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Praise to the Holiest in the Height, recurring before the departure to Purgatory. But the whole work sings
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Praise to the Holiest in the Height _and in the Depth_. A powerfully contrasting note is heard in the death-agony of Gerontius and, above all, in the chorus of demons occurring in the second part. Here a comparison with Berlioz is simply inevitable--for Edward Elgar's dramatic power admits of comparison with the great masters. His demons are much more terrible than those of Berlioz, who was a materialist in the profound sense--not, that is, in virtue of more or less shifting beliefs, but of unalterable temperament. Infinitely remote from that of Berlioz is the temperament revealed in Edward Elgar's music, which, like parts of the poem, fairly merits the epithet
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Dantesque.
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Gerontius,
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Ever since the far-off times of the great madrigal composers England has played but a modest part in the concert of the great musical powers. For the products of the musical mind it has depended almost entirely on importation, and has exported nothing but works of a lighter order. Such are the words with which the German author of the
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Gerontius programme, specially written for this Festival, introduces his subject. The economic metaphor is ingenious. It does not imply too much or justify the state of things to which it refers. Rightly or wrongly, Germany and the Continent of Europe in general did not feel that serious English music was a thing to be taken seriously, and to that fact the writer refers with ingenious delicacy, going on to say that about the turn of the century a change began to be noticeable. Everyone conversant with musical affairs knows how that change was brought about, though not everyone on our own side of the Channel cares to admit what he knows. It is in the main to Edward Elgar--a man who has done his best work living quietly in the Malvern hills, without official position of any kind, remote from social distraction and the strife of commercialism--that the change is due. The presentation of so lengthy a work as the
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Dream of Gerontius at a Rhine Festival has a kind of significance that the English musical public would do well to consider. The programme is much more carefully selected than at our own festivals, the idea being not at all that it should contain
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but that it should be characteristic of musical art as it now stands, giving only the most typically excellent of newer compositions, and of older compositions only those upon which it is felt that contemporary genius had been more particularly nourished. It is not accidental that on the present occasion the names of Handel, Mendelssohn, Schumann are absent while Bach is very abundantly represented; Beethoven's name figures in connection with the most modern in feeling of all his works (the C minor Symphony), and Liszt's with his revolutionary
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Faust