What's that saying, "anything that can go wrong will?"
That's kind of what happened with the 1900 premiere of Edward Elgar's two-part oratorio, "The Dream of Gerontius." It's based on a text by Cardinal John Henry Newman.
The premiere was October 3, 1900, at Birmingham Town Hall in England. It was part of the city's Triennial Music Festival.
The Birmingham City Council website says the performance was “considered a complete catastrophe," but the work itself gained some recognition.
The chorus master died a few days before the premiere.
And it didn't help that the chorus didn’t know their parts, because they didn’t have enough time to rehearse. And some of the soloists fell ill.
A friend of Elgar noted: “As the music became more chromatic, they slipped hideously out of tune. Part two was hopelessly wrecked by the choir, whose pitiful stumblings indeed remained the outstanding impression.”
But it seems reviewers were still able to look beyond the performance to appreciate the work’s musical value.
This oratorio was one of three Elgar wrote.
And more than 120 years after that so-called catastrophe, the work remains the most popular and widely performed of Elgar's large-scale choral pieces.
