British culture manages to assimilate the most wonderful things, as long as it is mysterious and visionary. For example, the voluminous poem The Dream of Gerontius (1865) by the now canonized John Henry Newman had success in Victorian England, despite the anti-Catholic sentiments of the time. The poem was about death and a postmortem experience. And not of a saint, but of an ordinary person, like
… you and me. Edward Elgar worked this poem into a masterful oratorio (though he himself did not speak of an oratorio). Masterful, because the grand work manages to move especially in its hushed moments. In an interview in Gramophone, conductor McCreesh called it an interesting experience to perform this very piece with a group of 250 young singers. The premiere in 1900 was a fiasco because the performance was not prepared well enough. For Elgar, who was already afflicted with a series of inferiority complexes, it was a traumatic experience. It was his tragedy that he could no longer believe in God, but meanwhile blamed that same God for everything. Later performances of The Dream were actually successful. Even a freethinker like Richard Strauss was laudatory in his assessment. The given performance under Paul McCreesh emphatically presents itself as The Dream of Gerontius 1900. Indeed, it is the first recording with orchestral instruments from Elgar's own time. The album received a rave review in Gramophone.(HJ)more
