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‘Proficiscere, anima Christiana’: Gerontius and German Mysticism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Abstract
The popularity in Britain of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius was triggered by the successful reception of the work in Germany in December 1901 and May 1902. By examining some of the writings on Elgar by German critics in this period, I explain that what may particularly have appealed to German audiences was the composer's engagement with mysticism, something that as well as being a distinct strand of German theology since medieval times had acquired a new popularity among German artists in a number of fields, as part of a reaction to the materialism of Wilhelmine Germany. Through a reading of the work that takes into account both its Catholic theology and ideas of mysticism more generally, I propose that the two Parts of the work should be conceived as taking place simultaneously, rather than successively, and that the work is thus best understood as belonging to the genre of epic rather than drama.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © 2013 The Royal Musical Association
Footnotes
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Thirteenth International Biennial Conference for Nineteenth-Century Music, University of Durham (2004), and the Music Research Seminar, University of Bristol (2007). I am also grateful to Stephen Banfield, Rachel Cowgill, Peter Franklin, Charles Edward McGuire, Laura Tunbridge and Andrew Weeks for their help and advice.
References
1 Lewis Foreman, ‘Elgar and Gerontius: The Early Performances’, The Best of Me: A Gerontius Centenary Companion, ed. Geoffrey Hodgkins (Rickmansworth, 1999), 162–235 (pp. 168, 173).
2 Rosa Burley and Frank C. Carruthers, Edward Elgar: The Record of a Friendship (London, 1972), 142, quoted in Jerrold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (2nd edn, Oxford, 1987), 331; Mrs Richard Powell [Dora Penny], ‘The First Performance of “Gerontius”’, Musical Times, 100 (1959), 78–9.
3 Foreman, ‘Elgar and Gerontius’, 182, 186–7. There was a performance in Worcester on 9 May 1901 under the composer, but it did not include the Demons’ Chorus. For some of the British critical reaction to the première, see Moore, Edward Elgar, 331–4, and ‘The Birmingham Première’, The Best of Me, ed. Hodgkins, 123–55.
4 See the reviews in the Düsseldorfer Zeitung and Düsseldorfer Volksblatt, trans. David Mason, quoted in Foreman, ‘Elgar and Gerontius’, 192, 198.
5 Foreman, ‘Elgar and Gerontius’, 205.
6 Foreman, ‘Elgar and Gerontius’, 188.
7 Foreman, ‘Elgar and Gerontius’, 187; Herbert Thompson, ‘The English Autumn Provincial Festivals’, Zeitschrift der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft (hereafter ZIMG), 5/4 (January 1904), 173. Thompson noted the near-identical attendance figures for the three oratorios at the 1903 Three Choirs Festival at Hereford: 2,130 for Gerontius, 2,129 for Elijah and 2,128 for Messiah.
8 Robert Anderson, Elgar (London, 1993), 54; Byron Adams, ‘Elgar's Later Oratorios: Roman Catholicism, Decadence and the Wagnerian Dialectic of Shame and Grace’, The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, ed. Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton (Cambridge, 2004), 81–105 (p. 87, n. 26); Charles Edward McGuire, ‘Measure of a Man: Catechizing Elgar's Catholic Avatars’, Edward Elgar and his World, ed. Byron Adams (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 3–37 (p. 6). The clerics had support from conservative critics like Charles Maclean, according to whom ‘a modern poem with its direct imagery does introduce and accentuate feelings of theological difference, which ancient words in Latin, become almost a formula, do not; and if the clergy are in earnest, they could not possibly allow the drama of “Gerontius” to be acted in its ipsissima verba before their eyes and giving the sanction of the Protestant church-building for which they are in trust’. See Charles Maclean, ‘Notizien’, ‘Worcester’, ZIMG, 4/1 (October 1902), 31–2 (p. 31). For more on the often mixed reception of Catholic oratorios, and Gerontius in particular, in Britain, see Maria McHale, ‘A Singing People: English Vocal Music and Nationalist Debate, 1880–1920’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 2003), Chapter 2 (‘Oratorio and the Choral Tradition’), 102–60, esp. pp. 125–42.
9 Emma Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford, 2002); Adams, ‘Elgar's Later Oratorios’, esp. pp. 83–93. The connection between Parsifal and Gerontius has long been recognized (Adams, ‘Elgar's Later Oratorios’, 86–7); the pejorative form that this could take is exemplified by Ernest Walker, who claimed that Gerontius's profession of faith, ‘though sincere, nevertheless suggest[s] an atmosphere of artificial flowers’, a choice of metaphor that hints at Act 2 of Parsifal. See Ernest Walker, A History of Music in England (Oxford, 1907), 306–7, quoted in Aidan J. Thomson, ‘Elgar's Critical Critics’, Edward Elgar and his World, ed. Adams, 193–222 (p. 213).
10 Sandra McColl, ‘Gerontius in the City of Dreams: Newman, Elgar, and the Viennese Critics’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 32 (2001), 47–64. The critics who admired the work most were Richard Wallaschek in Die Zeit, who saw ‘the national music […] of the German people as potentially lying in the massed choral-orchestral festivals that were a feature of German life at the time’ (quoted in McColl, ‘Gerontius in the City of Dreams’, 48), and Maximilian Muntz in the Deutsche Zeitung (a Christian socialist paper). Those who disliked it most were Hedwig von Friedländer-Abel in the Montags-Revue, who found the text ‘saccharine’ and Elgar's setting of it ‘artificial, cluttered, contrivedly simple’ (quoted in McColl, ‘Gerontius in the City of Dreams’, 54, 60); David Josef Bach in the Arbeiter-Zeitung (a socialist paper); and Robert Hirschfeld in the Wiener Abendpost, who thought Elgar's setting too operatic for a religious work. The leading Viennese critics, Julius Korngold (Neue Freie Presse) and Max Kalbeck (Neues Wiener Tagblatt), were moderately pro- and anti-Gerontius respectively; both disliked the text but, for the most part, praised Elgar's setting of it.
11 Max Hehemann, ‘Edward Elgar’, Die Musik, 2/7 (January 1903), 15–25, and idem, ‘Edward Elgar’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 72/40 (27 September 1905), 760–2; Otto Neitzel, ‘Zwei “Urneuheiten”: Elgar's “Traum des Gerontius” und Reznicek's “Till Eulenspiegel”’, Signale für die musikalische Welt, 60/10 (29 January 1902), 145–8; Fritz Volbach, ‘Die “Apostel” von Edward Elgar’, Allgemeine Musikzeitung, 31/51 (16 December 1904), 849–50, continued in Allgemeine Musikzeitung, 31/52 (23 December 1904), 869–70, and idem, ‘Edward Elgar’, Hochland, 5/1 (December 1907), 316–21. Volbach's perspective may also have been consolidated by his personal friendship and correspondence with Elgar; see Walther Volbach, ‘Edward and Fritz Volbach’, Musical Opinion, 60 (1937), 870–2. For more on these critics, see Aidan J. Thomson, ‘Elgar in German Criticism’, The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, ed. Grimley and Rushton, 204–13.
12 Among early twentieth-century British critics, Alfred Kalisch described Strauss as ‘the greatest, if not the only great force in the music of to-day, and destined to have a permanent and prominent place in the history of music’, while Maclean, though much appalled by the plots of both Salome and Der Rosenkavalier, described Strauss as the ‘greatest of living musicians’. See Alf[red] K[alisch], ‘Musikberichte’, ‘London’, ZIMG, 4/10 (July 1903), 626–7 (p. 627); Charles Maclean, ‘Music and Morals’, ZIMG, 8/12 (September 1907), 461–4 (p. 462); and C[harles] M[aclean], ‘London Notes’, ZIMG, 14/5 (February 1913), 138–9 (p. 138).
13 A blatant example of this point of view can be found in Hugo Riemann, ‘Schluss’, ‘Musikgeschichte’, §222 of Das goldene Buch der Musik, ed. Karl Grunsky et al. (Berlin and Stuttgart, 1900); note particularly Riemann's implicit universalizing in his references to ‘real art’ and ‘for all countries’: ‘The complete picture of the musical world at the end of the century shows that Germany's musical supremacy over all countries that cultivate real art continues with unabated strength. […] For all countries, the “greats” are German masters: Bach, Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner and Brahms. For one or other of one's own nationality to be equated with these greats is the highest thing to which the pride of other nations aspires’ (‘Das Gesamtbild der musikalischen Welt am Schlusse des Jahrhunderts zeigt die noch mit ungeschwächter Kraft fortdauernde musikalische Suprematie Deutschlands über alle Länder, welche überhaupt die rechte Kunst pflegen. […] die “Grossen” sind für alle Lande die deutschen Meister Bach, Händel, Gluck, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner und Brahms. Diesen Grossen einen oder den andern der eigenen Nationalität gleichzustellen, ist das Höchste, wozu sich der Stolz der anderen Nationen erhebt’). Hubert Parry's Studies of Great Composers (7th edn, London, 1902) focuses on almost exactly the same composers as Riemann; of these, only Gluck and Brahms are not the subjects of individual chapters, and Palestrina is the sole non-German/Austrian.
14 Hehemann, ‘Edward Elgar’ (1905), 761: ‘Seitdem Prof. Buths in Düsseldorf am 19. Dez. 1901 den “Traum des Gerontius” zum ersten Male in deutscher Sprache aufführte, hat Elgar Heimatrecht bei uns’ (italics added).
15 Peter Dennison, ‘Elgar's Musical Apprenticeship’, Elgar Studies, ed. Raymond Monk (Aldershot, 1990), 1–34 (pp. 13, 27). In an interview that appeared in Chicago Inter-Ocean on 7 April 1907, Elgar expressed his admiration for Strauss's tone poems, but comments about Tod are conspicuous by their absence: ‘“Don Juan” is the greatest masterpiece of the present, and his “Heldenleben” and “Zarathustra” I find almost as inspiring’ (quoted in Moore, Edward Elgar, 511).
16 Neitzel, ‘Zwei “Urneuheiten”’, 145: ‘[…] dass sie unmittel- oder mittelbar durch Richard Strauß’ Vorgang in's [sic] Leben gerufen wurden, ein Beweis, wie weit dieser Hecht im musikalischen Karpfenteich […] die musikalischen Wasser aufrührt. Und zwar spinnt das Elgar'sche [sic] Oratorium die Gedanken- und Empfindenskreise weiter, die Strauss in seiner Tondichtung “Tod und Verklärung” angeschlagen hat.’
17 Neitzel, ‘Zwei “Urneuheiten”’, 146: ‘eine Art “Parsifal” dritter Act, nur daß dem Gerontius der Schlangenbiß der Reue und der versäumten guten Thaten erspart bleibt’.
18 Neitzel, ‘Zwei “Urneuheiten”’, 145: ‘feierlichen aber kurzen Einzug in's [sic] Elysium’. Such predestination was also congruent with nineteenth-century theories of heroism, notably that outlined by Thomas Carlyle, for whom ‘Man [was] heaven-born; not the thrall of Circumstances, of Necessity, but the victorious subduer thereof’; see Thomas Carlyle, ‘Boswell's Life of Johnson’ (1832), Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 5 vols., The Works of Thomas Carlyle (Centenary Edition), ed. Henry Duff Traill, 26–30 (London, 1896–9), iii (1898), 90, quoted in introduction to Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, notes and introduction by Michael K. Goldberg; text established by Michael K. Goldberg, Joel J. Brattin and Mark Engel (Berkeley, CA, 1993), xxxiv–xxxv.
19 Strauss may have envisaged himself as the hero of Tod. In a letter to Friedrich von Hausegger in 1895 he wrote that he aimed ‘to represent the death of a person who had striven for the highest artistic goals, therefore very probably an artist’; see Michael Kennedy, Strauss Tone Poems, BBC Music Guide (London, 1984), 22. Moreover, Strauss quotes Tod at several points in Ein Heldenleben.
20 Neitzel, ‘Zwei “Urneuheiten”’, 145–6: ‘hat Newman die letzten Augenblicke seines Helden völlig in die Bannkreise des katholischen Glaubens hinübergeführt’; ‘schöpft er aus der Fürbitte, die ihm eine Bestätigung seiner Glaubenstreue ist, erneute Widerstandskraft’; ‘als ihn, unter dem Einfluß des ihm erscheinenden bösen Geistes, erneute wilde Todesfurcht durchschüttelt’.
21 Hehemann, ‘Edward Elgar’ (1903), 17: ‘Bei Strauss wird das Ideal in diesem Leben erstrebt’; ‘bei Elgar spricht die Musik noch mehr wie die Dichtung das Verlangen nach dem Jenseits aus, und das Gebet, das die Freunde des Gerontius seiner abgeschiedenen Seele widmen, ist keine zerknirschte wehmutsvolle Bitte, sondern eher ein Triumphgesang für den, der das Leben überwunden hat und durch die Todespforte eingeht zur ewigen Freude’.
22 Hehemann, ‘Edward Elgar’ (1903), 17: ‘Bei Strauss wird das Ideal in diesem Leben erstrebt’; ‘bei Elgar spricht die Musik noch mehr wie die Dichtung das Verlangen nach dem Jenseits aus, und das Gebet, das die Freunde des Gerontius seiner abgeschiedenen Seele widmen, ist keine zerknirschte wehmutsvolle Bitte, sondern eher ein Triumphgesang für den, der das Leben überwunden hat und durch die Todespforte eingeht zur ewigen Freude’; letter to August Jaeger, 28 August 1900, in Elgar and his Publishers: Letters of a Creative Life, ed. Jerrold Northrop Moore, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1987), i: 1885–1903, 228.
23 Roy Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism: German Literature and Society 1880–1918 (London, 1973), 162–3, 166.
24 For more on Lagarde, see George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964), 31–9, and Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, CA, 1974), 35–52. For an overview of the social, cultural, intellectual and artistic reaction to bourgeois modernity in Wilhelmine Germany, see Hagen Schulze, Germany: A New History, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 176–83.
25 Quoted in Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism, 171.
26 Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewußten, 8th edn, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1878), i: Phänomenologie des Unbewußten, 314, quoted in Jakob Mühlethaler, Die Mystik bei Schopenhauer (Berlin, 1910), 80: ‘Das Wesen des Mystischen ist zu begreifen als Erfüllung des Bewußtseins mit einem Inhalt (Gefühl, Gedanke, Begehrung) durch unwillkürliches Auftauchen desselben aus dem Unbewußten.’
27 Wilhelm Windelband, Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, 4th edn, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1907), i, §5, ‘Die deutsche Mystik’, quoted in Mühlethaler, Die Mystik bei Schopenhauer, 79: ‘erscheint der Mensch in seiner Identität mit der Gottheit als das Erkenntnisprinzip des Mystizismus. Der Mensch als Mikrotheos ist die Enthüllung aller Rätsel. Die Seele ist soweit Gott, als sie ihn erkennt – sie erkennt ihn soweit, als sie Gott ist. Dies Erkennen aber ist ein “unaussprechliches Anschauen” […]. Dieser idealistische Pantheismus, der die äußere Welt in die innere und die innere Welt in eine selige Gottesanschauung auflöst, ist der Grundcharakter der deutschen Mystik.’
28 Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism, 171. The first modern edition of either mystic's work was Deutsche Mystiker des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts, ed. Franz Pfeiffer, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1845–57), ii: Meister Eckhart. Other editions included Heinrich Suso Denifle, Die deutschen Schriften des Seligen Heinrich Seuse aus dem Prediger Ordern (Munich, 1880); Wilhelm Preger, Ältere und neuere Mystik in der ersten Hälfte des XIV. Jahrhunderts: Heinrich Suso (Leipzig, 1881); Meister Eckhart und seine Jünger: Ungedruckte Texte zur Geschichte der deutscher Mystik, ed. Franz Jostes (Freiburg, 1895); and Meister Eckharts mystische Schriften, trans. Gustav Landauer (Berlin, 1903).
29 Alain de Libera, Eckhart, Suso, Tauler, ou la divinisation de l'homme (Paris, 1996), 102, 111. Suso took a similar position to Eckhart: for him there was a need to be ‘freed from the forms of creatures, formed with Christ, and transformed in the Godhead’; the ‘goal of the truly detached person in all things’ was to ‘sink away from the self, and with the self all things sink away’ (Alain de Libera, Eckhart, Suso, Tauler, ou la divinisation de l'homme (Paris, 1996), 118–19; my translations). See also Henry Suso, The Exemplar, with Two German Sermons, trans., ed. and with introduction by Frank Tobin, preface by Bernard McGinn (New York, 1989), 184–5, and Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, IN, 1995), 122ff.
30 Eckhart even implied this directly, claiming that the ‘breakthrough’ required to achieve union was a transformation akin to transubstantiation; Suso challenged this position, arguing that however much a human might share Christ's humanity, no union with God could result in that human approaching Christ's divinity. See Libera, Eckhart, Suso, Tauler, 176, 182. Suso's refutation of Eckhart's position appears in The Little Book of Truth, Chapter 4; see Suso, The Exemplar, ed. Tobin, 29–30.
31 Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, 79, 84–5.
32 Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, 116, 27–8. Hollywood discusses the tradition of women identifying with the body more than men did, including in their respective spiritualities. Following the trial and condemnation of Meister Eckhart in 1328, the suffering body again became seen as essential as a means to accessing the divine; see Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, 75, 95, 101 and 206.
33 Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, 9.
34 Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, 138, 151.
35 Andrew Weeks, German Mysticism from Hildegard of Bingen to Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Literary and Intellectual History (Albany, NY, 1993), 230. Schopenhauer's mystical thinking derived from, among other sources, Buddhism, Eckhart and the sixteenth-/seventeenth-century mystic Jakob Boehme. See also Gerard Mannion, Schopenhauer, Religion and Morality: The Humble Path to Ethics (Aldershot, 2003), 77–80.
36 For examples of such mystically inspired work, see Weeks, German Mysticism, 233–5, and Paul R. Mendes Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit, MI, 1991), 80. Other figures inspired by the ideas of mysticism besides Rilke, George and Kandinsky included Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gustav Klimt, Hermann Hesse, Gustav Landauer and Ernst Bloch.
37 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. Richard Burdon Haldane and John Kemp (London, 1896), iii, §34, p. 231.
38 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. Haldane and Kemp, §52, pp. 333, 335.
39 ‘The knowing individual as such [i.e. one who still consciously knows], and the particular thing known by him, are always in some place, at some time, and are links in the chain of causes and effects. The pure subject of knowledge [i.e. one who has lost his sense of individuality through the contemplation that Schopenhauer deems necessary to come to perceive Ideas directly] and his correlative, the Idea, have passed out of all these forms of the principle of sufficient reason: time, place, the individual that knows, and the individual that is known, have for them no meaning’ (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. Haldane and Kemp, §34, p. 232).
40 Hehemann, ‘Edward Elgar’ (1903), 17: ‘Elgars Nationalität äusserlich am wenigsten aufgeprägt ist’.
41 Hehemann, ‘Edward Elgar’ (1905), 761: ‘Wir müssen [Elgar] als einen nationalenglischen Komponisten ansehen, und als einen religiösen dazu und zwar seltsman genug bei einem Sohne Albions, als einen katholischen. Es nimmt sich aus wie ein Spiel des Zufalls, dass gerade in England ein Sänger katholischer Mystik entstand, und doch scheint es das natürlichste zu sein.’
42 Volbach, ‘Die “Apostel” von Edward Elgar’, 849: ‘Eine Fülle von ganz neuen, bis ins kleinste differenzierter Seelenstimmungen, Stimmungen, die wie traumhaft ahnend, jenseits aller Wirklichkeit unsere Seele umfangen, klingen uns aus diesem Werke entgegen. Die Darstellung mystischer unfaßbarer Stimmungen ist Elgars Domäne.’
43 Volbach, ‘Edward Elgar’, 317: ‘Der ganze Zauber tiefinnerlichster Mystik, wie er sich hier ausspricht, eine Beseligung und Tiefe des Wesens, wie wir sie höchstens aus den verklärten Schilderungen visionären Schauens eines Suso empfinden, spricht sich in dieser Dichtung aus; ein Empfinden, getragen von brünstiger Gottesminne fernab dem Irdischen, in seligen Sphären verschwebend. Nicht glauben, Gott lieben: denn Credere in Deum est per dilectionem ire in Deum, sagt der alte Cäsarius von Heisterbach. Die weltabgewandte, verklärende Gottesminne ist der Quell, aus dem Elgars Kunst geboren, aus der geheimnisvollen Tiefe der Mystik. Im Gerontius fand Elgar zum ersten Male die Sprache für das Unausprechliche.’ Caesarius (c.1170–c.1240), the prior of the Cistercian Abbey of Heisterbach, was best known for his 12-book Dialogus magnus visionum ac miraculorum (Great Dialogue of Visions and Miracles) and the three-book De vita et actibus domini Engelberti Coloniensis archiepiscopi et martiris, the life of St Engelbert, archbishop of Cologne. New editions of these works appeared in 1851 (Cologne) and 1898 (Elberfeld) respectively.
44 Charles Edward McGuire, Elgar's Oratorios: The Creation of an Epic Narrative (Aldershot, 2002), 153; see also Andreas Friesenhagen, ‘An English Oratorio as Pathfinder: Notes on the Form and Layout of Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius’, The Best of Me, ed. Hodgkins, 102–15 (pp. 103–4).
45 Friesenhagen, ‘An English Oratorio as Pathfinder’, esp. pp. 110, 112; see also Moore, Edward Elgar, 305. Gerontius is technically a through-composed work, but old-fashioned ‘number’ structuring is discernible in both parts. For more on the quasi-number structuring of Gerontius, see McGuire, Elgar's Oratorios, Chapter 4 (‘The Dream of Gerontius and Operatic Narrative’), 126–76, esp. pp. 146–53 and 165–74.
46 For a theoretical and practical explanation of tonal (and harmonic) space diagrams, see Fred Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch Space (Oxford, 2001). In Lerdahl's theory (which develops earlier theories of tonal space, notably those of Gottfried Weber and Arnold Schoenberg), each row consists of alternating major and minor keys, the minor keys appearing to the right of their tonic major, and to the left of their relative major, while each column consists of the circles of fifths. ‘Sharp’ keys appear above ‘flat’ keys, so that tonal movement through increasingly ‘sharp’ keys is viewed as an ascent, and corresponding movement through increasingly ‘flat’ keys is viewed as a descent. The movement between keys is shown graphically by arrows. Wherever possible, a journey between two keys should take the shortest possible path; thus the move from D minor to B♭ at the beginning of Part I involves a move down one row to the right rather than down four rows to the left. In some cases, usually when the keys are some distance apart, there is a certain efficacy in bending this rule; and since in Lerdahl's theory each B♭ major in the grid is theoretically identical with every other B♭ major, there seems little practical reason not to do so.
47 It is also possible to conceive of these progressions in neo-Riemannian terms, although the implications of such an approach lie outside the scope of this article.
48 McGuire's analysis of Part II (Elgar's Oratorios, 165–74) refers to the Demons, Angelicals and Angel of the Agony/Judgment sections as ‘tableaux entendus’, which ‘teach the Soul and the audience something about the afterworld’ through the large-scale choruses and the dialogue between the Soul and the Angel (p. 165). Although the tableaux necessarily have to appear in a particular order, their essentially reflective and explanatory character means that they are characterized not by drama that moves forward in time (with the exception of the moment of judgment itself) but by the intensification of a particular moment.
49 Hehemann, ‘Edward Elgar’ (1903), 17: ‘die höchsten Wonnen den Jenseits wiederkehren’.
50 Mühlethaler, Die Mystik bei Schopenhauer, 87–8: ‘ein Zustand völliger Abgeschiedenheit der Seele, wo die äußere Welt zurücktritt, überstrahlt vom Glanze eines innern Lichtes, […] eines Lichtes, das uns eine geistige Welt zur unmittelbaren Schauung beleuchtet’; ‘ein Verschwinden des Ich-Bewußtseins’; ‘Verlust des Raum- und Zeitbewußtseins’; ‘Fehlen aller Vorstellungen und Begriffe, überhaupt als einen Zustand, wo die Identität von Subjekt und Objekt gleichsam erlebt wird’.
51 No examination of the motivic content of Gerontius would be complete without recourse to Jaeger's Analytical and Descriptive Notes on the work (August J. Jaeger, The Dream of Gerontius, John Henry Newman and Edward Elgar: Analytical and Descriptive Notes (London, 1901; rev. edn 1974)). Written for the work's première, the Notes aimed to provide listeners with a synopsis of the main musical themes in a manner similar to Hans von Wolzogen's thematic guide to the Ring cycle, in which Wagner's leitmotifs are given specific non-musical labels. While Elgar was certainly flattered by Jaeger's implicit comparison of him with Wagner – though the extent to which the themes in Gerontius are strictly speaking leitmotifs rather than reminiscence motifs is certainly debatable – he distanced himself from his friend's insistence that the themes in Gerontius be given ‘a one word name wherever possible’, commenting that ‘my wife fears you may be inclined to lay too great stress on the leitmotiven plan because I really do it without thought – intuitively, I mean’. As Christopher Grogan has commented, Alice's alleged concerns were undoubtedly Elgar's own; he ‘seem[ed …] to have anticipated the likely adverse influence of Jaeger's methods upon the audience and the critics, who would be encouraged to perceive the music as no more than the stringing together of essentially unconnected thematic tags’. In the event, Jaeger gave names to only 15 of the 76 quoted themes, including ‘Novissima hora’, and these names were put in parentheses. See letter from Jaeger to Elgar, 26 August 1900, and letter from Elgar to Jaeger, 28 August 1900; both are quoted in Christopher Grogan, ‘“My dear analyst”: Some Observations on Elgar's Correspondence with A. J. Jaeger regarding the “Apostles” Project’, Music and Letters, 72 (1991), 48–60 (pp. 48–9) (italics original).
52 Moore, Edward Elgar, 305.
53 1 John ii. 18; Luke xxiii. 46. Appropriately, Jaeger describes the figures as ‘plaintive’ (The Dream of Gerontius, 14).
54 Gerontius is not a ‘number’ oratorio, so this solo (figures 106–14) is not designated an aria. But it has certain aria-like qualities: a scena and recitative introduction (figures 101–6); an internal Bar form (two Stollen at figures 106 and 108:3, and an Abgesang at 110:3); and, for all its chromaticism (the openings of the Stollen are characterized by I/♭II discord), a single tonic (D♭).
55 This forceful reaction was not in Elgar's original plans. He had intended ‘Take me away’ to be set quietly, part of a gradual diminuendo that took place from ‘Praise to the Holiest’ to the end of the work, in order to give the impression of a Soul ‘shrivelled, parched & effete, powerless & finished’ from the minute it had seen God. However, he responded to criticism from Jaeger, who argued that ‘the first sensations the soul would experience [on seeing God] would be an awful, overwhelming agitation !; a whirlwind of sensations of the acutest kind coursing through it; a bewilderment of fear, exitation [sic], crushing, overmastering hopelessness &c &c, “Take me away!!”’. Jaeger added that Wagner ‘would have made this the climax of expression in the work’, whereas Elgar's proposed solution had ‘shirked […] the supremest moment’. The negative comparison with Wagner and, in a subsequent letter, with Richard Strauss, seemed to act as a spur to Elgar, who revised the section to be something closer to what Jaeger had envisaged. See Elgar, letter to Jaeger, 20 June 1900, quoted in Elgar and his Publishers, ed. Moore, i, 202; Jaeger, letter to Elgar, 27 June 1900, quoted in Elgar and his Publishers, ed. Moore, i, 204–5 (Jaeger's italics); and Jaeger, letter to Elgar, 30 June 1900, quoted in Elgar and his Publishers, ed. Moore, i, 208.
56 Moore, Edward Elgar, 300. Note, however, that the a″–g ♯″–c ♯″–a″ melodic line at figure 120 recalls the f ♯′–e ♯′–a ♯–f ♯′ at figures 56:3–5 in Part II. In the earlier passage the Angel sings ‘Thou knowest not, my child, What thou dost ask’ when the Soul expresses his hope that he will see God; in the later passage this knowledge is made fully apparent.
57 Appropriately enough, it is at the words ‘a singer who sings no more’ that ‘Novissima hora’ is quoted in Elgar's later choral work The Music Makers. For more on the web of self-quotations and allusions that Elgar uses in this piece, see Aidan J. Thomson, ‘Unmaking The Music Makers’, Elgar Studies, ed. J. P. E. Harper-Scott and Julian Rushton (Cambridge, 2007), 99–134.
58 Michael Kennedy, Portrait of Elgar (3rd edn, Oxford, 1984), 134. For a good survey of the difficulties involved in the generic classification of Gerontius, see McGuire, Elgar's Oratorios, 38–45.
59 Newman, Elgar, 55. Later in the same paragraph Newman explicitly describes Gerontius as an oratorio: ‘It was because in his next oratorio [Gerontius] Elgar was fortunate enough to get a theme alive with human emotion from first to last that he succeeded in making of it such a masterpiece.’ For a German critique that refers to Gerontius as an oratorio, see n. 16 above.
60 Although the extent to which Volbach and Neitzel would have been aware of this is questionable, these exponents would have included a great many nineteenth-century British composers; as Howard E. Smither has observed: ‘From the late 1840s to the 1880s, the primary model [for English oratorio] was Mendelssohn’ (‘Oratorio: England and America, 19th century’, New Grove Online, <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com>, accessed 3 May 2013).
61 Otto Neitzel, ‘Die Apostel: Oratorium von Edward Elgar, op. 49: Erstaufführung in Deutschland beim Niederrheinischen Musikfest in Köln im Mai 1904’, Signale für die musikalische Welt, 62/38 (15 June 1904), 676–8 (p. 677): ‘mystisch-katholische Betrachtungen […] von deren [Elgar] schon im zweiten Teil des Gerontiustraumes soviel Belege gab’. According to Neitzel, Elgar ‘in this respect goes considerably further than Liszt and Tinel, of whom the second still more than the first has remained in the forecourt of mysticism’ (‘geht hierin erheblich weiter als Liszt und Tinel, von den der zweite noch mehr als der erste im Vorhofe des Mystizismus stehen blieb’). Tinel's oratorio St Francis was performed at the Cardiff Festival in 1895, but received a mixed reception; the Special Correspondent of the Musical Times complained that the whole of the first part of the work concentrated on the worldly period of the saint's life, and that the third part made ‘a pious end in a space of time remarkably brief by contrast with the prolonged lamentations raised above his remains and the jubilations with which his apotheosis is celebrated by way of Finale’. See ‘Cardiff Musical Festival’, Musical Times 36/632 (October 1895), 672–3 (p. 672).
62 Neitzel, ‘Die Apostel’, 678: ‘Grundsäulen der jedesmaligen Textstimmung’.
63 Volbach, ‘Edward Elgar’, 318: ‘über ihnen steht eine höhere Macht, Jehova, der Gewaltige. Er ist der wirkliche Lenker der Geschicke. Unsichtbar leitet er sie, aber wir ahnen seine Nähe, wir fühlen sie aus dem Brausen der mächtigen Chöre, die so zum eigentlichen Mittelpunkte des Ganzen werden, und mächtig in die Breite wachsen. […] das Ganze ist emporgerückt in die Sphäre des Erhabenen’.
64 Volbach, ‘Edward Elgar’, 318: ‘Keiner seiner [Handel's] Nachfolger – am wenigsten Mendelssohn – vermochte die Größe und Erhabenheit dieser Idee zu fassen.’
65 Volbach, ‘Edward Elgar’, 318: ‘Keine Entwicklung einer Handlung im Sinne des Dramas; nur große, breit angelegte Bilder, die sich auf dem erhabenen Goldgrunde mächtiger Chöre aufbauen, stehen neben einander. Aber verbunden sind die durch einen großen erhabenen Gedanken.’
66 Volbach, ‘Edward Elgar’, 318–19: ‘setzen sich aus einzelnen Szenen zusammen, breit ausladenden Bildern, ohne fortlaufende Handlung, und zusammengefaßt durch die Idee des unsichtbar Göttlichen, Erhabenen. Im Gerontius steht sogar die körperlose Seele, um die Engel und Dämonen streiten, im Mittelpunkte; eigenartige, traumhafte Empfindungen, wie sie die Seele befallen, während sie dahineilt zwischen Welt und Ewigkeit, bang erwartend, vor ihren Richter zu treten.’
67 Cf. Percy Young's comment that ‘being the pattern of a spiritual progress traced in a dream it was inaccessible as a narrative’. Young also draws attention to the fact that, besides the première of Gerontius, 1900 also saw the publication of Sigmund Freud's Träumdeutung. See Percy M. Young, Elgar, Newman and The Dream of Gerontius: In the Tradition of English Catholicism (Aldershot, 1995), xi.
68 Volbach, ‘Edward Elgar’, 318: ‘die Idee des unsichtbar Göttlichen, Erhabenen’; ‘fortlausende Handlung’; ‘nur als Oratorium denkbar’.
69 Willy Seibert, ‘Das 79. Niederrheinische Musikfest in Düsseldorf’, Die Musik, 1/18 (June 1902), 1681: ‘Es liegt aber in der Natur der Sache und der Absichten, dass Steigerungen, wie sie motivisch aufgebaute Chöre ergeben, ausbleiben und durch die Unterordnung der musikalischen Idee unter den jeweiligen Inhalt Längen entstehen, die durch das Fehlen der Kontraste, wozu noch eine gewisse harmonische Gequältheit kommt, ermüden. Das wird dem zweiten Teil des riesig interessanten Werkes fast verhängnisvoll.’
70 Volbach, ‘Edward Elgar’, 321: ‘sich der Empfindungsgehalt der Hauptcharaktere und Momente gewissermaßen verdichtet. Sie ziehen sich durch das Werk, die Gedanken bald verknüpfend, bald vertiefend, lenken den Blick zurück auf Geschehenes, weisen prophetisch verkündend in die Zukunft.’
71 Like many of his contemporaries, Volbach understood ‘leitmotif’ to be more or less synonymous with what we know as a ‘reminiscence theme’, and not as a musical motif that formed the musical as well as the dramatic substance of music drama (see McGuire, Elgar's Oratorios, 84–6, for a useful summary of the changing definitions of ‘leitmotif’). Given the number-like structures of Gerontius (alluded to in n. 45 above), The Apostles and The Kingdom, Volbach's terminology is obviously wrong; yet his sense that Elgar's motifs could both deepen and anticipate ideas suggest that they were more than just dramatic props.
72 Stephen Banfield, ‘The Dream of Gerontius at 100: Elgar's Other Opera’, Musical Times, 141 (2000), 23–31.
73 Stephen Banfield, ‘The Dream of Gerontius at 100: Elgar's Other Opera’, Musical Times, 141 (2000), 23, 27–9.
74 Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice 1800–1900 (Berkeley, CA, 1990), 22.
75 Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice 1800–1900 (Berkeley, CA, 1990), 24, 30; Kramer cites Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD, 1976), 141–64. For the connection between Gerontius and decadence, see n. 9 above.
76 Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 30.
77 McGuire, Elgar's Oratorios, 133.
78 Banfield, ‘The Dream of Gerontius at 100’, 26.
79 Arnold Schoenberg, ‘New Music: My Music’, Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein (London, 1975), 99–106 (p. 105).