a more suitable description than Jaeger’s ‘cantata’) the new durchkomponiert setting of Newman’s poem must have appeared as a determined tilt at the venerable oratorio tradition, to which indeed it virtually gave the death blow.
