Dr. Martin Adams

Summary

Full title: '"Impressions that . . . could not be hummed": Elgar's "The Dream of Gerontius" as Mnemonic, Mystical Drama and Uncommon Genre'. An historical and analytical study of Elgar's setting (1900) of John Henry Newman's poem "The Dream of Gerontius." It will result in an article of round 12,000 words, plus analytical diagrams. Although it is deeply dependent on the work of earlier writers, especially in historical musicology, its methods and conclusions deal with areas that tend to be either neglected or over-simplified within published work on Elgar. That especially applies to aspects of this composer's compositional techniques and how he deploys them for specific expressive and semantic purposes. It seeks to identify, within the music, some of the reasons why astute critics, such as Robert J. Buckley (whose words are quoted in the title above), found this work so original within the context of English music of that time. It explores how and why Elgar's supporters wrote of this work in a way that makes plain to cognoscenti that there was a debt to Wagner, while fending off the reductive comparisons made by those inclined to see Elgar's achievement primarily in the context of Wagnerian musico-dramatic techniques. It also identifies those aspects of Elgar's compositional practice that give this work its unusual combination (commented on by the same critics) of precision and elusiveness. Those techniques are indebted to Wagner, but also to other 19th-century composers; and Elgar deploys them in a distinctive way that tends to suggest meaning rather than explicitly to state it. In that way, and in the precisely targeted setting of words by the poem's various characters, he taps into the poem's mystical aspects -- a characteristic noted by a number of critics in England and Germany. The article also suggests that the composer's reluctance to call this work an oratorio was well-founded. (He acceded only because his publisher had nowhere else to put it in their catalogue of works.) Rather, "Gerontius" is best understood as a specimen of what Hermann Danuser has called Weltanschauungsmusik. Distinctive styles and techniques, and the relationships between them and meaning, identified by Danuser in works such as Wagner's "Parsifal", Schoenberg's "Gurrelieder" and Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde" (all written between 1882 and 1911) are far closer to Elgar's practice in "The Dream of Gerontius" than they are to any English oratorio or dramatic cantata, which have often been cited as its ostensible precedents.

Project Type

Journal article -- hstorical/analytical/critical

Summary

Study leave has been granted for 2011-12 for this project. It seeks to establish why England was the last major culture in Western Europe to accept the concept of all-sung opera, and why English stage music of the 17th century was the way it was. Over the last three years, several conference papers have been given on contributory components. The research explores literature, religion, politics, and the general intellectual and cultural life of England from the middle of the 16th century to around 1700. The resulting book will explain why the stage works for which this period is best known - those with music by Henry Purcell (e.g. "King Arthur" and "The Fairy Queen"), are so different from continental stage works, and why the genre on which Purcell and Dryden worked, and which the latter called "Dramatick Opera", declined rapidly in the 18th century. The resulting book will situate these works in a much broader context than any publicly presented research thus far. It will demonstrate that the characteristics of dramatic opera are calculated - far more than merely a response to Restoration theatrical taste, or an abberrant dead-end on the road towards all-sung opera. Rather, dramatic opera is a natural and logical consequence of a highly distinctive view of music, of a somewhat fearful view of music's power, and of deeply thought views on how music could and should be used in a public context.

Funding Agency

Study leave funded by the School of Drama, Film and Music.

Project Type

Monograph book