Sacred Music: St. John Henry Newman's Words and Music

I purchased and have listened to Harry Christophers and The Sixteen's new CD of various settings of St. John Henry Newman's poetry and famous meditation adapted for commissioned works:

God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.

He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments.

Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about.

Harry Christophers went to a Church of England minister for a "translation" of Newman's Meditation more suited to be set to music and Christophers is most pleased that Robert Willis, the Dean of Canterbury, eliminated the use of the third person singular masculine pronoun when referring to God. So listening to the CD, one hears five different variations on the theme of Newman's Meditation, with different texts. They are all meditative, virtuosic, and inward looking. 

But Harry Christophers has programmed more traditional settings of Newman's works: Sir William Henry Harris's version of "Lead, Kindly Light", Richard Runciman Terry's of "Praise to the Holiest in the Height, and "Firmly I Believe and Truly" with a hymn tune by William Boyce (Halton Holgate). So these are works for congregations to sing, and the Sixteen sing them gloriously. 

The adapted works for Meditation mostly just glided by as I listened to them, while the three quoted hymns stand out as praise to God, declarations of faith, and thanksgiving for providence.

I've also listened twice to the recent performance of Sir Edward Elgar's setting of Newman's poem, The Dream of Gerontius at the Proms. Critical reception of this work, almost always from a secular publication, is always mixed: admiring Elgar's achievement, but descrying Newman's religion (what Harry Christophers refers to as his "ideology" in the Meditation CD liner notes). For example, The Guardian review has to remind us:

First performed in Birmingham town hall, Gerontius has always provoked extreme reactions, initially to its Roman Catholicism in a mostly Anglican country, now because its religiosity, with all the resonance of that word, is too much for some.

I don't think that Newman should be even indirectly accused of religiosity, with its implications of falsity and hypocrisy of excessive piety. And certainly not Elgar, who as this article from The Newman Review notes, had a very common-man view of the title character:

I imagined Gerontius to be a man like us, not a Priest or a Saint, but a sinner, a repentant one of course but still no end of a worldly man in his life, & now brought to book. Therefore I’ve not filled his part with Church tunes & rubbish but a good, healthy full-blooded romantic, remembered worldliness, so to speak. It is, I imagine, much more difficult to tear one’s self away from a well to do world than from a cloister.[3]

Perhaps Elgar went a little far in his judgment of the title character, but he sees Gerontius, even in this Dream, as a real human being. I rather think Gerontius was not as worldly as Elgar thinks, as he proclaims:

Rouse thee, my fainting soul, and play the man;
and through such waning span
Of life and thought as still has to be trod,
Prepare to meet thy God.
And while the storm of that bewilderment
Is for a season spent
And, ere afresh the ruin on me fall,
Use well the interval.

Gerontius is more aware of his condition than someone who has been "no end of a worldly man in his life"; he's been well-instructed in the Faith and believes it, even as he faces the crisis of his death.

Nevertheless, every time I listen to live or recorded performance, I appreciate how Elgar created a dramatic, almost operatic musical narrative. The deathbed sequence in the first part is filled with Gerontius' expressions of both faith and fear, as he tries to rouse himself even before he dies to declare his faith and trust in his Saviour. Elgar sets Newman's quotations from the traditional prayers for the dying with clarity, while Gerontius' fears are also sensitively set as he fades away from life. The Priest confidently send Gerontius on his way:

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!

And the second part, as the Soul adjusts to eternal life "temporarily" without a body, is imaginative and inspires awe. The dialog between the Soul and Angel transports the listener to the Soul's particular judgment, and the long interlude of the Choirs of Angelicals prepares us for the denouement of the promised-to-be-brief parting of the Angel from the Soul, with the final intrusion of the Soul's deathbed on earth, even as the Souls in Purgatory join him in the hopes to "see Him in the truth of everlasting day." And the Angel's loving farewell! Glorious!

Elgar's music is transcendent and Newman's drama is based on doctrine and devotion. Perhaps Elgar's work--not an oratorio, as he would not allow that term--is something only a Catholic may fully appreciate. 

Nevertheless, the announcers on the BBC mentioned the audience's rapt silence during the performance in Albert Hall, and the ovation was enthusiastic at the end. Such a confident, promising conclusion, as the orchestra, choirs, and Angel serenade the Soul demonstrates more than the audience may have dreamed as true--even as that final Amen and timpani roll presage a warning for the rest of us.