Preview: The Premiere of Elgar's "Dream of Gerontius", 1900

There's yet another new recording of Sir Edward Elgar's Dream of Gerontius (from Finland!), based on Saint John Henry Newman's epic poem--in scope if not in length--of the Four Last Things. The last recording won multiple awards this year. 

And yet when it premiered in 1900 in Birmingham, things did not go well, and reviews of performances lately often include comments about "how Catholic" and esoteric the work is, qualified by praise of the music and orchestration! Nevertheless, it's an often performed and recorded choral masterpiece. 

Since this year marks the 125th anniversary of Elgar composing it and of its premier in 1900, it's up next in our Son Rise Morning Show 2025 Anniversaries series on Monday, August 25. I'll be on the air around 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central. Please listen live here or catch the podcast later here.

Elgar (June 2, 1857-February 23, 1934) composed this work (not really an oratorio) 60 years after Saint John Henry Newman wrote the Dream of Gerontius in 1865--so 2025 is also the 160th anniversary of the poem from which Elgar excerpted sections.

Edward Elgar's mother Ann was a convert to Catholicism while his father remained Anglican; Edward was baptized and raised Catholic. His father William disapproved--while at the same time serving as the organist at Saint George's Catholic Church in Worcester from 1846 to 1885--and became a Catholic on his deathbed! As the BBC classical magazine website explains, Elgar was coming off the great success of the Enigma Variations in 1900 when he decided to compose a great choral work based on Newman's poem for the Three Choirs Festival in Birmingham that year. He composed quickly and concluded that "This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved and hated, like another: my life was as the vapour and is not; but this I saw and knew; this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory."

Unfortunately,

the first performance was plagued by mishaps. The choirmaster, Charles Swinnerton Heap, died shortly after rehearsals began and was replaced by the ageing William Stockley, who wasn’t equal to the task and who, in any case, didn’t try to mask his distaste for the subject matter. Hans Richter, the conductor, only received the full score one day before orchestra rehearsals began and only one of the soloists was in good voice on the day. Although the press generally conceded that a decent work had been presented, it was widely accepted that the first performance had been a disaster.

Fortunately,

The German conductor Julius Buths was in the Birmingham audience and recognised that Gerontius merited a decent hearing. It was Buths’s performances in Düsseldorf in 1901 and ’02 that alerted the British musical world to the fact that Elgar had indeed produced something extraordinary. The occasions were a huge success, Elgar was fêted as a hero and was presented with two enormous laurel wreaths which he and Alice somehow managed to lug back to Malvern. Richard Strauss wrote ‘I raise my glass to the welfare and success of the first English progressivist, Meister Elgar’. If the Catholic Elgar hadn’t arrived before, the Anglican establishment had no choice but to concede that he certainly had done so now.

In spite of reviews like this (or in defiance of them!), Elgar's Dream of Gerontius is one of my favorite works. I've three recordings on CD and the DVD record of a great performance at Canterbury Cathedral by Dame Janet Baker as the Angel and Peter Pears as Gerontius/the Soul, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. 

When my mother was in her final days, I was called by the Hospice nurse to come early one more morning and I took my 1962 Roman Missal with the prayers for the dying. When I prayed the priest's prayer "PROFICISCERE, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo!"--

Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul!
Go from this world! Go, in the name of God
The omnipotent Father, who created thee!
Go, in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord,
Son of the living God, who bled for thee!
Go, in the name of the Holy Spirit, who
Hath been poured out on thee! Go, in the name
Of Angels and Archangels; in the name
Of Thrones and Dominations; in the name
Of Princedoms and of Powers; and in the name
Of Cherubim and Seraphim, go forth! . . .

--I heard Elgar's music in my "mind's ear"!

What's sad about Elgar's own life is that the initial failure of the Dream of Gerontius had lasting effects on his faith in God and religious devotion, as this website explains:

Ironically, it was the early failure of The Dream of Gerontius itself that led him to make the oft-quoted remark “I always knew God was against art…”, continuing “I have allowed my heart to open once – it is now shut against every religious feeling…”, this shortly before beginning work on The Apostles and The Kingdom, two oratorios viewed from an admittedly more neutral religious perspective.

As he grew older, his belief gradually withered. Although on his deathbed he is reported to have reaffirmed his commitment to the Roman Catholic faith and, while unconscious, received the last rites, he had not attended a church service for many a year. He claimed to have no belief in a life after death and to have taken exception to the dogma of the Catholic liturgy.

That same website offers a snarky comment about Elgar's memorial stained glass window being in the Anglican Worcester Cathedral (image use under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license: "The Elgar Window by A. K. Nicholson, 1935, based on the Dream of Gerontius. The window shows Gerontius ascending to the Heavenly City, surrounded by figures from the Bible [?]*." 

I could be snarky too and point out that Worcester Cathedral was a Catholic church from 680 to 1535 (and 1555-1559 during Mary I's reign)! *There are Catholic saints depicted there, including two canonized bishops of Worcester, Oswald and Wulfstan, Saint Cecilia, Saint Gregory the Great, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Peter (with the keys!) the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph, and King David with his harp, etc.

The memorial plaque to Elgar in the cathedral includes the words from the prayers he may or may not have heard on his deathbed: "PROFICISCERE, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo!"

Edward Elgar and his wife Alice are buried in the cemetery of St. Wulstan’s Catholic Church at Little Malvern in Worcestershire, where a 75th anniversary memorial Mass was offered for him in 2009.

May Edward and Alice Elgar rest in peace!

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Image Credit (Public Domain): English composer Edward Elgar, likely in the early 1900s.

Preview: 250th Anniversary of "The Liberator" Daniel O'Connell's Birth

The man who became known as "The Liberator" in Ireland from anti-Catholic legislation and political tests was born on August 6, 1775, 250 years ago. 

Daniel O'Connell was born in County Kerry on the southwest coast of Ireland to a Catholic family who had maintained their property because they arranged for Protestant trustees. That's just one of the freedoms--owning private property--that O'Connell worked to secure for Irish Catholics during his life. We'll celebrate this 250th anniversary on Monday, August 18 on the Son Rise Morning Show! I'll be on the air around 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central. Please listen live here or catch the podcast later here.

Because he was Catholic and could not attend college in Ireland in his youth, O'Connell studied at the Jesuit College at Saint-Omer--and fled the bloody violence of the French Revolution in 1793! He studied law in England, practiced law in Ireland; while he appreciated the greater freedom afforded Catholics in the "Roman Catholic Relief" Acts of 1791 and 1793, he sought even greater freedom for Catholics in Ireland--including their right to vote for Catholics to represent them in the House of Commons in Parliament. Marked by the violence of the French Revolution and with the lessons of other failed attempts to gain freedom for Catholics in Ireland, where they were the vast majority, O'Connell proceeded to organize and to test the system by standing for Parliament in Ireland and being elected in 1828--shaming the British, reform-minded Government out of its Anti-Catholic (doctrine) exclusions and Oaths. 

Thus the passage of the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act, removing most of those exclusions and eventually the anti-Catholic Oath O'Connell would have had to take before being seated in Parliament: to deny the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist (Transubstantiation), prayer to the Virgin Mary and the Saints, and participation in the Catholic Mass and reception of Holy Communion there--and to abjure political fealty to the Pope. He still had to declare he "was a true Christian". [Catholic nobility would also be able to take their seats in the House of Lords.]

Of course there were some compromises made in the process of this Parliamentary action in 1829: only men who owned property worth ten pounds per annum could vote (raised from two pounds) and Catholics still had to tithe 10% of their land's value to the Anglican Church of Ireland (taxation without ecclesial representation!). These difficulties were eventually addressed, and O'Connell had to run for the seat he had just won again in the 1829 Clare County special election (perhaps some hoped he'd lose without those poorer voters who had supported him in 1828--but he ran unopposed!)

The National Library of Ireland comments that he "changed the face of Irish history":

A brilliant orator, political organiser and advocate for non-violent reform, O’Connell led the campaign for Catholic Emancipation and founded the Repeal Association to challenge the Act of Union. Known as ‘The Liberator’, he was the first Catholic to win a seat in the British Parliament in more than 100 years. O’Connell helped forge a model of peaceful mass mobilisation that influenced movements far beyond Ireland.

As we mark the 250th anniversary of his birth this year, the National Library of Ireland (NLI) invites the public to rediscover the life and legacy of one of the nation’s most consequential political figures through our unparalleled Daniel O’Connell collections. . . .

On August 6, there was an official Irish Government ceremony at Derrynane House, Caherdaniel, Co. Kerry, O'Connell's birthplace--and you may watch it on RTE (and hear a little Irish spoken!). The speakers emphasize O'Connell's influence beyond Ireland in the cause of freedom and progress, but I hope they don't really include the right to abortion in that progress, but they might. In 2023, there were more than 10,000 babies murdered in the womb, through legal abortions.

There was a wide range of events and programs to honor the anniversary of O'Connell's birth, including a statue outside the Irish Parliament:

The Bank of Ireland is gifting a statue of Daniel O’Connell to the Houses of the Oireachtas. The statue which is currently located in their College Green Branch will be moved to the Leinster House building for unveiling later this year.

Mention of a statue reminded me that G.K. Chesterton called for a statue of Daniel O'Connell in London back in 1929, and in 2014 Francis Campbell, writing for The Catholic Herald, echoed Chesterton's idea when a statue of Mahatma Gandhi was announced, dedicated the next year in Parliament Square.

In "The Early Bird in History" Chesterton had written about how the Catholic Church rehabilitated Saint Joan of Arc long before the English (or even G.B. Shaw) had considered it and then noted:

And I for one hope to see the day when this measure of magnanimity [regarding late-developing English sympathy for Saint Joan of Arc] shall be filled up where it has been most wanting; and some such payment made for the deepest debt of all. I should like to see the day when the English put up a statue of [Robert] Emmett beside the statue of Washington; and I wish that in the Centenary of Emancipation [1829-1929] there were likely to be as much fuss in London about the figure of Daniel O'Connell as there was about that of Abraham Lincoln.

Robert Emmet, like George Washington, had rebelled and fought against the English, leading the Rising of 1803 but, unlike Washington, lost and therefore was hanged, drawn, and quartered on September 20 in Dublin that year. Why does one rebel gets a statue and the other doesn't? Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in the Union and Mahatma Gandhi worked to end Untouchability in India, etc. Why do two liberators of the enslaved and oppressed get statues and another doesn't? 

There's still no statue of either Irish hero in London.

Saint Patrick, pray for us!

Image Source (Public Domain): Lithograph of Daniel O'Connell refusing to take the oath of supremacy. Caption: "One part of this Oath I know to be false; and another I believe to be untrue. House of Commons, May 20, 1829."

Preview: 80th Anniversary of Blessed Rupert Mayer, SJ's Death

Periodically, the Magnificat prayer monthly includes an excerpt from Dying We Live: The Final Messages and Records of the German Resistance, edited by Gollwitzer, Kuhn, and Schneider. After reading several of those excerpts, I purchased the 2009 Wipf and Stock edition. It is an extraordinary experience reading the letters and journals of these men and women, girls and boys as they face imprisonment, torture, and execution with tremendous peace and faith. 

One of the last entries in a section titled "Crowned in Death" is by Blessed Rupert Mayer, SJ who died 80 years ago on All Saints Day in 1945.

So, on Monday, August 11, I'll highlight this anniversary in our weekly Son Rise Morning Show segment, as a way to recommend this book and remember his life and sacrifice. You know the drill: I'll be on the air around 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central. Please listen live here or catch the podcast later here.

Rupert Mayer was born on January 23, 1876, in Stuttgart, Germany. Although he heard a call to become a Jesuit when quite young, he obeyed his father and went to college first, then studied for the priesthood. He was ordained in 1899 and joined the Society of Jesus in 1900. After studying in the Netherlands he was assigned to Munich in 1912 and then served as a chaplain during World War I. He was wounded and his left leg was amputated. After the war he returned to Munich.

As early as 1933 Father Mayer began to preach against Chancellor Adolf Hitler's actions against the Church from the pulpit of Saint Michael's, the Jesuit parish in Munich. He was told to stop such preaching and then taken into "protective custody" on June 5, 1937. He was arrested again on November 3, 1939 and taken to the Sachenhausen concentration work camp for political prisoners.

As this blog notes:

After a few months, his health had deteriorated so badly that it was feared he might die in the camp and be seen as a martyr. So he was sent to stay in the Benedictine abbey in Ettal [which this year is celebrating the 125th anniversary of its restoration after the suppression of the abbey in 1803], in the Bavarian Alps. Fr Mayer spent his time there in prayer, leaving his future in the Lord’s hands. He remained in the abbey for almost six years until freed by American forces in May, 1945.

He at once returned to Munich, where he received a hero’s welcome, and took up again his pastoral work at St Michael’s. However, the years in prison and the camp had undermined his health. On 1 Nov, 1945, Rupert was celebrant at the 8 a.m. Mass on the feast of All Saints in St Michael’s. He had just read the Gospel and began preaching on the Christian’s duty to imitate the saints, when he had a stroke and collapsed. Facing the congregation, "The Lord… the Lord… the Lord…" were his last words. He died shortly afterwards. He was 69 years old. While he was first buried in the Jesuit cemetery at the Jesuit house of studies in Pullach, outside Munich, his remains were later brought back to the city and interred in the crypt of the Burgersaal, the church next to St Michael’s, where the men’s Sodality regularly met.

Saint Michael's in Munich offers some details on his beatification:

Father Rupert Mayer was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 3 May 1987, during a service at Munich's Olympic Stadium. In his sermon, the pope told the congregation: "May the spiritual legacy of his life and apostolic ministry always be with you, especially in times of trial, and always give you new strength and confidence in Christ." After the service, the Pope visited Bürgersaalkirche, where he paused in silent prayer at the tomb of the Blessed.

The Vatican website has the homily available in Italian and German. Pope Saint John Paul II beatified St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) during that visit too. Father Rupert Mayer's feast day is November 3.

Father Mayer's selections in Dying We Live are from letters written during those different imprisonments, including at the monastery in Ettal--where he was not allowed to participate in the praying of the Divine Office by the monks per the authorities!--but kept hidden from the public entirely. That's how much the Nazi party feared him.

While he was in the penal prison at Stadelheim in June/July 1937, he wrote:

I have now passed through the most beautiful period of my life. One would not believe that possible. I have been happy, completely happy, as never before in my life. . . . (p. 257)

Writing to a Gestapo official:

If people could only understand how little it takes to become truly happy inwardly! I have always known that God is good but that he is good in the degree that I have been permitted to experience during the past fortnight, I should never have thought possible. (p. 258)

The most difficult time for him was when he was moved to the monastery at Ettal because of the extreme isolation. He was moved there on August 6, 1940 (the Feast of the Transfiguration!):

Since I exist in a living death; indeed, this death is for me, who am still so full of life, much worse than actual death. . . . I intend to go on carrying my cross and to do penance and atone for my mistakes and my weaknesses, until such time as the dear Lord will intercede to lift this cross from me again. And likewise for the time to come, my watchword will be, "Nearer my God, to thee!" (pp. 262-263)

His favorite prayer was:

Lord, let happen whatever you will;
and as you will, so will I walk;
help me only to know your will!
Lord, whenever you will, then is the time;
today and always.
Lord, whatever you will, I wish to accept,
and whatever you will for me is gain;
enough that I belong to you.
Lord, because you will it, it is right;
and because you will it, I have courage.
My heart rests safely in your hands!

So many of the letters and journals from these Christian victims of Nazi oppression echo these sentiments of resignation and rejoicing; confidence and hope: the main regrets their authors express are sorrow for their families, concern that their imprisonment, mistreatment--even torture--and deaths are causing great anguish to their parents, wives, children, brothers and sisters, friends, even fiancées.

Blessed Rupert Mayer, pray for us!

Preview: The 135th Anniversary of Saint John Henry Newman's Death

Early yesterday morning the news came that Saint John Henry will be declared a Doctor of the Church soon. Pope Leo XIV accepted the recommendation of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints that Newman be conferred that title. He will be the 38th saint declared a Doctor of the Church. 

Since one can't be named a Doctor of the Church unless one is declared a Saint and one can't be declared a Saint until after one is dead, it seems appropriate to remember the 135th anniversary this year of Newman's death on August 11, 1890 in our 2025 anniversary series on the Son Rise Morning Show. 

So that's what we'll do around 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central on Monday, August 4. Please listen live here or catch the podcast later here.

The New Liturgical Movement website offers some context to the brief announcement made on July 31, 2025:

With this decree, St John Henry becomes the 38th Doctor of the Church, the first Oratorian to be granted the title, the second Englishman, after the Venerable Bede, and the third cardinal, after Ss Bonaventure and Robert Bellarmine. (St Anselm, the eleventh Doctor, is often called “of Canterbury” because of the episcopal see he held, but he was Italian by birth, from the northern region of the Val d’Aosta.) He is also the first Doctor of the Church who converted from Protestantism.

As a reminder, there are three qualities required for a saint to be named a Doctor of the Church: "eminent learning (eminens doctrina), a high degree of sanctity (insignis vitae sanctitas), and a formal proclamation by the Church (Ecclesiae declaratio)" as Father Juan Velez reminds us.

Many Newman scholars have hoped Newman would be named a Doctor of Church, some of them like Erich Przywara, SJ and Ida Friederike Gorres, long before his Cause for Canonization had made much progress. Father Juan Velez also reminds us that "Such a declaration benefits the faithful by highlighting the saint’s teachings and encouraging devotion. The Doctor is added to the Church’s universal calendar." What that will mean for the liturgical calendar in the USA we'll have to see. Newman currently shares an optional memorial with St. Denis and Companions and St. John Leonardi on October 9, the anniversary of his conversion.

[The date of his death, August 11 (in 1890) wasn't used because it's already the feast of St. Clare of Assisi, as a Memorial.] 

When Newman died 135 years ago, many praised him, in the Church and even in the British establishment. The Newman Reader offers a collection of contemporary press comments on Newman's death. One highlight is from the The Times of London:

A great man has passed away; a great link with the with past has been broken. Thus enviably closes a most noteworthy life; a life that in itself sums up in the best and most attractive way one side of the religious life of the century. At ninety years of age, full of years, full of honour, but not of honours, in the obscurity of his almost private home, the great man receives the last summons and quietly obeys. A most interesting chapter of our history closes his death, and a life which bears strange testimony to the permanence of certain types in human nature becomes a part of the past. Once more the world is reminded of the degree in which respect and love still attach to the saintly life, when it is coupled with one or another kind of intellectual leadership. Cardinal NEWMAN is literally the last of his generation. Many of his old friends and colleagues he has long survived; others have but lately passed away; but he, to all appearance the most fragile of all, has remained till now. . . .

Will NEWMAN'S memory survive in the estimation of his country? Will his books maintain it? That is a question which may be asked today, but which the future only can answer. Of one thing we may be sure, that the memory of his pure and noble life, untouched by worldliness, unsoured by any trace of fanaticism, will endure, and that whether Rome canonizes him or not he will be canonized in the thoughts of pious people of many creeds in England. The saint and the poet in him will survive. "Lead, kindly Light," is already something better than a classic; the life at Littlemore and at Edgbaston will engrave itself deep into the memory of all to whom religion and lofty human character are dear.

And the Sussex News, highlighting his Oratorian community:

A great Englishman and another of the saints of God has passed to his peace. When JOHN HENRY NEWMAN laid down his long and immortal life's work he was surrounded by young men, any one—or all—of whom would joyfully have given up his own life if it had been possible by such sacrifice to prolong yet a little while the life of the greatest theologian and one of the greatest thinkers of this century. No one who knows anything of the Brothers at the Oratory of S. Philip Neri can doubt this for a moment. Their love for their illustrious and aged chief has scarcely a parallel in these days * * * * * Not in England only but throughout Christendom the death of Cardinal NEWMAN will inspire a feeling of reverent sorrow. He was in his ninetieth year, and it might be said that his work was done; but it is not in human nature to say "Farewell!" without a feeling of grief to such a pure and glorious spirit. In the Christian Church he was the foremost man of his age among the English speaking race, and it is generally agreed among all the most competent critical authorities that he stood before all living prose writers as the master of the English language. . . .

As any future canonized saint should, Newman denied that he that he was one when praised by a correspondent in 1850:

I return you Miss Moore’s letter. You must undeceive her about me, though I suppose she uses words in a general sense. She called Newman a saint. I have nothing of a Saint about me as every one knows, and it is a severe (and salutary) mortification to be thought next door to one. I may have a high view of many things, but it is the consequence of education and of a peculiar cast of intellect—but this is very different from being what I admire. I have no tendency to be a saint—it is a sad thing to say. Saints are not literary men, they do not love the classics, they do not write Tales. I may be well enough in my way, but it is not the ‘high line.’ People ought to feel this, most people do. But those who are at a distance have fee-fa-fum notions about one. It is enough for me to black the saints’ shoes—if St. Philip uses blacking, in heaven.

But 20,000 people in Birmingham lined the streets for his funeral procession and even Cardinal Manning, who did not see eye-to-eye with Newman as a Catholic as much as he had when they were both Anglicans, praised him in his funeral sermon:

. . . A noble and beautiful life is the most convincing and persuasive of all preaching, and we have all felt its power. Our Holy Father Leo XIII. knew the merits and the gifts, both natural and supernatural, which were hidden in his humility, and to the joy of all he called him to the highest dignity next to his own.

The history of our land will hereafter record the name of John Henry Newman among the greatest of our people, as a confessor for the faith, a great teacher of men, a preacher of justice, of piety, and of compassion.

May we all follow him in his life, and may our end be painless and peaceful like his.

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!