Everyone who loves Elgar acclaims The Dream of Gerontius as a masterpiece. I don’t. Cardinal Newman’s words are beyond atrocious as poetry, and I find their sado-masochistic doctrinal underpinning sickening (“O happy, suffering soul! For it is safe, Consumed, yet quickened by the glance of God”). Yecch! Newman’s relish in dwelling on the (for him) fuzzy line between pleasure and pain, between spiritual ecstasy and joy in suffering–all captured in pretentiously awful Victorian verse–makes the poem come across more like the projected script for a Mel Gibson film than as a subject ripe for musical setting. I can see it now: The Passion of Gerontius–Beyond the Thunder Dome.
Nevertheless, Elgar poured his heart and soul into the work, finding a musical analog to every appalling bit of text. Some of it turned out to be rather fun: the demons’ chorus, for example, proves yet again that evil is so much more entertaining than good. The “fried sole”–oops, “soul”–episode, where Gerontius gets percussively zapped by his Maker (I’ll bet you didn’t know that God played the tam-tam) before being gratefully hauled off to Purgatory, provides a much needed moment of genuine drama before the obligatory sanctimonious ending. Dvorák was offered this text to set as one of his own English oratorio commissions, but he decided to do The Specter’s Bride instead. Smart man.
Admittedly, much of the music is very beautiful, some of it is dreary, all of it is relentlessly sincere, and it can work–given great singing and conducting. Sadly, only the latter is present in full measure here. On the other hand, and speaking of purgatory, there is no more potentially painful moment in all of Elgar (or anyone else) than the tenor’s entrance after the Big Zapping, when he wails “Take me away, and in the lowest deep there let me be…” More often than not, he’s giving voice to what most of the audience has been thinking for the past 90 minutes, thanks to a bevy of quivery-voiced English tenors, of whom, alas, David Rendall is one of the worst. To hear his tremulous tone production on the second syllable of “away”–never mind in the big numbers, such as “Sanctis Fortis” in Part One–is suffering of a singularly unhappy kind.
Similarly, Anne Sofie von Otter sounds surprisingly frayed, even squally, as the Angel, particularly next to Felicity Palmer (Hickox) or the inimitable Janet Baker (EMI, for Barbirolli). Otter is simply out of her element in music that calls for a big, rich-toned English oratorio singer (what Anna Russell in a different context called “the large, fat alto with a voice like a fog horn”). More’s the pity, because Colin Davis and his LSO forces deliver a powerful, exciting, totally committed performance from first note to last. Davis obviously, and to his credit, takes the music as seriously as did Elgar himself. Tempos are admirably swift, the demons aptly scary, and the whole buildup to the great Praise to the Holiest chorus is stupendous.
At the same time, the soft, sweet bits (and there are tons of them) never come off as saccharine or excessively slimy. The opening of Part Two steals in with positively sublime discretion and sensitivity, a tribute to Davis’ keen attention to dynamics and phrasing as much as to Elgar’s sensitivity to that icky text. The sonics are also among the finest to come from this source, with excellent balances between choir and orchestra and plenty of impact. If Otter sounds lost in the shuffle, it’s more a function of miscasting than of any fault in the engineering. Unfortunately Rendall remains audible, and audibly wobbly throughout, though Alastair Miles does well by–it pains me to even write this–the Angel of the Agony.
As you doubtless have noticed, I find it hard to take this piece seriously, and if listening to it is your idea of a great evening in front of the stereo, I apologize. The Apostles always has struck me as a far finer effort, its comparative neglect astonishing in the extreme. Still, I have heard just about every recording of Gerontius ever made, and I continue to own a goodly bunch of them (Barbirolli–No. 1 all around; Hickox; Britten; Gibson; and Boult, who has the best Gerontius in Nicolai Gedda, a real tenor). Sargent’s EMI recording retains historical interest but sports dull sonics, while Rattle’s was predictably greeted with great enthusiasm by the British press before being promptly deleted, reissued, and deleted again. I’ll probably hang on to this one too, just to hear the conviction and intensity that Davis and the LSO bring to the music. But I can’t say I’ll play it often. Life is just too short.
