MUSIC ArrEa the Halle Orchestra's Dream of Gerontius -1 was
reminded of Andre Gide 's answer to the question " Who is the greatest French poet ? " " Victor Hugo, helas ! " sighed Gide, scrupulously honest but wishing that he could hand the palm to a more sympathetic member of the French literary Pantheon. " Elgar—alas I " seems to me the first name forced upon us by the facts, should any foreigner (per impossibile) wish to arrange our British composers in order of magnitude. Gerontius has this resemblance, among others, to Parsifal—that you either like it or you don't, but that, whether you like it or not, it is a masterpiece, a world in itself, perfectly realised. I have never before heard a performance which transported me so -often from the concert-hall to the opera-house; Newman's excessve convert's delight in the dramatic parapher- nalia of a Catholic deathbed (the penultimate act in a drama which must have finished, on earth, with a pompe funebre, premiere dame, as the French morticians have it) furnishes a perfect operatic first act ; and Elgar does not lose a single chance to exploit the drama and the tension, ,to paint the restless movements and shifting moods of the dying man, to suggest the hushed gloom and the incense-laden atmosphere (for presumably Gerontius dies in a room adjoining his private chapel, where his private choir are gathered in readiness and perfectly rehearsed). If might all be a scene from a ninetyish novel by a ritualist curate ; but it provides Elgar with just what he wants, a framework on which to hang his richly,sensuously imagined funereal trappings and a text in which short dramatic points succeed each other without interruption.
Act I is pure opera, but with Act 2 we move into a musical, though not technically theological, limbo. This is not oratorio, except in a purist sense, neither is it opera, but something of the same sort of hybrid as was attempted by Mahler in his eighth symphony. The music still demands something different from a concert-hall setting ; possibly Reinhardt could have designed a set sufficiently vague and magnificent to have pleased Elgar without offending the Cardinal, and much would depend on the illusion of vastness and the skilful use of lighting. In any case I feel that Gerontius, as presented by Sir John Barbirolli—and his is to me unquestionably the right reading—needs transporting at once to Covent Garden.
Richard Lewis sang the title-role with fervour and dignity, though without the perfect sense of words and the rapt unction of the great interpreters of the past. His voice is. rather light in weight and thin in quality for the big climaxes, but his delivery is admirably easy and his tone pure and pleastig in all registers. Kathleen Ferrier's Angel was excellently round, warm and full in tone, and her singing had the right dramatic emotional quality, not exactly disembodied nor material but vibrant with a quite unerotic ardour, which not all singers can achieve. Marian Nowakowski's Priest was too simply operatic, and his praying, both in Act 1 and as Angel of the Agony later, mere oratory and spoiled as such by his inadequate treatment of the English words. The Sheffield Philharmonic Choir, on the other hand, brought one of those revelations of what we in London miss in the way of choral singing. Their tone was unfailingly alive, bright and clear even in pianissimo passages, their diction excellent and their discipline as fine as that of so large a body can be whose singing yet remains human and personal. MARTIN COOPER.
Previous page
