Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius is a work which has haunted my imagination, challenged my thinking, enriched my spirituality and given me joy beyond telling for over forty years… by Michael J Townsend

The subject
The organisers of the 1900 Birmingham Festival took a risk when they commissioned Edward Elgar to write a choral work for them. At 41 he was still relatively unknown. Initially Elgar chose the life of St. Augustine as his subject. The committee turned that down and he eventually decided on Cardinal Newman’s long poem The Dream of Gerontius, which he had known for many years. It tells the story of an old man approaching death, being commended to God. It then depicts his soul after death being guided by his guardian angel into the presence of God. From there the soul is taken to Purgatory to be purged of its sins before entering heaven.

Put as baldly as that it hardly seems a promising subject for a musical work and it also represented a radical break with the past. The 19th century English oratorio tradition generally took biblical subjects. Mendelssohn’s Elijah and St. Paul, Parry’s Job and Sterndale Bennett’s The Woman of Samaria, were staple fare for festival choral societies. Elgar, at that time an active Roman Catholic, chose to set a poem whose ostensible subject is the depiction of the Catholic doctrine of purgatory – this at a time when Catholics were still regarded with suspicion in many quarters.

The writing and the premier
Newman’s poem, written in 1865, is no masterpiece. As poetry it is rather second-rate and sometimes clumsy, though it has some passages of remarkable beauty and intellectual vigour throughout. Elgar knew what he was doing. He excised great chunks of the text and moved passages around to give it dramatic focus. It evidently grabbed hold of Elgar’s imagination and he worked on it with feverish intensity not entirely accounted for by his having left it very late to begin if the work was to be completed in time. When it was done he knew that he had written a masterpiece. At the end of the score he inscribed words from John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies:

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.

The italicisation is Elgar’s. If it seems like the slightly self-conscious literary reference that a composer might put at the end of his score, knowing it will be read by posterity, the same cannot be said of his comment about Gerontius in a letter to a friend: ‘I’ve written it out of my insidest inside.’ Indeed he had.

However, the premiere on 3rd October 1900 was an almost total disaster. Almost everything capable of going wrong at the first performance of a complicated choral work with three soloists went wrong. The critics and commentators were surprisingly kind, many discerning the quality of the work which was struggling to get out from beneath the performance. But for Elgar the experience was devastating and his reaction violent: ‘I always said God was against art & I still believe it’ he wrote. He had offered the best of his art to God and it had been, as he saw it, rejected.

He never risked another Gerontius. His two later oratorios (a word he never used to describe Gerontius), The Apostles and The Kingdom have many felicities but are much more conventional. They have nothing of the white heat of Gerontius. The writer Jerrold Northrop Moore thinks they were bargains: if God really did care about Elgar’s art then let him show it by sending inspiration for the oratorios. But even great artists do not bargain successfully with God.

The Music
The Dream of Gerontius is in two parts. Part 1 begins with an orchestral prelude. As it ends Gerontius sings his opening words, ‘Jesu, Maria, I am near to death, and Thou art calling me.’ He sings of his fear at the approach of death not only as a physical fact but as a ‘strange innermost abandonment.’ However, he is not alone, for the semi-chorus is heard interceding for him through the phrases of liturgical prayer. In this experience the dying Christian is supported by the company of the faithful. Then Gerontius sings of his faith using Latin prayers from the Good Friday liturgy interspersed with verses of Newman’s own composition, ‘Firmly I believe and truly/God is Three and God is One…’ (once available to Methodist congregations in the 1969 collection Hymns and Songs). Gerontius approaches his death with fear but also with a well-instructed faith. Elgar’s genius at this point is to set the Latin and English words in slightly different styles, making the whole sound simultaneously like a liturgical hymn that Gerontius has learned and a personal confession of faith. Gerontius’ last words echo those of Jesus from the cross, ‘Into Thy hands, O Lord…’ matched by music of the utmost simplicity. Then a blaze of brass launches the bass soloist and the chorus into the ancient prayer, ‘Proficiscere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo! Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul!’  John Lampard has demonstrated that this beautiful text originated in France over 1,200 years ago (John Lampard, Go Forth, Christian Soul, Epworth Press, Peterborough 2005) and ably tells its story. A shortened version of it can be found in ‘Prayer with the Dying’ in The Methodist Worship Book p.431.

As Elgar piles yet more glorious and noble phrases into his music we are left in no doubt that the Church’s commendation of the believer to God is of deep significance.

Part 2 begins with the Soul of Gerontius singing, ‘I went to sleep; and now I am refreshed’ and the contrast in musical texture between this and the somewhat fearful musings at the beginning of Part 1 could hardly be greater. The Soul marvels at what it experiences and here Elgar selects some of Newman’s best lines to set to music. ‘I hear no more the busy beat of time’ is one example; a paradox because although there is no time in eternity the singer is performing and the listener is hearing the music in time – Elgar catches this perfectly. Nor does he duck the hardest challenge a composer can face when the Soul wonderingly exclaims, ‘I hear a singing…Oh what a heart-subduing melody!’ A heart-subduing melody is duly supplied: the mezzo-soprano (guardian) Angel enters with ‘My work is done, my task is o’er’ to an archetypal Elgarian melodic phrase of the utmost simplicity.

The succeeding dialogue between Soul and Angel represents the most radical redaction of Newman’s original. Elgar chooses those passages which relate most directly to the Soul’s journey into the presence of God. It is the Angel’s task to explain (as it were) what will happen, and thereby to prepare the Soul. But all is not straightforward.

The Soul becomes aware of a ‘fierce hubbub’, caused by the demons in hell. They sing two extraordinary choruses expressing their hatred of Christianity – and saints in particular – and their own free-thinking independence from God. Elgar’s music is necessarily dissonant and chaotic (at least by the standards of 1900) and strikes us as such even now. These are passages of astonishing difficulty on which many an amateur choral society has come to grief, as did the first performance. But the demons have no power over the Soul and are safely negotiated.

At this point the dialogue between the Soul and the Angel begins to approach its central question. The Soul wants to know whether it will see its ‘dearest Master’ and receives the reply, ‘Yes – for one moment thou shalt see thy Lord.’  As they approach closer to the throne of God we hear the semi-chorus (the Choir of the Angelicals) begin to sing, ‘Praise to the Holiest in the height’.  In an abbreviated form this is familiar as a hymn set to J.B. Dykes’ pleasing if innocuous tune ‘Gerontius’, written only three years after the poem first appeared. That Elgar’s setting is of another order entirely hardly needs saying; here is the composer at his grandest and noblest, the music of heaven indeed.

Suddenly the Soul sings, ‘I hear the voices that I left on earth’ and we hear the bass soloist (now the Angel of the Agony) offer an intercession. Then we come to the work’s (late) climax. The Soul sings ‘I go before my Judge’. This is followed by an orchestral passage of mounting intensity, a brief silence and then a great chord on full orchestra as the Soul comes into the presence of God. As it finishes the Soul (beginning on a cruelly high note) sings ‘Take me away…’ and the heart of this great work is reached. The Soul is willingly led away to its purging that it might be worthy to stand in the presence of God. The souls in purgatory are heard singing words from the psalms and then the Angel sings again. The orchestral strings enter with one of Elgar’s most beautiful tunes, supple and flowing and full of hope, but when the Angel begins, ‘Softly and gently, dearly-ransomed soul’ it is to a lovely counter-melody. The two mingle and separate and then flow into first a verse from Psalm 91 sung by the souls in Purgatory, then a repeat of the Choir of Angelicals softly singing ‘Praise to the Holiest in the height’. Salvation has been achieved, it is all of God and to the glory of God and the emphatic closing ‘Amen’ properly inevitable.

The issues
It was the doctrine of Purgatory (or rather its misuse through the selling of indulgences to release souls from it) which precipitated the Reformation. Elgar (and Newman) take us beyond the theories and the disputes into the theological and psychological heart of what it is about. Gerontius, a sinner like the rest of us is, despite his faith, not ready to dwell in the presence of God. There is no question over his salvation; he is destined for heaven but at his death is not ready to be there. Are any of us?

Classical Protestantism treats justification in largely forensic terms. We are put right with God through what God-in-Christ has done for us. Christ’s righteousness is ‘imputed’ to us. Those who confess that Jesus is Lord are therefore seen and treated by God as if they are righteous. This undoubted truth leaves unanswered the questions around holiness and sanctification. Are believers just treated as if they are righteous or do they in some sense become so? There is plenty in the New Testament, not least in the writings of Paul which suggests that the Christian life is a process of ‘becoming what we are’. John Wesley’s sometimes tortured wrestling with what he called ‘perfect love’ reflects this question. If the call to discipleship is also a call to holiness, what limits can be set to such holiness in this life? Above all, what happens when the process is incomplete at death?

The Soul’s cry, ‘Take me away’ at the heart of Elgar’s work arises from the Soul’s own awareness of unworthiness, not from God’s command. The Soul knows s/he is not yet able to bear the light and love of God’s presence and ‘Take me away’ is the heartfelt cry to be fully restored to the image of God, cost what it may. The genius of Elgar’s work is not that it compels us to believe in a doctrine of Purgatory. Rather, it lies in enabling us, imaginatively, to desire communion with God and to be ready for it. How that may eventually happen is, of course, entirely God’s business and God’s work. The question itself may haunt our days, which is why The Dream of Gerontius may do so too.

Michael J Townsend is currently Superintendent of the Grimsby and Cleethorpes circuit. He is a former Chair of the Leeds District and Chair of the Faith and Order Committee. He is the author of several books on worship, preaching and the sacraments and of biblical commentary.