Programme annotators have often embraced an uncomplicated narrative of Sir Edward Elgar’s career in which the composer sprang overnight from provincial obscurity to international fame with the 1899 premiere of his Variations on an Original Theme op. 36, now known as the Enigma Variations. Unsurprisingly, the historical narrative is more complex: Elgar’s reputation was already growing thanks to a series of acclaimed choral works, including The Black Knight op. 25 (1892), Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf op. 30 (1896), The Banner of Saint George op. 33 (1897) and Caractacus op. 35 (1898). All of these scores were highly successful at their first performances; British choral societies took them up rapidly – singers delighted in the challenges posed by the music, while both audiences and critics relished Elgar’s brilliant orchestration.

It is clear, however, that the composition of the Enigma Variations gave Elgar insights into his own creative process that had a marked and lasting effect upon his music: a greater richness, consistency, technical mastery and expressive depth.Footnote ¹ This change is evident in the works that appeared immediately after the Enigma Variations, particularly the orchestral song-cycle Sea Pictures op. 37 and the oratorio The Dream of Gerontius op. 38 (1900). Comparing two recent recordings from Chandos best illustrates the differences between Elgar’s music before and after the Enigma Variations. One of these features Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf and The Banner of Saint George, while the other includes Sea Pictures and The Dream of Gerontius. Both releases are recorded at the high standard that is a hallmark of the Chandos label; Sir Andrew Davis, who is surely one of today’s finest conductors of Elgar’s music, masterfully conducts both.

Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf is perhaps the best of Elgar’s choral frescos completed before The Dream of Gerontius. The score is the result of a commission from the innovative choral conductor Charles Swinnerton Heap, who requested an extended work from Elgar for the 1896 North Staffordshire Triennial Music Festival. For his text, Elgar used an excerpt from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn, an autumnal New England version of Boccaccio’s Decameron. In the course of the volume, one of Longfellow’s characters tells the tale of the Norse King Olaf, whose career included considerable bloodshed as well as a famous conversion to Christianity. Elgar was introduced to Longfellow’s poetry by his mother, Ann, and he maintained a fondness for the American poet’s verse – he had previously used Longfellow’s words in The Black Knight. Those who find Longfellow’s writings anodyne today may be surprised to discover that Elgar considered his excursus on King Olaf both too violent and much too ribald to set to music. The composer tapped his literary neighbour, Harry Arbuthnot Acworth (1849–1933), to bowdlerize and redact Longfellow’s poem as well as to provide some additional verses. The result is a disjointed libretto filled with splendid but inexplicable scenes – thus the title – that only make sense if one has read Longfellow’s original. Given the American poet’s immense popularity in Great Britain at the time, Elgar may have assumed that most of the chorus and many in the audience were familiar with Tales of a Wayside Inn.

Given the libretto, it is unsurprising that the musical result is uneven. King Olaf begins with an atmospheric orchestral passage evoking mist-enshrouded antiquity. Splendid choral sections follow, such as the exciting ‘Challenge of Thor’. Even though Elgar had already visited Bayreuth and was steeped in Wagner, the vocal solo parts in King Olaf are incongruously decorous. The duet between Olaf and the noblewoman Thyri, for example, conjures up ‘charming young people’ singing in a Victorian parlour rather than a bloodthirsty monarch being cozened into ill-advised actions by a scheming princess. Just when the listener begins to tire of the gentility, however, Elgar provides either a rousing chorus or an exquisite meditation, such as the unaccompanied chorus, ‘As Torrents in Summer’, which is the highlight of the eloquent epilogue.

Such moments of musical interest are conspicuously lacking in The Banner of Saint George, which was urged upon Elgar by his publisher, Novello, in their quest to sell multiple copies of a profitable patriotic choral work for Queen Victoria’s jubilee. Saddled with a banal tub-thumping poem by one Shapcott Wensley (1854–1917), Elgar did the best he could with intractable material. The result is a potboiler that was immensely popular during the composer’s lifetime, though recent political events in England render it a bit embarrassing now. In this admirable recording, Davis keeps The Banner of Saint George moving along at a cheerful clip while pacing King Olaf with an expert hand. The Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra is in splendid form; the soloists in King Olaf are ardent; and the consortium of Norwegian choruses sound as if they are having the time of their lives.

The second recording under review begins with an otherworldly performance of Sea Pictures. The conductor and the mezzo-soprano, Sarah Connolly, are so sensitive to the music that the unevenness of the poems that Elgar chose to set becomes, for once, a moot point. Furthermore, thanks both to Davis and the superb BBC Symphony Orchestra, the listener is aware of the expert way in which Elgar uses recurring melodic motifs to bind together this orchestral song cycle. In addition to its developmental techniques, Sea Pictures contains a newly flexible use of arioso that liberated Elgar’s vocal style from both the choir loft and the drawing room. As Elgar could not have known Mahler’s similar cycles for voice and orchestra, Sea Pictures makes an original contribution to British music, the example of which was not lost on Benjamin Britten.

This improved manner of treating solo voices, combined with the choral and orchestral mastery found in King Olaf, resulted in The Dream of Gerontius, a supreme masterpiece composed the year after Sea Pictures. Written and orchestrated at breakneck speed between January and August 1900, Gerontius was a daring gamble, as such a complex score had never before been created for a British music festival. The continuous Wagnerian fabric of the music, which was heavily influenced by Parsifal, was radical indeed within this particular context. The Roman Catholicism of the libretto, drawn from a poem by the Blessed John Henry, Cardinal Newman, was controversial in Anglican Britain. The vivid web of orchestral sonority demanded both a sensitive, well-prepared conductor and sufficient rehearsal time, neither of which was likely under the rather slipshod music festival conditions of the day. The mezzo-soprano and tenor soloists faced demands that were unprecedented for singers in a British oratorio. All of this was a recipe for disaster, exacerbated by Elgar’s unaccountable procrastination in reading the proofs, so that the full score was put into the conductor’s hands a mere ten days before the first rehearsal.

This disaster duly arrived at the premiere conducted by Hans Richter during the Birmingham Festival on 3 October 1900. Elgar was high-strung at the best of times, and he completely lost his composure at a rehearsal and berated (read: screamed in anguish at) the chorus, thus demoralizing all the performers. Vaughan Williams, who was present at the premiere, remembered ‘the extraordinarily bad first performance of Gerontius which nearly killed the work’.Footnote ² (In fact, Richter took the unusual step of adding an extra rehearsal devoted exclusively to Gerontius; his decision had a deleterious effect upon the other new works performed at the festival.Footnote ³ ) Despite this unfortunate beginning, Gerontius was given a splendid performance in 1902 at the Lower Rhine Festival in Düsseldorf, where the organizers were used to allotting complex post-Wagnerian scores adequate rehearsal time.

After the German performance, Gerontius was taken up and performed with ever-increasing frequency in Britain, quickly becoming a rival to both Messiah and Elijah in popularity. There are several fine recordings, including one conducted by Sir John Barbirolli, as well as some appalling ones, such as the arrant perversion of Elgar’s score conducted by Benjamin Britten. Although the new recording under review here does not possess the white-hot ardour of Barbirolli’s, which featured the heroic tenor Richard Lewis as Gerontius and the ecstatic mezzo-soprano Janet Baker as the Guardian Angel, it is surely one of the finest performances of Gerontius ever recorded. Due to Davis’ expertise as a Wagnerian, the sensuousness of this interpretation recalls the mystical voluptuousness of Parsifal. Davis has lovingly considered every detail of Elgar’s score. Both the BBC Symphony Orchestra and BBC Symphony Chorus, prepared by the incomparable chorus master Stephen Bryant, are in top form. Sarah Connolly gives a ravishing and deeply moving performance as the Guardian Angel, and bass David Soar excels as both the Angel of the Agony and as the Priest who ministers to the dying Gerontius. Tenor Stuart Skelton gives an extraordinary performance as Gerontius that is at once deeply introspective and achingly vulnerable. Perhaps Davis’s most daring interpretive decision is the sustained and unusually broad tempo at which he takes the concluding section, known as the ‘Angel’s Farewell’. In lesser hands, and with a lesser singer, the music might well have fallen to pieces at this tempo, but the line of Elgar’s music is sustained perfectly by both Davis and Connolly until its rapturous conclusion. One cannot help to think that Elgar would have been pleased with this performance of his choral masterpiece.