Edward Elgar was more than instrumental in blessing British music with an international stature around the turn of the twentieth century. Having eventually found his forceful and individual voice at the rather lateish age of 42 with the Enigma Variations that became an immediate worldwide hit, he went on composing vocal and orchestral works of great originality. Besides the aforementioned Variations, he wrote the two monumental Symphonies, while the Violin Concerto and the Cello Concerto earned him a definite and secure place in international musical life. The self-taught Elgar, who achieved his mastery through practical means — “learning by doing”, in particular as a rank-and-file violin player of the modest but adventurous William Stockley's Orchestra between 1882 and 1889 — soon became the most significant English composer between Purcell and Britten. Along with the orchestral works already cited, it was with The Dream of Gerontius that Elgar most thoroughly demonstrated his sovereignty as a composer. It firmly belongs to the tradition of Handelian oratorios, a culture that had been continued by Mendelssohn, Dvorák, Gounod and Saint-Saëns: Elgar was their obvious heir. As a young man he got to know the repertoire at first hand as a violinist in the great choral festivals of his native Worcester. The Dream of Gerontius represented a new departure within this tradition, both in the choice of subject — not taken from the Bible, but written by an Anglican priest later turned Roman Catholic cardinal, John Henry Newman — and in the music. It was commissioned by the renowned Birmingham Festival, a centre of oratorio cultivation, which asked Elgar to write a large choral work for 1900.
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