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Sex and destiny

A visitor to Earth from outer space today would soon conclude, from our art and our advertising, that sex was one of the biggest issues in the year 2000. But a hundred years ago Queen Victoria was still alive, and in Victorian culture the big issue (with or without sex as unspoken corollary, even then) was death. Nothing became a life quite like the leaving of it. The dream of Gerontius, of course, begins with a man on the point of death – to acknowledge this is indeed the first thing he says. And to the Victorian artistic mind it makes for a uniquely sexy bit of drama. Not many operas begin with a death scene, Don Giovanni and Gianni Schicchi notwithstanding, but operatic the opening of Gerontius certainly is. You can almost hear the curtain going up at the end of the Prelude, to reveal first the dimly-lit sick room and then the tossing and turning of the dying man in his bed, agonies which we back-project into the Prelude itself once we realise what has been going on as it were behind that curtain, just as, some ten years later, we realise with prurience what has been going on before the curtain rises on a very different bed scene in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. Elgar’s dramatic timing and establishment of atmosphere in these few moments of mise en scène are perfect, just enough – only eight bars – to prepare us for Gerontius to speak. Wagner may have been a model for the situation and the emotional cast of the music – the opening of the third act of Parsifal, with Kundry lying on the ground quietly groaning, suggests a parallel – but for deftness it is Puccini who we feel could not have done it better; and although the wonderful ‘Go forth’ conclusion to Part 1 is most obviously indebted to the processional transformation scene in the first act of Parsifal, it is of Puccini that we are again reminded if we allow free play to our Roman imagination – the stink of incense, as Stanford called it – and instead of the stentorian bass summons of the Priest we imagine the commanding voice of Scarpia announcing his claim on a suffering soul as he marches the length of Sant’ Andrea della Valle. Tosca was almost exactly contemporaneous with Gerontius – and incidentally, the curious pseudo-Phrygian approach to the tonic D, via E flat, at the end of Part 1 of Gerontius shows similarities to the D major rounding-off just before the end of Act 1 of La bohème. However incidental such comparisons may seem, the point is that Elgar casts his Part 1 with immaculate dramatic pace and shape, in two simple scenes whose directional force, characterisation and succinctness Puccini would have coveted as the stuff of one of his own shorter operatic acts. The protagonist’s great arc of suffering, during which a rich variety of characters, affects and presences, including scherzando demons, flits across his mind’s stage (and, in the case of his interceding choral friends, across the ‘real’ stage, we suppose), climaxes in extremis with his top B flat (to the words ‘In Thine own agony’) and quickly subsides, whereupon a new character, the Priest (or is he really Charon?) takes the stage and inaugurates the complementary second scene, the processional. This is a wonderful first act to any drama.

Extract from ‘Elgar’s other opera?: The Dream of Gerontius at 100’, by Stephen Banfield.