‘That is the penalty of my English environment.’ So Edward Elgar replied to Frederick Delius, who had just opined that he ‘thought it was a great pity that [Elgar] had wasted so much time and energy in writing those long-winded oratorios’. Elgar was visiting Delius at his home in Grez-sur-Loing on 30 May 1933, just before conducting the French premiere of his Violin Concerto. Delius, a fervent disciple of Nietzsche, despised any music Associated with organised religion; he once remarked to his amanuensis Eric Fenby that Elgar ‘might have been a great composer if he had thrown all that religious paraphernalia overboard. Gerontius is a nauseating work, and, of course, tremendously influenced by Parsifal.’

Assuming that Delius, who was as a rule brutally frank, did report Elgar's reply accurately, a question arises immediately: why did Elgar thus casually dismiss The Dream of Gerontius, The Apostles, and The Kingdom as penance imposed upon him by his environment? Even if offered in courtesy or in jest, Elgar's remark constitutes a shocking, almost Petrine, threefold denial. This appears to repudiate the oratorios, belittle the loyalty of the English listeners who supported his career, and leave Christian faith out of the question entirely. Even for such a tortured personality, riven by lacerating self-doubt and envy, Elgar's denial seems at first inexplicable. To understand the forces that motivated Elgar's renunciation of the three great oratorios and shaped their creation in the first place, one must first attend Elgar's deathbed. This chapter will place those oratorios within a cultural, historical and aesthetic perspective so as to illuminate not only their position within Elgar’s oeuvre, but also the ambivalent attitudes of their creator towards religious belief, society and aesthetics.