The Apostles is the biggest creative achievement of the man who has some claim to the premier place in English music. It might well be argued on that basis alone that here is the greatest musical work this country has produced. The Apostles has another distinction within the work of its composer: in this music alone Elgar's mature genius was to move amongst the tensions and grandeurs of opera. 

The Apostles was written in 1902-03, when Elgar was 45. But the history of its project went back more than 30 years to the time of his schooldays. The composer was to remember all his life the moment of its origin in an observation made by his teacher at Littleton House near Worcester: 'The idea of the work originated in this way. Mr Reeve addressing his pupils, once remarked: "The Apostles were poor men, young men, at the time of their calling; perhaps before the descent of the Holy Ghost not cleverer than some of you here". This set me thinking, and the oratorio of 1903 is the result'.

Elgar's words were addressed to Robert Buckley, his first biographer. And Buckley wrote them down together with the remark that followed: 'A moment later he added, with characteristic luxury of humour too deep for smiles, "I do not remember more than 27 fellow pupils, but there must have been three or four hundred, as that number (or thereabouts) are kind enough to remind me of our early acquaintance at Littleton House."'

There was the unmistakable hint of this subject's first appeal to the artist in the young Elgar. The pursuit of religious themes such as Christ's Divinity and the Actions of God could offer no real insight through self-identification. The Apostles on the other hand had been real men. And yet they had been special – elect – distinct from their fellows. Where was the beginning of any individual distinction if not in just such a feeling? What could conceivably drive an obscure Worcestershire schoolboy to become the composer of important music unless he already had some notion of the distinctive role for which his powers might have cast him? Each of Christ's Apostles had been specially chosen to stand out from his obscure beginnings. If Mr Reeve's words set his pupil thinking, it was because the pupil had recognised something that applied to himself. 

A second appeal of this story for Edward Elgar might have been recognised in its religious significance. For a man who always sought faith and often found only doubt, the choice of a religious theme for the embodiment of a big work could show itself almost as a means of offering God a temptation: if God was real, let him prove his existence by crowning this of all the composer's efforts with a special inspiration. Any such notion would perhaps have remained far below the conscious level of Elgar's thought. But I believe it played a part in the making of all of his big religious works. When The Apostles' predecessor The Dream of Gerontius failed of a satisfactory premiere in 1900, the composer wrote bitterly to a friend: 'I always said God was against art and I still believe it'. Nevertheless he was to try again. 

And when he came finally to address it, the subject of Christ's Apostles was to make a third appeal to Elgar – an appeal to his own private craft of composition. Here was a group of heterogeneous figures from different backgrounds and origins, brought together by a single overmastering project. That was a precise analogue of the process by which Elgar's music was created. His primary ideas, as he once said, had been noted down 'anywhere and everywhere'; but it was only the formation of a definite project that caused those ideas to be looked out of the sketchbook, chosen from amongst all the other ideas noted there, put together and developed into an expressive unity. 'He hath chosen them' the chorus sing at one important point in The Apostles. In exactly that way Elgar himself was to choose themes and ideas from his sketchbooks for this work. Thus the Apostles and their story found an identification in the composer's way of writing music, even as they had found identification in the composer's way of looking at himself. 

So much so that Elgar was to apply the same principles not only to the making of his music for The Apostles but to the making of a libretto for that music as well. The Bible must be the only source for such a libretto: then there could be no question of accuracy or of inspiration. But within the Bible Elgar took his words from here, there, and everywhere. Line by line, sometimes almost phrase by phrase, he brought together the fragments that would give just the emphasis he wanted at every point. He combined separate stories and superimposed different actions upon one another until the psychological emphasis of the libretto reflected its composer as faithfully as the music it was to serve. As Elgar confided to Robert Buckley: 'I have been thinking it out since boyhood, and have been selecting the words for years, many years.' 

The making of The Apostles

The authorities of the Birmingham Festival first approached Elgar to write a work for production at their 1900 Festival. He was at first undecided as between his Apostles project and Cardinal Newman's The Dream of Gerontius (which offered the advantage of a finished poem needing only some abridgement to produce a workable libretto). And despite its unfortunate premiere, The Dream of Gerontius won wide recognition for Elgar at home and abroad. At Düsseldorf in May 1902 the composer conducted his own work, and was afterwards toasted by Richard Strauss as 'the first English progressivist musician'. By then Birmingham had requested another major Elgar work for production at their next Festival in October 1903. Gerontius had been done; the Apostles project remained. 

Two months after the Gerontius success at Düsseldorf Elgar was in Germany again, but this time as a listener. At the end of July he spent a week at Bayreuth. There he heard Der fliegende Holländer, Parsifal and the first three operas of the Ring. Returning home, he wrote to a friend: 'I am plotting gigantic work'.

The Ring cycle was unquestionably in Elgar's mind as he formulated The Apostles, for he first saw it as a cycle of oratorios. But it was prophetic that Elgar had heard only the first three operas of Wagner's tetralogy at Bayreuth. For not only was his own cycle planned as a trilogy; but the lack of a conclusion was to pursue this trilogy-idea to an enigmatic end. At the beginning, however, the plan seemed clear. Elgar would later recall it: 'It was part of my original scheme to continue The Apostles by a second work carrying on the establishment of the Church among the Gentiles. This, too, is to be followed by a third oratorio, in which the fruit of the whole – that is to say, the end of the world and the Judgement – is to be exemplified. I, however, faltered at that idea...'

As well he might. It was one thing to write about the past, about beginnings. But it was quite something else to frame the future with an ending that would eliminate the very terms of human life itself. So Elgar reduced his trilogy-scheme to a single large oratorio devoted only to the original Apostles. 

This was the plan on which he began to work for Birmingham. It was to show three separate cases among Christ's Apostles: the man who lacked faith, the doubter converted, and the man whose faith was strong. It made a virtual catalogue of the spiritual possibilities within Elgar's private existence. 

The three Apostles

The choice of the Apostle to represent failure was clear from the outset: it had to be Judas. (When Elgar had started writing the music for his first Birmingham project in 1899, it had been around Judas that his beginning thoughts had collected.) The strong man to balance Judas, the composer decided after a little hesitation, should be Peter. Peter was to be a visionary, like Gerontius. But Judas fascinated Elgar for the same reason: in him too the composer saw the effects of a kind of vision. Several of the commentaries Elgar read to prepare his own thinking suggested that Judas had been not so much blindly perverse as ambitious for Christ – that the 'betrayal' had been staged by Judas entirely with the idea of putting Christ in a situation where he would have to make a great show of power. It was an interesting temptation – a temptation in which a creative personality would be certain to find appeal. 

The middle case – the figure of the doubter converted – was to give Elgar much more trouble. Perhaps it was just too close to private experience and private problems. However it happened, the very character of doubt seemed to fasten itself upon the composer's thinking about this figure of ambivalence. At last he chose Mary Magdalene, the woman of the streets who was converted by witnessing one of Christ's miracles. 

With the choice of Mary Magdalene there came into Elgar's scheme a flaw. Perhaps it was the only flaw in the entire conception, but it was fundamental. Theologically, spiritually, artistically, the only way to present these three cases was in the order of Weakness-Conversion-Strength. But the Judas story would inevitably remove the earthly presence of Christ. And while Peter's strength could be shown without Christ's physical presence, Mary Magdalene's conversion could not. Against every inclination, then, Elgar found himself forced to deal with Conversion before he portrayed Doubt. So the entire formulation acquired an unhappy, downward direction from its outset.

The composition process

Undaunted, Elgar worked at his libretto and his score almost side by side through the winter months of 1902-03. Its beginning seemed to call forth from him all the heights and depths of eloquence that even he could desire or dream of. The very opening words he had chosen, 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me', appeared really to come true in the hushed fervour of the choral Prologue. The action then began with the Watchers on the Temple roof waiting for the dawn; and the breaking of the new day's light over the scene drew from him music of unparalleled magnificance. His libretto had brilliantly placed against this daybreak the defining action of the whole work – the choosing of the Apostles. Next came The Beatitudes, set in an enchanting pastoral landscape 'By the Wayside', where the individualities of the different Apostles emerge in their separate reactions to the Blessings as Christ speaks them one by one. By late February 1903 all this was complete in vocal score and in the printer's hands. Now came the individual cases. It was time for Mary Magdalene. 

Mary's music

Elgar's sense of his difficulty at this point was shown in the special elaboration with which he had constructed the Mary Magdalene libretto. There were two separate scenes – the first actually sub-divided so as to show Mary Magdalene watching from her tower while Peter attempts to walk over the water and Christ quells the storm, the second showing Mary Magdalene washing Christ's feet with her tears and securing forgiveness for her sins. And between those two scenes Elgar had inserted the incident of Peter recognising Christ's divinity, so as to keep the action moving forward amongst the Apostles already chosen. Much of the music for Mary Magdalene was necessarily slow and sorrowful. It was relieved, however – not only by Peter's recognition scene, but by a wonderful choral fantasy evoking Mary Magdalene's life with her former friends ('Let us fill ourselves with costly wine and ointments') and a virtuoso orchestral conception of the sea storm. 

The role of Judas

During April Elgar wrote the Judas portion. Here was a night scene to answer the opening dawn: Judas, obsessed by his ambition to see Christ reveal himself in power, leads the rabble through the shadowy garden 'with lanterns and torches and weapons'. After the betrayal he begins to realise what he has done in a great bass solo. And against his gradual self-recognition is set the choral singing within the Temple of the Palm beginning 'O Lord God, to whom vengeance belongeth...render a reward to the proud'. Judas hears this, picks up odd phrases to apply with bitter irony to his own case, and so resolves on suicide. 

In the Judas scene Elgar touched heights of sheer human drama which he had never before approached. Yet during this supremely successful writing in April 1903 he began to be unwell, and the illness gathered itself with overwhelming psychological suggestion into trouble with his eyes – trouble with seeing.

The source of the trouble emerged in May when he suddenly went back to the Mary Magdalene portion and confused the publisher's engraver by adding a completely new chorus to end Part I more convincingly. It was a good idea to relieve the persistent chromaticism of both the Mary Magdalene and the Judas scenes with the diatonic security of 'Turn you to the Stronghold'. But there was some difficulty in forming a sufficiently imposing structure out of such a simple, hymn-like tune. 'Turn you to the Stronghold' did not in fact ideally complement the closely woven texture of the rest. Nonetheless its addition somehow set Elgar's mind at rest, and his health improved immediately.

Through June he worked at the scenes leading up to the Ascension. Here he had planned a second dawn, whose revival of the opening music for the Watchers on the Temple roof made a superb device for emphasising the passage of time. And in the linked climaxes of 'The Ascension' Elgar again achieved something new in his music – a staggering elaboration of choral lines and polyphonies all shaped within a single ever-rising curve of melodic expression. 

Two of his projected three cases now stood finished in vocal score. But June was nearly over. The Birmingham Festival loomed in October, and none of the orchestration had yet been done. Inevitably Elgar was forced to recognise that be could never hope to finish Part III and all the orchestration in time for the rehearsals and the performance. Part III must be put off. His wife broke the news to the publishers, and they were very nice about it. The two parts he had finished after all culminated in Christ's Ascension, and what better climax could there be than that? Everyone was pleased at the prospect of comfortable time for careful preparation, so that the Gerontius fiasco of 1900 would on no account be repeated. And they were right. The premiere of The Apostles at Birmingham in October 1903 provided one of Elgar's greatest triumphs. 

After The Apostles

The question of Part III, depicting Peter, seemed to resolve itself easily when a third Birmingham commission arrived for the Festival of 1906: 

'...I suggested to the directors of the Birmingham Festival to add merely a short third part to the two into which the already published work, The Apostles, is divided'. But when he came seriously to think about it, that solution seemed hardly to provide a convincing climax to cap what had already been achieved. The beginning of 1904 found Elgar questioning his own revised plan.

In February he told an interviewer: '...I found that to be unsatisfactory, and I have decided to revert to my original lines. There will, therefore, be two other oratorios'. In The Kingdom (1906) Elgar realised his vision of Peter as the Apostle who was able to build his own spiritual strength toward achievement. And that combined perfectly with the original scheme for the second oratorio as 'carrying on the establishment of the Church among the Gentiles'. But there weren't so many actual events to depict in The Kingdom. Its mood was inevitably lyric after the drama of The Apostles. In that mood of contemplation the great scheme faltered. All of Elgar's later attempts to revive the unique opening dramatic thrust of The Apostles for a final work on 'The Last Judgement' ended in failure, and he was never again to achieve any large-scale expression of a religious theme. 

One scene written especially for The Kingdom was an imposing solo for soprano, 'The Sun Goeth Down'. The Elgars' friend Dora Penny found him actually in the midst of composing this solo when she arrived for a visit near the end of 1905. But I often wonder whether Elgar did very much more for The Kingdom beyond merely working up the material he had previously sketched for Peter. In many ways The Kingdom achieves a better unity than The Apostles. It remains considerably the shorter of the two works. And the addition of 'The Sun Goeth Down' near its end is suggestive. It complements Peter's great solo earlier in The Kingdom, just as Judas's solo had complemented Mary Magdalene's in The Apostles. And it completes in another night the day which had dawned with 'The Ascensio' at the end of The Apostles. 

Was this second day and night cast as preparation for that third and ultimate midnight which must bring The Last Judgement? Or had Elgar realised in his heart of hearts that though Michelangelo might depict such a subject in visual art, it would be impossible to represent the ending of time in a temporal art like music without negating all the music which had gone before? That was the question, I think, which could never finally be answered. All one can say is that if The Apostles really is unfinished, it can be so only because in this work Elgar had taken up a subject which for Western man at any rate is greater than any other: such a subject, if it is to retain its greatness, simply cannot be brought to any end. And so The Apostles above all Elgar's other works pays tribute to the sheer courage of his genius. It raises itself as a hymn, more profoundly touching than any I know, to the inevitable imperfection of plans, to the fallibility of human vision.