Elijah - The Background
Oratorio gained astonishing popularity in England during the 18 th and
19 th centuries. Yet ironically, for the whole of this time the country itself
produced no memorable oratorios. Of course, the era developed its
mighty tradition of choral performance — so much so that the legend
of the “Great English Choral Tradition” emerged. Around this banner
there grew a buoyant and ever-increasing flowering of cathedral music,
church choirs, choral services and anthems, to say nothing of the annual
Three Choirs Festival, which began early in the 1700s and is still very
much alive today. But for two hundred years the country’s oratorios —
the large showpiece genre of England’s choral music –were all supplied
by visiting or imported composers until 1900, when Elgar’s Gerontius
made its celebrated appearance.
More ironic still is the fact that, in the 19 th century, even the imported
composers didn’t produce all that much in the field of English oratorio
despite the burgeoning interest in the form. Haydn’s Seasons and
Creation shine like beacons, so perhaps it’s niggardly to complain
that they amount to no more than two. Beethoven wrote only a single
oratorio, Christ on the Mount of Olives, and no-one claims that it’s
among his best works. Liszt’s Christus and Elizabeth never attracted
much attention, and Berlioz’ L’Enfance du Christ is less of an oratorio
than a series of theatrical set pieces on a sacred theme.
But help came at last. With triumphant effect, Mendelssohn’s Elijah
singlehandedly broke the famine of 19 th -century oratorio composition,
and it still flourishes in our own time. At its first performance at the
1846 Birmingham Music Festival, it was a runaway success. Ovation
followed ovation, with audiences clamouring for the immediate repeat
of many arias and choruses.
Part of the reason for this sensational appeal was because of the ease
with which Mendelssohn’s oratorio combined the practices of Bach
and Handel, the two pillars of Baroque choral tradition on which the
English choral movement had been built. Just about everyone knows
of Mendelssohn’s famous reconstruction of Bach’s St Matthew Passion
in 1829, but few remember his hugely successful revival in Germany
of Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt four years later, using a score he
had uncovered on a previous trip to London. By the time of Elijah,
Mendelssohn had mastered the art of combining Bach’s fervent brand
of Lutheranism with Handel’s operatic type of drama, and the result
was completely all-embracing: German as well as English, religious as
well as theatrical, intimate as well as spectacular.
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