Into His Marvelous Light
If someone says he enjoys "classical music," he probably doesn't mean to designate precisely the period that excludes the Baroque, Romantic, and Modern eras. Bach and Handel would make the cut, as would Brahms and Rachmaninoff, Wagner and Liszt, and many others. The creative careers of the most popular "classical music" composers stretch from the mid-seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries.
There aren't many (if any) American-born composers who would show up on this list. Neither are there many (if any) great English composers that one could include. In fact, it has often been remarked that after the death of Henry Purcell in 1695 (when J. S. Bach was only ten years old), no widely acclaimed composers were born in England until 1857.
That was the year that Ann Greening Elgar (daughter of a farm worker) and her husband William (a piano tuner and music-shop owner) welcomed their fourth child into their cottage in the village of Lower Broadheath in the West Midlands. They christened him Edward and had him baptized at St. George's Roman Catholic Church in Worcester. The Elgars were a very musical household, and Edward's father performed in the Worcester Glee Club and was organist at St. George's. From the age of fifteen, Edward served as his father's substitute when needed, later inheriting the post. And since Worcester was one of the sites hosting the prestigious Three Choirs Festival (an active institution since the early eighteenth century), the young Edward Elgar was exposed to choral works intended for large public—and non-liturgical—performance.
But those early assets for a musical career were offset by two significant liabilities: Elgar was lower-middle-class, and he was Roman Catholic. For to succeed as a composer in the Victorian era required connections with the prestigious universities and/or with the established Church. So from the beginning Elgar was an outsider, a position he felt—despite being knighted in 1904—throughout his life.
Well-Known Compositions
Other than the early orchestral work popularly known as the Enigma Variations (composed in 1898–1899), the first of the Pomp and Circumstance marches (still heard annually at thousands of graduation ceremonies), and his Cello Concerto (his last significant composition), one of the best-known works by Elgar is his setting of John Henry Newman's 1865 poem The Dream of Gerontius. Newman's text recounts the prayers of a dying man and the responses to his reflections by choruses of angels and demons. If you've sung the hymn, "Praise to the Holiest in the Height"—often sung to the tune gerontius—you've sung stanzas from Newman's poem that are included in this oratorio.
Elgar had possessed a copy of the poem since at least 1885 and had long considered setting it to music. In 1898, he was asked to compose a new work to be premiered at the 1900 Birmingham Music Festival, and The Dream of Gerontius was the result.
The Light of Life Oratorio
But this was not Elgar's first composition for chorus and orchestra on Christian themes. In 1895, he had asked an Anglican priest to produce a libretto for a new work to be sung at the 1896 Three Choirs Festival at Worcester. The Rev. Edward Capel-Cure had played chamber music with Elgar while serving as a curate at Holy Trinity, Worcester, in the 1880s. He suggested three subjects that were suitable for a large oratorio, the most promising being the story of Christ healing the blind man, as recounted in the Gospel of John. "Call it Lux Christi," he wrote, "it is a perfect story, descriptive and dramatic—would almost arrange itself for musical treatment."
The final work was re-named The Light of Life, as Elgar's publisher was afraid that a Latin title might incite anti-Catholic bias. (This was a reasonable concern: several years later, when The Dream of Gerontius was performed, composer Charles Villiers Stanford is reported to have said the work "stank of incense.") Such prevailing prejudice may explain why Elgar never wrote a setting of the Mass.
In The Light of Life, the words of the blind man are sung by a tenor, while Jesus is represented by a baritone. About halfway into the work, after the blind man's sight is restored, a long tenor solo extrapolates from the text given in the Gospel. It concludes:
For has not God sealed up our souls in clay
That they are blind to Heaven's eternal day?
Now, Death, I fear thee not! When I have trod
Thine icy flood, Lo! I shall see my God!
This is followed by a musical dual between two choruses: first, a male chorus representing the Pharisees, who vigorously accuse Jesus of violating the Sabbath commandment; second, a women's chorus insisting that the miraculous healing is the work of God. Finally, both choruses ask the blind man for his opinion, which seems to silence the dispute: "He is a prophet."
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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