I am a very 'lapsed Catholic', I very much like very much of Elgar's music but I have always been repulsed by this work. I have the same reaction to Elijah. It ain't the faux 'Religion' which gets to me - I love the Glagolitic Mass, Bach's so-called Sacred Music - I still correspond with a priest who taught me back in the mid-sixties and I send him the Lutz Bach Cantatas as they become available on YouTube. He is as entranced by the 'Word' as much as the music, while it's the sheer exhilaration which makes my heart rejoice - plus watching a certain chorister perform her magic.
I very rarely agree with Herr H, as I call him, but I get what he's on about with regard to Gerontius.
It is an oft-repeated mantra that the text Elgar used for his great oratorio is "terrible...embarrassing...mawkish...inept" - you name it - and I have long puzzled over this automatic condemnation. This posting is prompted by my catching our resident YouTube know-it-all critic and indefatigable belittler of all things British yet again coming out with that accusation. I do not say that I am any kind of supreme arbiter of literary taste but as an Oxford graduate in English Literature, a teacher of English over twenty-five years and a dabbler in translation into what I hope is elegant English, I remain mystified by that claim. It seems to me that Newman's text is direct, moving and devoid of flowery pretentiousness; are those negative reactions, I wonder, the result of delicate Protestant sensibilities being revolted by the expression of Catholic convictions? Or simply an unexamined prejudice which has gained currency? I am genuinely perplexed and would be interested to hear what fellow Elgar-devotees think!
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