From Rome via Birmingham to Vienna

The oratorio »The Dream of Gerontius« is considered one of Edward Elgar's most important works and enjoys great popularity especially in his native England. There, the oratorio had been the dominant genre of the developing bourgeois musical life since its establishment by George Frideric Handel, and had retained this position for more than a century and a half, when in 1900 an English oratorio by an English composer was finally premiered, which was able to revive the genre - now in a contemporary late Romantic tonal language. The English oratorio tradition was thus perpetuated - by a Catholic, of all people, who, on top of everything else, chose as his libretto a theological poem by Cardinal John Henry Newman, who had converted from the Anglican to the Catholic Church in 1845 and was canonized by Pope Francis in 2019.
»The Dream of Gerontius« is thus a work closely associated with particularities of English history, and so it is not particularly surprising that it has only recently become more widely known on the European mainland. For example, it was first heard at the Vienna Konzerthaus only in 1986, in a concert in the cycle »Rarities from Opera and Oratorio« conducted by the legendary Australian conductor Sir Charles Mackerras. The orchestra that played under him at that time was the ORF Symphony Orchestra, and it is the same orchestra under its present name that is now giving the fourth performance of Elgar's major oratorio work at the Wiener Konzerthaus. This time, the British conductor Nicholas Collon is at the podium, making his Konzerthaus debut, and the Canadian tenor Michael Schade shines in the title role.