Edward Elgar and His World by Byron Adams Page B

conception and technical mastery, are far above anything in “The Dream of Gerontius;” but, none the less, it does not seem to me so successful in an artistic sense. The subject, of course, is not so complete; not so pliable to the personal treatment which is the strength of the composer. It is laid out in a series of pictures which have no great connection one with another; and Dr. Elgar has so seized on the picturesque side of the matter that the spiritual ideas are more or less swamped. The orchestra plays a large part in the work, and I must confess that I found it the most interesting part. But, after all, the vocal portion of an opera and an oratorio must predominate if the main idea of a work is to impress. Elgar’s writing for the voice has greatly improved since he composed “The Dream of Gerontius;” but it still does not seem to me that he thinks in a vocal sense. His melodies do not come to him as song; they are not the natural outcome of the words that he sets. In “The Apostles,” for instance, there is but very little vocal music that really would impress one apart from the harmony and the orchestral colour. Again, in his laying out of the choruses, he is too inclined to make his voices part of the whole contrapuntal web, as if they were additional instruments. The effect in performance is not equal to the clever appearance of the music on paper. Much that one expects to come out well is comparatively ineffective.
    A PART from all these technical defects, however, the work fails to make the impression that it should, because the composer has not kept to a very central idea. He continually wavers between description and the expression of personal feelings; between the dramatic and the lyrical view of his subject. One finds this, to be sure, in the works of many a great composer. Handel, for instance, is descriptive in one chorus and in the next he is abstract and emotional; but Dr. Elgar has a fancy for mixing his point of view whenever musical exigences [sic] prompt him. As an instance, I may mention the realistic description of the pieces of silver (by a gong and shivering of cymbals) in the midst of the impressive Judas music.
    â€œThe Apostles,” however, is not a work that can be finally judged by two hearings. It is to [be] performed again by the Royal Choral Society this month, and I shall go to its performance with an open mind. At present it impresses me in detail, but the cumulative effect is not impressive. The new overture, “In the South,” in spite of a rather weak opening, and perhaps some diffuseness, is a work which should raise the composer’s reputation. Once again I thought that Dr. Elgar finds his proper expression in orchestral composition rather than in oratorio.
    Â 
    Part III: The Gloucester Festival Performance (September 8, 1904)
    The Three Choirs Festival was perhaps the most important choral festival in Britain in the early twentieth century (indeed, it remains one of the most important to this day). It is an annual event whose venue rotates among the cathedrals of Worcester, Hereford, and Gloucester, and is so called because its festival chorus was traditionally drawn from the choirs of those three cathedrals. Typically, the festival began on a Sunday with a service that included an anthem and canticles specially written for the occasion; this was followed during the week by a series of morning and evening concerts that included several large-scale choral works (including Messiah and Elijah) and a rather smaller number of orchestral works. The festival usually included several premieres of works by British composers.
    In 1904, the Three Choirs Festival took place in Gloucester and ran from September 4 to 9 . The Apostles was performed in Gloucester Cathedral on the morning of September 8 as part of a concert that also included Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony.
    The soloists included four of those who had sung at the premiere (Albani,