Elgar’s 1900 Midlands setting of St John Henry Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius is a rich starting point for delving into English Catholic cultures stretching from the 19th century to the present. Both poem and music contributed to their creators’ reputations in a country in which they were – as Catholics – part of a minority treated with suspicion, prejudice and even violence.
In a flurry of inspiration in a few weeks in 1865, Newman wrote his mystical poem about the journey of the soul after death on scraps of paper. Favourably received in both Catho lic and Anglican communities, the poem received a further boost to its popularity in imperial Britain following the death in 1885 of General Gordon, who kept a copy of Gerontius with particular passages underlined with him on his last military campaign.
Elgar’s musical interpretation, comparably, not only cemented his national reputation as a composer at the relatively advanced age of 43, but was also taken to signal the end of England’s 300-year duck in producing a composer of stature. As Richard Strauss said upon the performance of Gerontius in Düsseldorf in 1902, “With that work, England for the first time became one of the modern musical states.”
Yet the early reception of Elgar’s work also exposed typical anti-Catholic sentiments. Senior British composer Charles Villiers Stanford is said to have complained that Gerontius “stank of incense”, and the text was stripped of references to “Masses on earth” and prayers mentioning Mary, Mother of God for early performances in Anglican places of worship. Nor has the difficulty of dealing with Elgar’s religion disappeared over time. While some writers have claimed that he was never very religious, shoring up the love of the English countryside palpable in his music (think Ken Russell’s 1962 docu-drama Elgar out on the Malvern hills), others have cast his Catholicism as a form of otherness in Victorian (Anglican) Britain, articulated in the sensual, Wagnerian and above all foreign musical language of Gerontius .
Through a recent project centred on digitising the manuscripts of Gerontius and bringing them to a wide online audience, I have come to feel that none of these views fully capture Gerontius ’s connections to both Englishness and Catholicism. By examining the local Catholic cultures that nurtured Elgar, and the circumstances of the original commission for the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival, we shall see that music – in Worcester and elsewhere – was frequently the catalyst for greater exchange among Anglican and Catholic communities. Moreover, while this Catholic history of Gerontius is to be found in disparate places and materials, digital tools offer new opportunities for discovering and experiencing it anew.
June Rockett, in her social history of Catholic parishes, has noted Banbury as an example of a Catholic community easily absorbed into civic life because Catholics had lived locally and respectably for generations.
Similarly, Elgar’s Worcester had had an unbroken Catholic presence “since” (well before, obviously) Reformation times, and the city boasted Catholic families of wealth, respectability and civic distinction. The music at Worcester’s Baroque St George’s church during the tenure of Elgar’s father William and later Elgar himself as organist, had a number of attractions for non-Catholics. As Elgar’s childhood friend Hubert Leicester reports in Notes on Catholic Worcester (1928): “As there was no service on Sunday evenings at Worcester Cathedral, and the services at the parish churches were, for the most part, exceedingly plain, it is not surprising that large numbers of the citizens were attracted to ‘Sansome Street Chapel’ – as the Protestants were pleased to call our Catholic Church.”
The Catholic liturgy could thus liven up a dull Sunday evening, but it also offered a repertoire and quality of performance rarely available elsewhere. “The ordinary musical fare provided at the principal Mass on Sundays,” Leicester writes, “consisted of the well-known festival Masses of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Hummel and Weber.” And while William Elgar ran an excellent choir and orchestra even in ordinary circumstances, they were frequently bolstered by (foreign and Catholic) members of touring opera companies, including, memorably, the famous English tenor Sims Reeves. Finally, the choir and orchestra offered performance opportunities for both Catholics and Protestants, providing yet another opportunity for social interaction. The following anecdote, again from Leicester, is most revealing:
“A quaint story is told of one of the Chorister boys from our Cathedral who was desirous of hearing the music and had been invited to sing. To avoid trouble, he asked the schoolmaster if it would be wrong to attend, and the answer was: ‘You must not go to such a heretical place.’ The boy told his father, who was indignant, and suggested that the lad should please himself, which was accordingly done, and on entering the choir, the said schoolmaster was discovered among the band. Result – the boy sang one of the solos and the master joined with his flute in the accompaniment. No further reference was made to the incident.” Of course, the heretical musical fraternisation both lamented and indulged in by the schoolmaster also travelled in the other direction. The Three Choirs Festival, held annually in rotation among the cathedral cities of Hereford, Worcester and Gloucester, was a distinctly Anglican affair. In addition to its formal association with the three cathedrals, it had a history of excising Catholic allusions from sacred music, once listing a performance of Beethoven’s Mass in C as “Service in C”. Nevertheless, both Elgar’s father and Elgar himself were deeply involved in the festival. As a violinist, Elgar played in orchestras throughout the Midlands and became well acquainted with the leading Anglican organists and choral directors of the region. Elgar’s father, moreover, was able to introduce Cherubini’s Mass in D minor and Hummel’s Mass in E-flat into the festival programme. Notably, such permeability between Catholic and Anglican spaces, sacred and secular music-making, was also characteristic of Newman’s circles in Birmingham. Newman, a violinist and music lover himself, was a keen attendee of the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival, eventually rising to become a patron of the festival and encouraging younger fathers at the Oratory to attend likewise. At one festival, he encountered Cherubini’s Requiem in C minor and was sufficiently moved to arrange to have it performed liturgically at the Oratory. It was in the context of the Birmingham Festival that Elgar’s Gerontius would later be commissioned and – albeit with notorious incompetence – first performed.
If Elgar’s Gerontius emerged from a culture of musical ecumenism, what then of the notion that the composer’s inspirations from the English countryside trumped his religious affiliations? It is here that we must turn to the manuscript of Gerontius : gifted to Newman’s own Birmingham Oratory by Elgar himself, and now – thanks to a recent collaboration with Oxford University, the British Library and the National Institute for Newman Studies – is now freely explorable online at the Institute’s website.
The manuscript is peppered with allusions to Elgar’s rural surroundings at significant times in his life. Gerontius was largely composed at Birchwood Lodge, a summer cottage in a hilly and heavily wooded area near Malvern, where Elgar learned to cycle for the first time. Where the Soul’s Guardian Angel sings “Alleluia, From earth to heaven”, Elgar noted on the score: “at Birchwood Lodge in Summertime”; and during the Chorus of Demons at a prominent sforzando, Elgar writes, “Birchwood Lodge in thunderstorm”. These annotations have something of whimsy about them, yet more serious is his setting of the Soul’s utterance as he and the Angel enter the House of Judgment: “The sound is like the rushing of the wind, /The summer wind among the lofty pines”. This passage is relevant to the trees that Elgar knew so well from his birthplace cottage (now called The Firs), at his school, Spetchley Park, and the woods around Birchwood Lodge. Elgar recalled of the birthplace in a letter of 1920 to a friend who had visited it:
“So you have been to B[roadheath]. – I fear you did not find the cottage – it is nearer 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 & now and I want to see it.”
As the eminent Newman scholar Fr Guy Nicholls has suggested to me, the pine trees had a particular significance for St John Henry too, who frequently retreated to Rednal, where one could see the pines covering the Lickey Hills. Thus, a love of the coniferous English landscape was common to both men.
In the resonant “lofty pines” passage, we can also perceive a connection between this distinctly English experience and their Catholic faith. Elgar’s memory of Broadheath indicates a highly sensuous experience: memory triggering the very smell of the firs. Notably, too, both text and music of Gerontius are steeped in sensuous experience. Newman’s Soul wonders about his ability to perceive sights and sounds after bodily death. Elgar’s Wagnerian score – employing a musical language directly associated with sensuality and eroticism in the late 19th century – is equally evocative. Moreover, as Matthew Riley has discussed, Newman’s evocation of the wind here referenced a tradition of English poetry in which the movement of the breeze was a metaphor for spiritual awakening and renewal. And indeed, although not noted by Riley, the Biblical etymology of “ruach” or “pneuma” further intensifies this connection between the breeze and the life of the spirit. Perhaps this palpable sensuality in Elgar’s work, combined with its Wagnerian qualities, was more of a stumbling block for English Protestant critics than the references to Masses on Earth or Mary, Mother of God. Yet there is no reason to see it as fundamentally in opposition to the Englishness of either Newman’s text or Elgar’s music.
Digital discovery
To discover the Catholicism of Gerontius , we need to range over poetry, music, theology and social history, to move from inner-city Birmingham and Worcester to rural Herefordshire; we must see the material history of the work in the autograph score; and we must hear, see and even smell the places that inspired it. And yet part of the momentum for my project was the invisibility of the Catholic spaces in this story – St George’s Worcester and the Oratory in the usual Elgar tourist routes – and the almost legendary inaccessibility of Elgar’s manuscript among Elgar scholars. While being able to visit places physically is important, Covid has taught us to turn to the digital sphere.
The digitisation of Elgar’s score has multiple significance. Through special transmitted light photography, we revealed the original markings underneath corrected passages that had been glued down by Elgar. While these reveal no smoking gun of previously unknown material, the precise reworkings show the composer’s acute attention to detail and sensitivity to the impact of the work in performance. The permanent deposit of the digital manuscript in the Newman Institute’s collections, alongside the poem manuscript, also properly situates it within the theological, pastoral and musical culture of 19th-century Catholicism in the Midlands – a culture that also nurtured Tolkien, for example.
And while I have done something to showcase the places of Gerontius in a recent podcast series, Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius: A Story in Five Places, ongoing research by myself and colleagues is looking at mapping apps that can link physical “hotspots” to digital collections (imagine sitting in Elgar’s garden by the Scotch firs hearing the ‘lofty pines’ music).
The digital cannot – and is not meant to – replace the physical. But it can help to bring these submerged Catholic histories to light, and show how they inform the English Catholic culture we still inhabit when hearing Gerontius.
Joanna Bullivant is a lecturer in Historical Musicology at Oxford University
This article is from the December 2021 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.
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