Conference Agenda

In the decades following World War II, the late Haydn Masses were often described as fundamentally symphonic in nature, displaying both the formal architecture and developmental processes typical of the composer’s symphonies. This “symphonic model,” as I call it, was first proposed by H. C. Robbins Landon (1955), but spread widely beyond the academy: it was taken up by such conductors as Robert Shaw and Leonard Bernstein, and both newspaper reviews and liner notes frequently described the Masses in symphonic terms. Recent scholars (Webster 2001, Demaree and Moses 2017, Hosar 2020) have maintained that Landon and others drastically overstated the symphonic properties of the Masses. There has yet to be an examination, however, of the symphonic model as a cultural phenomenon, of what motivated so many to take up the idea, and of the light it sheds on the place of liturgical music within the social environment of the concert hall.

Through close readings of articles, interviews, concert reviews, and liner notes propounding the symphonic model, I interrogate its underlying assumptions and examine its tacit evaluative charge. I argue that its prominence is due largely to a shift in the performance venue and hence the function of the Masses: a repertoire originally composed for liturgical celebration had come to be heard almost exclusively in the concert hall and on record. Advocates for Haydn’s Masses, I contend, used the symphonic model to assimilate the Masses to a musical culture that valued formal balance and organic unity far more highly than functional utility or Christian devotion.

The symphonic model, therefore, functioned both to disenchant and to re-enchant the Haydn Masses. On the one hand it secularized the Masses, framing their essence not as religious revelation but as pure musical structure. On the other hand, in the sacralized space of the concert hall, those concrete musical structures served as markers of absolute, transhistorical truth. Rather than censuring the symphonic model as inaccurate or anachronistic, however, I propose a reparative reading, which seeks to understand how the symphonic model functioned to reinterpret the Masses, giving them new meaning in their newly secular context.

Geoffrey Hodgkins argued 20 years ago that, like the famous Variations, Gerontius still presents ‘enigmas’. One of these is the question of how Elgar came to choose to set Newman’s poem to music, a choice – for biographers like Jerrold Northrop Moore and Diana McVeagh - bound up with his attitude to his own faith. While the immediate stimulus was a commission to produce the work for the 1900 Birmingham Triennial Festival, Elgar stated that the poem had been ‘soaking’ in his mind for at least eight years. Another notable enigma of Gerontius is the fact that it is a curious object in terms of genre. Contrary to the English enthusiasm for oratorios in the tradition of Handel and Mendelssohn, it has no real plot and is not based on scripture. Elgar also himself avoided the term oratorio, instead simply describing Cardinal Newman’s poem ‘set to music’. When August Jaeger came to catalogue Elgar’s music, he allowed it to be added to the list of oratorios, but noted that ‘there’s no word invented yet to describe it’.

This paper explores two new contexst for Elgar’s unusual contribution to the oratorio tradition. First, and contrary to a tradition of conceiving Elgar’s faith in isolationist terms, it explores Elgar’s myriad connections in Catholic social networks around the English Midlands, and the potential impact of these networks on his aesthetics. Second, and correspondingly, it explores musical and spiritual practices taking place at Newman’s Oratory of St Philip Neri in Birmingham immediately prior to the composition of Gerontius. From 1895, the choir of the Oratory tried to resurrect the spiritual exercises of ‘musical oratory’ or oratorio as they were conceived and practised by St Philip and his followers in sixteenth-century Rome. These exercises reveal not only an intriguing context for Elgar’s work, but also display a remarkable cultural rapprochement with sacred musical traditions in England. Consequently, as well as reconsidering Gerontius, this paper explores implications for a more thoroughgoing reassessment of Elgar’s connections to English Catholicism.

This paper explores the impact of Neoclassicism on church music in interwar France. Beginning from the abundant research already devoted to Catholic influences on French Neoclassicism (epitomised by Stravinsky’s contacts with Jacques Maritain), I turn to the less familiar reverse side of the encounter, asking how the anti-expressivist strain in Neoclassicist discourse entered and disrupted debates on Catholic ritual music itself. By the interwar period, the aesthetics of Catholic religious art had a long history of discord over issues of subjectivity, expression, and emotion, as seen in zealous (and highly gendered) campaigns against “sentimentalism” in church music and decor. Modernist objectivism was therefore colliding with an older discourse of ritual impersonality, itself a product of earlier reactions against Romantic doctrines of art as expression of subjective emotional experience. My paper analyses the messy interaction of these two intellectual traditions, via the case study of a series of public and private exchanges in the early 1930s between Joseph Samson, France’s leading choral conductor; Dom Gajard, the musical chief of the Solesmes Benedictines; and the Catholic writers A.-D. Sertillanges and Maurice Brillant. To clarify the issues in this debate, which extended to choral performance practice as well as composition, I turn to contemporaneous recordings by Samson and Gajard. The episode recontextualises secular Neoclassicism by illuminating its connections to the aesthetics of religious art, and at the same time emerges as a significant source of the “new humanist” reaction against Neoclassicism in the 1930s.