Softly and gently

DR. LUIS DIAS

My first introduction to the music of Edward Elgar (1857-1934) must have been in my internship year 1989, my ‘golden year’, as I learned so much about music and music-making from American violinist-conductor George Trautwein. He left me two suitcases full of cassettes, among which were many works by Elgar: his violin concerto (Yehudi Menuhin, soloist), his cello concerto (Jacqueline du Pre, soloist), his symphonies, and his Serenade for Strings.

I became more familiar with Elgar’s music in England, playing violin in the Corinthian Chamber Orchestra. His cello concerto, with Richard Jenkinson soloist in 2001 was
particularly memorable.

While in England, I also encountered the poetry of John Henry Newman (1801-1890) and Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). Incidentally my interest in their oeuvre occurred before I learned of their connection with Catholicism. Both converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism in adulthood.

Newman is better known as Cardinal Newman, so high did he rise in the faith. He was canonised in 2019 by Pope Francis, and is equally venerated in the Church of England and the
Episcopal Church.

It was Newman who received Hopkins into the Roman Catholic Church in 1866. Hopkins was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1877. Both Newman and Hopkins loved music. We know Hopkins studied the violin, and Newman was an accomplished violinist, played chamber music as a respite from theological studies, and particularly loved the music of Beethoven. He also
composed music.

This musical affinity comes through in their poetry. ‘Lead, kindly light’, a favourite hymn of Mahatma Gandhi, owes its text to Newman, from his 1833 poem ‘The Pillar of the Cloud’, based on Exodus 13:21-22.

But the high point of Newman’s ‘Catholic period’ has to be ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ (1865), a remarkable epic poem. ‘Gerontius’ is a Latinised Greek name meaning “old man” or “elder”, derived from the Greek ‘geron.’ Newman’s work explores through the device of a ‘dream’, the journey from death through Purgatory, and thence to Paradise and to God.

Newman wrote the poem “on a sudden impulse”, but then put it away and forgot about it. It is only when the editor of the Jesuit periodical ‘The Month’ requested a contribution from him that he found it and submitted it.  “It was written by accident – and it was published by accident,” he said later. A very happy “accident”; the world would be much the poorer had it
not occurred.

It was set to music in 1900 by Elgar as a work for voices (Gerontius sung by tenor; the Angel by mezzo-soprano; the Priest and Angel of the Agony are sung by one performer although more suited to bass and baritone respectively), choir and orchestra, widely regarded as his finest choral work, even his masterpiece. Elgar called it “the best of me.”

Elgar’s Gerontius is “a man like us, not a priest or a saint, but a sinner”.

Elgar for musical purposes set the poem in two parts. The first part has Gerontius on his deathbed, with his friends and a priest by his side. The second part (truncated in the service of narrative flow and thrust) has the disembodied Soul of Gerontius in the afterlife (“I went to sleep; and now I am refreshed”; “I hear no more the busy beat of time, No, nor my fluttering breath, nor struggling pulse; Nor does one moment differ from the next”) in conversation with The Angel.

We’ll never know if Elgar, who loved to tease his listener, has even in such a mystical work a little “inside joke”, for after the Soul expects that the Angel (my Guardian Spirit) is male (“I will address Him”), is answered by the voice of a mezzo-soprano!

The choir is called upon at various points to be assistants, souls in Purgatory, demons (an extremely menacing segment) and a “Choir of Angelicals”.

The Angel of the Agony once stood by Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and is now before the throne of God, in whose “veiled presence” the Soul eventually arrives.

Toward the end of this approximately 90-minute work, The Angel sings the most sublime aria (“Softly and Gently”) that gives you goosebumps if well-performed.

Many have observed that “only a Catholic” could have set Newman’s poem to music as masterfully as Elgar did. Newman had not originally written it for publication, and he does not explain many fundamental concepts (such as Purgatory, or the Litany for the Dying) that would be unfamiliar to a non-Catholic.

Elgar was Catholic, born a few years after Pope Pius IX through the Papal Bull Universalis Ecclesiae (1850) restored the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales. His work nevertheless faced stiff opposition, bans, and he had to fight to retain (and have bowdlerised by other text) “objectionable” references in the libretto to the Virgin Mary, Purgatory, and the Mass.

Elgar’s piece was performed twice at the BBC Proms festival during the decade I lived and worked in England, and I am glad I went to both live performances. The fact that both were on a Sunday helped.

The first performance was on August 6, 2000, Sir Andrew Davies conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, with Glenn Winslade (Gerontius), Catherine Wyn-Rogers (Angel) and Alastair Miles (Angel of the Agony). Sir Davies was a celebrated Elgarian, and ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ was a particular favourite of his.

I came away quite moved, and remember mentioning it to my dad over the phone when I called home to wish my parents on their wedding anniversary a few days later, India’s Independence Day. (Although an atheist, my father read widely, and he first introduced me to the work of Cardinal Newman). As fate would have it, five days later, I had to deal with the shock of his sudden illness and death within hours.

I don’t recollect if ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ flashed through my thoughts in my frantic scramble to get home, but I did think about it after the dust had quite literally settled on
his grave.

The second Proms performance in 2005 (available on YouTube) had Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé orchestra (said to have “Elgar in their blood”) with the Hallé and London Philharmonic choirs, and Paul Groves, Alice Coote and Matthew Best, soloists.

I recall Elgar’s ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ now for two reasons. It is central to ‘The Choral’, a 2026 historical drama (set against the backdrop of 1916 wartime England) on Netflix, outshining even Ralph Fiennes’s role as
reluctant conductor.

Secondly, it was two years last month since the death of my mother at 92. Although a ripe old age, it still came unexpectedly. I’m grateful she received ‘prophylactic’ Extreme Unction’ at the previous first Friday
Holy Communion.

I take comfort in “Softly and gently, dearly-ransomed soul, In my most loving arms I now enfold thee.” In life, she was literally “brave and patient” in her “bed of sorrow”.

As I get “older” myself, I appreciate both Newman’s ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ and Elgar’s setting of it even more. Death becomes us all, cutting across all man-made distinctions; it is the ultimate equaliser. One of the defining features of life is our eventual mortality. Cardinal Newman’s text and Elgar’s music make for a truly
spiritual experience.