Elgar's Oratorios

by McGuire, Charles Edward

• ISBN13: 9780754602712
• ISBN10: 0754602710
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-10-01
• Publisher: Ashgate Pub Ltd

Summary

From the end of the eighteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War, the oratorio was Britain's most accessible and important musical genre, and towards the end of this period, Edward Elgar became its most successful champion. Four oratorios were composed by Elgar in the decade 1896 to 1906: The Light of Life, The Dream of Gerontius, The Apostles and The Kingdom. The last three were performed at every major British music festival and at numerous venues worldwide. This is the first study of these works within the broader context of the British oratorio tradition, and as such gives us a unique appreciation of just how revolutionary Elgar's oratorios were.Elgar's intention was to make the oratorio a vehicle of modern musical styles; to create both a sacred and a characteristically English response to Wagner's music dramas. Moving away from the typical oratorio formats, Elgar successfully portrayed drama based on characterization rather than action, imbuing them with an interpretation of christianity at once personal and universal, and giving the sacred texts that he chose a sense of vitality missing in other contemporary oratorios.Using narrative theory to analyse the structure of the oratorios, Charles McGuire locates the different problem presented in each of the four works and shows the increasingly complex musical means that Elgar used to solve them. This new approach reveals that The Light of Life and Gerontius gave Elgar the tools to create musical epic of Wagnerian proportions in The Apostles and The Kingdom, and to transcend the limitations of the oratorio genre.

Author Biography

Charles Edward McGuire is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Oberlin College and Conservatory, USA.

Table of Contents

Preface	vi
Abbreviations	xvi
The Nineteenth-Century British Oratorio	1	(45)
Narrative and the Oratorio	46	(42)
The Light of Life and the Traditional Oratorio	88	(38)
The Dream of Gerontius and Operatic Narrative	126	(51)
The Apostles and the Narrative Construction of an Epic	177	(68)
The Kingdom and the Epic Continued	245	(48)
Epilogue: Elgar and the Oratorio after the Kingdom	293	(10)
Appendix A Select British Music Festival Programs, 1790-1906	303	(8)
Appendix B Narration in British Oratorios and Oratorios Performed in Great Britain, ca. 1730-1944	311	(14)
Bibliography	325	(10)
Index	335