This got to be too long for the “Sacred Music” thread so I’ve started one in which I can witter at length.
Last year I found myself with a regular car journey that was about an hour each way, and I had the luxury of a car CD player and so the time to listen to something really long that, as a father of two small boys, I don’t often get to listen to. As the thread title suggests, this was Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius.
I first encountered this epic piece some years back when a young lady at the place I used to work drew my attention to a local performance of it. (She’d appointed herself a sort of unofficial morale officer after I’d been jilted, with no apparent ulterior motif on her part.) My half-time reaction was: why have I waited 29 years to hear this? Later I was to hear/see it on BBC TV with the phenomenally talented Willard White as The Priest and The Angel of the Agony. They’re comparatively minor parts, as the cognoscenti will know, but they gave him the opportunity to showcase his magnificent bass voice; I can’t remember at all who the other soloists were.
Later I was given the Barbirolli recording as a birthday present. I misremember who the tenor soloist is, which as this is Gerontius and his Soul is a major blind spot on my part, but the Angel is sung, definitively, by Janet Baker, not then a Dame, and I can safely say she had a good day at the office on this one. Kim Borg as the bass soloist pronounces his English in idiosyncratic fashion, but it behooves me not to cry out on him until my Finnish improves dramatically, and that is likely to be never.
Musically it’s an odd item. Elgar constantly threatens to break into a tune but hardly ever goes ahead and does so. The overall effect is one of sweeping grandeur, though. For me there are three high spots:
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Gerontius has just breathed his last. There is a brief pause, a crashing chord on the brass, and The Priest bursts in with “Profisiscere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo!”, whereupon he and the chorus wish Gerontius on his merry way in the name of all persons of the Trinity, all the orders of angels bar one (that would make a good trivia question), and every holy predecessor he can think of. There is a recognisable tune
and the first half ends with the chorus tapering off and The Priest gently singing “Through the same, through Christ our Lord”. -
Midway through the second half, when all the angels combine to sing “Praise to the Holiest in the height” as The Soul approaches the judgement seat.
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The Guardian Angel is delivering Gerontius to Purgatory. The souls already there sing the penitential psalm “Lord, thou hast been our refuge: in every generation” as the GA bids The Soul farewell:
(I have to say that, though I don’t subscribe to Purgatory as a matter of doctrine, if I ever end up there against expectations, that’s the kind of goodnight I would find enormously reassuring.)
Then the sound of the psalm fades away, replaced by “Praise to the Holiest” as the Guardian Angel returns to Heaven. sniffle
Open to the floor…