Variations on a Theme – God or Superman?

Whenever I am involved in performances of Edward Elgar’s ‘Dream of Gerontius’ or Frederick Delius’s ‘Mass of Life’ I cannot avoid the question of God.  If ever there is a ‘place’ where Music and Theology meet – this is it!

And what a maelstrom of musical theology was swirling around Europe in the years before the Great War! 

• Gustav Mahler, with his sonic obsession with ‘death’, went to his grave in 1911;
• Arnold Schoenberg was struggling towards the day when he declared (for his 12-note method) ‘I have made a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years’;
• Richard Strauss, after hearing ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ in Dusseldorf, Germany, hailed Edward Elgar as “the first English progressive musician, Meister Elgar”;
• The Swiss theologian Karl Barth was undergoing a crisis as he wrestled with the question of how to know God when Protestant liberal theology appeared to be too closely aligned to German nationalism;
• Young French musicians, such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, were sounding out a pathway with new tones and expressions.

In all of this contrapuntal abundance, I need to express my sense of being at a cross-roads when performing ‘The Dream’ and ‘A Mass of Life’.  With Elgar there are, for me in my sonic frame, sublime moments of vital resonance and enchantment with the ‘divine’, with that mystery beyond and outside human knowledge which may be called God – and equally with Delius, there are moments of overwhelming power and poignant glory, but in this music it feels as though we are singing and playing a kind of supremacy in human nature, with God nowhere to be heard. Has Nietzsche hammered God onto the Cross?

Nietzsche’s and Delius’s Zarathustra is ‘Ubermensch’ (overman or superman) dominating and controlling the sound world, whereas Newman’s and Elgar’s Gerontius recognises mystery and unknowability beyond humanity.

Having the privilege of being played in these two great works can feel like a meeting of two ways, a cross road, a meeting place at the centre of a crucifixion.

When the Great War broke out in 1914, these emotions began to be played out in a catastrophic performance on a monumental polyphonic scale.