Beth Tree and the Elgars 8

I must admit that I have not written this next bit without help from my musical friends who often get together to discuss Dr. Elgar's music. So if it sounds overly formal, that is why.

About that time things became quite difficult for Mr. Elgar as his mother died. But also in that same year he had the premiere of his work Dream Children and the second successful performance of The Dream of Gerontius in Düsseldorf. And to show how his reputaton had spread, Strauss toasted Dr. Elgar as the first "English progressivist" composer, which didn't please all in British music circles.

His first performance of Gerontius had not been a success, mainly because he didn't give the musicians adequate time to learn the music. When it failed to have a satisfactory premiere in 1900, he wrote bitterly to me saying: 'I always said God was against art and I still believe it'.

His next big composition was The Apostles  written in 1902-03, when Dr. Elgar, as I must now call him, was 45. But the history of this project went back more than 30 years to the time of his schooldays. He told me that he remembered all his life the moment of its origin in an observation made by his teacher Mr. Reeve, saying 'The Apostles were poor men, young men, at the time of their calling; perhaps before the descent of the Holy Ghost not cleverer than some of you here'. This set him thinking, and the oratorio of 1903 is the result”

He said, “The Apostles on the other hand had been real men. And yet they had been special – elect – distinct from their fellows. Where was the beginning of any individual distinction if not in just such a feeling?”

For a man such as Dr. Elgar who always sought faith and often found only doubt, the choice of a religious theme for a big work could show a challenge to see if God was real, let Him prove His existence by crowning his efforts with special inspiration.

The apostles were a group of heterogeneous figures from different backgrounds and origins, brought together by a single overmastering project. That was the same idea by which Dr. Elgar's music was created. He decided to write the libreto for it as well, which he normally didn't do.

The Bible as his only source for such a libretto meant there could be no question of accuracy or of inspiration. But within the Bible Dr. Elgar took his words from here, there, and everywhere. Line by line, sometimes almost phrase by phrase, he brought together the fragments that would give just the emphasis he wanted at every point. He combined separate stories and superimposed different actions upon one another. As Mrs. Elgar confided to me what he said to her, 'I have been thinking it out since boyhood, and have been selecting the words for years, many years.' 

By then Birmingham had requested another major Elgar work for production at their next Festival in October 1903 so the Apostles project was chosen. 

Dr. Elgar said that it was part of his original scheme to continue The Apostles by a second work carrying on the establishment of the Church among the Gentiles. This, too, was to be followed by a third oratorio, in which the fruit of the whole – that is to say, the end of the world and the Judgement – was to be exemplified. He, however, faltered at that idea. He reduced his trilogy-scheme to a single large oratorio devoted only to the original Apostles. 

For Christ's Apostles he chose the person who lacked faith, the doubter converted, and the man whose faith was strong.  Judas he had to represent failure, the strong man was Peter, and the one who overcame doubt was Mary Magdalen, not strictly an Apostle, but a Disciple, the woman of the streets who was converted by witnessing one of Christ's miracles

Judas fascinated Dr. Elgar and he felt that Judas had been not so much blindly perverse as ambitious for Christ – that the 'betrayal' had been staged by Judas entirely with the idea of putting Christ in a situation where he would have to make a great show of power.

In order to follow the right pattern of events, Weakness-Conversion-Strength he would end up getting the story out of biblical order, as after Judas' betrayal, Christ would not be alive to influence Mary Magdalen. He had to go against his original plan and present them with Mary's story being first, then Judas, and then Peter.

Dr. Elgar worked at his libretto and his score through the winter months of 1902-03. Its beginning seemed to call forth from him all the heights and depths of eloquence that even he could desire or dream of. The very opening words he had chosen, 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me', appeared really to come true in the hushed fervour of the choral Prologue. The action then began with the Watchers on the Temple roof waiting for the dawn; and the breaking of the new day's light over the scene drew from him music of unparalleled magnificance. His libretto had brilliantly placed against this daybreak the defining action of the whole work – the choosing of the Apostles. Next came The Beatitudes, set in an enchanting pastoral landscape 'By the Wayside', where the individualities of the different Apostles emerge in their separate reactions to the Blessings as Christ speaks them one by one.

By late February 1903 all this was complete in vocal score and in the printer's hands. Now came the individual cases. It was time for Mary Magdalene. 

Dr. Elgar's sense of his difficulty at this point was shown in the special elaboration with which he had constructed the Mary Magdalene libretto. There were two separate scenes – the first actually sub-divided so as to show Mary Magdalene watching from her tower while Peter attempts to walk over
the water and Christ quells the storm, the second showing Mary Magdalene washing Christ's feet with her tears and securing forgiveness for her sins. And between those two scenes Dr. Elgar had
inserted the incident of Peter recognising Christ's divinity, so as to keep the action moving forward amongst the Apostles already chosen. Much of the music for Mary Magdalene was necessarily slow and sorrowful. It was relieved, however – not only by Peter's recognition scene, but by a wonderful choral fantasy evoking Mary Magdalene's life with her former friends. 

During April 1903, Dr. Elgar wrote the Judas portion. Here was a night scene to answer the opening dawn: Judas, obsessed by his ambition to see Christ reveal himself in power, leads the rabble through the shadowy garden with lanterns and torches and weapons. After the betrayal he begins to realise what he has done in a great bass solo. And against his gradual self-recognition is set the choral singing within the Temple of the Palm beginning 'O Lord God, to whom vengeance belongeth render a reward to the proud'. Judas hears this, picks up odd phrases to apply with bitter irony to his
own case, and so resolves on suicide. 

In the Judas scene Dr. Elgar touched heights of sheer human drama which he had never before approached. Yet during this supremely successful writing in April 1903 he began to be unwell, and the illness gathered itself with overwhelming psychological suggestion into trouble with his eyes.

The source of the trouble emerged in May when he suddenly went back to the Mary Magdalene portion and confused the publisher's engraver by adding a completely new chorus to end Part I
more convincingly. Its addition somehow set Dr. Elgar's mind at rest, and his health improved immediately.

Through June he worked at the scenes leading up to the Ascension. Here he had planned a second dawn, whose revival of the opening music for the Watchers on the Temple roof made a superb
device for emphasising the passage of time.

The premiere of The Apostles at Birmingham in October 1903 provided one of Dr. Elgar's greatest
triumphs. It above all of Dr. Elgar's current work pays tribute to the sheer courage of his genius. It sounds like a hymn, more profoundly touching than any I know, to the inevitable imperfection of plans, and the fallibility of human vision.