The genre of the oratorio proved to be the principal outlet for Elgar’s dramatic instincts. Though he did attempt an opera in the form of The Spanish Lady late in his life, he left the work unfinished and was, in truth, never particularly happy with the literary material he was trying to set. One wonders, too, whether he genuinely possessed that insight into those pragmatic expedients of the stage which his contemporaries such as Stanford, Goring Thomas and Mackenzie more readily understood. Shaped, as he admitted to Frederick Delius in 1933, by his English environment of the choral festival, he more naturally gravitated to oratorio. This allowed him to embrace the ‘epic’ narrative feature which the genre abundantly afforded in its handling of soloists and the orchestra (as exemplified by Handel, Haydn, Spohr and Mendelssohn) while, at the same time, it was imperative to provide ample music for the chorus, which oratorio, of necessity, demanded.

By the time Elgar broached the oratorio form in The Light of Life in 1896, he had advanced some way in embracing Wagner’s symphonic principles—the importance of leitmotiv, and the central, dynamic role of the orchestra—through the vehicle of his choral symphony, The Black Knight. This understanding of Wagner’s techniques had been nourished partly by hearing Wagner in London (under August Manns and Hans Richter), at the Leipzig opera during the 1880s and by the study of Wagner’s scores; but it was during the years 1892 to 1902, when he made no fewer than six visits to Germany (which included Bayreuth), that his fervour for Wagner deepened. He was also much encouraged by his publishing agent, Augustus Jaeger, himself a passionate Wagnerian. The hour-long Light of Life, however, offered him only limited scope (as Parry had found in Job of 1892 which Elgar much admired), so it was in Caractacus (for Leeds in 1898) and The Dream of Gerontius (for Birmingham in 1900) that he began to refine his assimilation of Wagner on a larger scale, and it was this sense of formal magnitude which surely influenced his decision to set the dramatic, world-changing events of the New Testament to music.

Constructing his own libretto for The Apostles, Op 49, commissioned by the Birmingham Festival of 1903, Elgar set about the study of theological literature, and also looked at poetical works such as Longfellow’s The Divine Tragedy and Wagner’s sketch for Jesus of Nazareth before putting pen to paper in December 1902. Over the next seven months he devised a scenario in which he pieced together his own interpretation of those key elements of the Gospels. Preoccupied by the distinctly human facets of the Christian story, The Apostles sought to depict the story of Jesus’s disciples through their calling, reference to the miracles, the preaching of Jesus (not least the Beatitudes), the betrayal, the crucifixion, resurrection and ascension. An ambitious array of soloists, six in all, attempted to encapsulate this distillation. Jesus and Mary are obviously key figures, but much of the focus rests on Peter and John and the sympathetic portrayals of Mary Magdalene and Judas Iscariot, essentially an antihero whose tragic, Wotan-like monologue is one of the central episodes of the oratorio. Equally important too was the part played by the chorus who fulfilled an imaginative and variegated set of functions as the remaining body of disciples, the turba (crowd), narrator and commentator. Elgar also used The Apostles as a fertile thematic seed bed since it was from this reservoir of leitmotivic material that he drew exhaustively for The Kingdom, Op 51, commissioned for Birmingham in 1906. Here, in the wake of Jesus’s legacy, the emphasis of the work is placed even more profoundly on four of the six protagonists in The Apostles—Mary, Mary Magdalene, John and Peter—their meditation on past events and the early (pre-Pauline) formation of a new, Christian faith.

The Kingdom was composed at Elgar’s Hereford home at Plas Gwyn and early drafts were made in January 1906 including the orchestral prelude. Nevertheless, the gestation of the music was fraught with self-doubt, illness and worry, not least because he and his wife had been invited to visit Cincinatti for the May Festival. Though he was able to undertake some orchestration in the United States, it inevitably meant that further inspiration for, and completion of, his new oratorio would be disrupted. On his return, work was fitfully resumed. Its title, The Kingdom, was announced to Birmingham in early June, but it was not until almost the end of July that the composition was finished, though there was still much scoring to do. Besides the task of rehearsing The Kingdom at Birmingham in mid-September, Elgar also had the additional pressure of preparing The Apostles which was due to be given the night before The Kingdom premiere. Exhausting it may have been for the composer, but he must have been entirely gratified by the packed Birmingham Town Hall in which every nook and cranny of the great building was occupied for those two legendary performances on 2 and 3 October, adorned by four of the country’s finest soloists, Agnes Nicholls, Muriel Foster, John Coates and William Higley.

Critical evaluation of The Kingdom was mixed, even polarised, but, in time, the work established itself as a cornerstone of British oratorio and Elgar conducted it numerous times at choral festivals. Some conductors, notably Adrian Boult, maintained that it was the composer’s finest choral utterance. Shorter, by some twenty minutes or more, than The Apostles, The Kingdom is more concise in structure than its longer counterpart. The opening prelude, one of Elgar’s most vigorous and uplifting orchestral canvases, serves several functions. Material from The Apostles is copiously resummoned, particularly of Peter’s denial and abandonment of Christ, but this is tempered by a prevailing sense of hope and optimism established in the stirring mood of the initial orchestral Schwung. Couched in E flat this section yields to the exposition of new ideas headed by a slow march in D flat which Jaeger (who, with Elgar’s sanction, published an identification of all the leitmotivs for Novello) labelled ‘New Faith’. Other connected themes, namely ‘Penitence’, ‘Contrition’ and ‘The Real Presence’ (which quotes a portion of the plainsong melody ‘O sacrum convivium’), appropriately emerge from this ardent yet fragile statement of belief, in particular the faltering ‘Prayer’ motive in a gentle triple metre which, combined with ‘New faith’, re-establishes E flat in the last section. Together they form a microcosm of the oratorio’s larger form.

Elgar marked the head of his libretto ‘Jerusalem’ for it was here that he located the oratorio’s five sections. The first movement, ‘In the Upper Room’, is based on the first part of The Acts of the Apostles, where the disciples, Mary and Mary Magdalene congregated to pray. This entire paragraph Elgar set in C major and introduced several new themes—the hymn-like ‘Seek first the Kingdom of God’ and the more flowing ‘The Way, the Truth and the Life’. Also pivotal is the ‘Real Presence’ which refers to the emerging sacramental significance of the Last Supper. In true Wagnerian style, Peter’s monologue, ‘Men and brethren’, acts as a recapitulation of events from The Apostles in which Judas’s betrayal and Jesus’s glorious resurrections are recalled which give rise to a penitential hymn (again in E flat), ‘Thou Lord, which knowest the hearts of all men’, sung by the disciples (as a male chorus). A brisker, more agitated choral episode in C minor follows in which Matthias is chosen as the twelfth disciple. This culminates in a spirit of rejoicing, spearheaded by the motive ‘O ye priests’, before the movement concludes ruminatively in E flat.

The second movement, ‘At the Beautiful Gate’ (The Morn of Pentecost), provides a short, poignant intermezzo for Mary and Mary Magdalene. Opening with a falling seventh figure, reminiscent of Parry, this lyrical meditation in G major cites from Old Testament texts (such as Ecclesiasticus, Zephaniah and Leviticus) as the faithful prepare to go into the temple for the Jewish feast of Shavuot. At the heart of this mellifluous fantasy, the miracle of the healing of the lame man (from Chapter 3 of The Acts), with its more angular chromaticisms, is anticipated. This more tortured material is, however, counterbalanced by a passage sung by Mary (‘The blind and the lame came to Jesus’) where, in marked contrast to the grand orchestral forces of the oratorio, the tender beauty of her words is characterised by instrumental textures of an intimate chamber idiom.

The miracle of Pentecost, from Chapter 2 of The Acts, forms the heart of the third movement. Embarking in B minor, this highly theatrical essay begins with the disciples once again in the upper room, urged on by ‘The Way, the Truth and the Life’ (as expressed by the orchestra). As the disciples reflect on the hope of spiritual inspiration in a plaintive 6/4 paragraph in F minor (‘The spirit of the Lord will rest upon them’), Jesus’s words are invoked (‘I will pour forth of my spirit’) by a chorus of female voices. The energy of the Holy Spirit is subsequently unleashed in a tour de force of another slow march (‘He, Who walketh upon the wings of the wind’) in A flat and a rhythmical scherzo in C minor (‘In Solomon’s Porch’) in which Elgar’s orchestral mastery is exemplified in its fullest vigour and colour. The rest of the movement, dominated by Peter, attempts to articulate the Pentecost event. His ‘nobilmente’ mood is underlined first by a return to E flat and then by a highly symbolic recapitulation of the ‘New Faith’ in C major where the theme’s meaning is fully enunciated (‘It shall come to pass in the last days’). In view of Peter’s preaching, the people examine their guilt at Jesus being given up to death (‘Men and brethren, what shall we do?’), but their spirits are lifted in a brighter, buoyant, climactic finale in D major as Peter exhorts them to repent and be baptised (‘In the Name of Jesus Christ’). Here Elgar also used the opportunity to restate earlier thematic material from the movement and gave especial prominence in the closing bars to the ‘New Faith’ and ‘Pentecost’ motives.

‘The Sign of Healing’, which constitutes the fourth movement, begins lyrically in D major as the contralto narrates the baptisms, breaking of bread and wondrous signs of the new, fledgling religion. This includes the miracle of the lame man (referred to in the second movement) which invokes an aria for John (‘Unto you that fear His Name’) in F major, well matched to the euphonious melodiousness of John Coates’s tenor voice. Rivalling the fervour of Gerontius (a role Coates had also sung), this resplendent solo passage gains even greater ardour with its heart-warming modulation to G flat (‘Unto you first’) and its transformation into a duet with the entry of Peter (‘Turn ye again’). Peter’s ensuing detention by the priests and Sadducees (recalling Jesus’s arrest in The Apostles) then provides a conduit to Mary’s elegiac nocturne in C minor, ‘The sun goeth down’, the longest solo section of both oratorios. Making reference to two ancient Hebrew hymns (as a parallel to the ‘Morning Hymn’ of The Apostles), her searingly mournful lament, embellished by the emotional arabesques of the obbligato solo violin, draws on the Psalms, the Gospels and the Epistle of Peter as she meditates on the future persecution of the disciples. Written for Agnes Nicholls, this powerful scena exactly suited the Wagnerian stature of her voice; it was one she made her own and it moved the composer to tears.

In the final movement, the interrogation and release of Peter and John back to the company of the disciples is represented by another slow march in the form of a grand choral statement (‘Lord, Thou didst make the heav’n’). This leads on to ‘The Breaking of Bread’ as a powerful reference to the sacrament of the Eucharist. Invoking C major once again, Elgar makes eloquent reference to the theme of ‘Real Presence’, and the ‘Prayer’ motive, heard at the conclusion of the opening orchestral prelude, makes its telling entry with John’s entreaty ‘Give thanks—first for the Cup’. With enactment of Communion, we hear stridently the triumphal theme of the ‘Church’ (‘so may Thy Church be gathered together’) as a transition to the final, unusually becalmed section of the oratorio, ‘The Prayers’. At the head of this unconventional finale lies ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ for the chorus which Elgar veils in mystery and, by dint of its pensive G minor, not a little melancholy. This sense of spiritual introspection is further complemented by the extended, contemplative coda in which the motives of the ‘New Faith’ and ‘Prayer’ are seminal in the restoration of E flat, the framing key of the entire work.

Jeremy Dibble © 2025

The extent to which The Kingdom resides under the shadow of Elgar’s much-loved The Dream of Gerontius is clear from its comparatively infrequent performances and fewer recordings. Elgar considered The Dream of Gerontius (1900) to be ‘the best of me’ … but was it in the end?

After Gerontius, as he worked on his grand ‘Apostles’ scheme during the first decade of the 20th century, he was refining his skills as an orchestral composer; this is evident in both The Apostles (1903) and The Kingdom (1906). For me, it is the quality of the orchestral writing in these works that elevates them above The Dream of Gerontius. At the same time, the choral writing in The Apostles and The Kingdom was more achievable for the choirs of the day, which avoided the issues present at the premiere of Gerontius.

As is well documented, nothing came easily to Elgar. His new fame and his health issues were both distracting in different ways, and he did not complete The Apostles as planned: he had to settle for a two-movement work for its premiere in 1903. By 1906, when he composed The Kingdom (which is in effect the third and final part of The Apostles), he was beginning to turn his attention towards purely orchestral writing; large choral works would no longer be a priority.

Time constraints and further ill-health meant that even The Kingdom was left incomplete. Its ending is unlike the ‘heavenly glow’ of The Dream of Gerontius or the tumultuous climax of The Apostles. Musicians new to The Kingdom may well get to the end and turn a page to discover that this is it! My mission, when conducting it, is to make the ending sound like an entirely natural conclusion.

So why is it that I am among a minority who believe The Kingdom to be Elgar’s best choral work? After all, it was last of the three that I conducted and it is the only one I never sang as a choral tenor. My conversion happened gradually, the penny finally dropping in 2010 when I conducted it for the fourth time, on this occasion with Hertfordshire Chorus in St Albans Cathedral. I am now so taken with the work that I struggle to find any fault with it at all. It is a gem from the first note to the last, and my desire to share this as widely as possible is reinforced by the present recording.

One thing that cannot happen in a concert performance is ‘repeated listening’. A recording, by contrast, holds an open invitation at the end … to return to the beginning! This drip-feed allows the music to be deeply absorbed, and it is this which I believe will enable The Kingdom’s true quality to be more widely appreciated.

Elgar recorded many of his works later in life, some in the newly built EMI Studios in Abbey Road. The only part of The Kingdom that has come down to us under his direction is the Prelude and this has formed the basis of my approach to the entire work. Even with the scratchy sound quality, it is a revelation to hear Elgar conduct it. It is so full of colour, energy and pathos, and it incorporates so much more rubato than that which is indicated in the score. In other words, Elgar’s reading of the Prelude is totally fluid and of the moment. He takes it where he wants it to go with real momentum and drama; I find it totally liberating and it has strongly influenced my interpretation of the whole score.

The Kingdom is a mixture of gentle conversational sections and astonishing dramatic passages, and with judicious rubato one is free to feel where the music is going in a totally natural way. The various layers of varnish that have coated this work over the past century were not present in Elgar’s recording. His colours are iridescent, and he never allows the music to become static or turgid.

This new recording took place in the recently restored 1875 Victorian Theatre at Alexandra Palace. It was in fact performed in the Great Hall at Alexandra Palace shortly after it was written, although Elgar did not attend that particular performance. He was familiar with the area, as it is where his companion Jaeger lived, and he often attended the racecourse at the foot of the Palace.

In his later life, Elgar conducted a memorable performance of The Kingdom and visibly wept as he reached the famous solo, Mary’s ‘The sun goeth down’. Perhaps, by then, the music’s true worth had been brought home to him.

David Temple © 2025