Planet Online - Elijah

Ancestral Voices Prophesying War

Mendelssohn: Elijah
Cardiff, St David's Hall, 010309

Alud Jones (presenter), James Lloyd Smith (treble), Anna Leese (soprano 1), Elin Manahan Thomas (soprano 2), Wendy Dawn Thompson (mezzo), Andrew Kennedy (tenor), Neal Davies (bass), BBC National Chorus of Wales, Cardiff Ardwyn Singers, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Thierry Fischer (conductor).

07.05.09
A packed St David's Hall on St David's Day, a riot of daffs and Taffs, an atmosphere of giddy anticipation running high among God's chosen people... and, at last - Elijah! The heroic biblical prophet - through Mendelssohn's agency - has been our nation's help in ages past. On his single visit to Wales, twenty-year-old Felix - though smitten with his host's lovely daughter - recorded less than felicitous comments about the charlatan harpists who plagued the Flintshire countryhouse where he was a guest. Despite this mixed start, and though you'll never pick it up from history books, Mendelssohn was to become more cherished by the Welsh people than Marx ever was. Indeed, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, a period of slow recovery from deep economic depression, his hymns and arias made Elijah almost as important as the revivalist preacher Evan Roberts in our spiritual regeneration.

Elijah regularly inspired our forefathers to turn adversity into triumph, to struggle and to overcome. From his maiden rally in Birmingham's new Town Hall in 1846, Mendelssohn's young magus soon migrated westwards to receive innumerable performances, rapturous receptions and endless praise in Wales - especially, if not exclusively, amongst the coalfield communities. Not even Handel's Messiah himself, who (oddly enough) didn't get through to us until the 1870s, just as he was finally going out of fashion in England, commanded greater allegiance. As far as Wales was concerned, Haydn created only a third prize with The Creation. (Mind you, he was a Roman Catholic...) As it happens, all three of these masters are having relevant anniversaries marked this year. But it was Mendelssohn's epic which by the 1920s had become uniquely ours, with (among many testimonials) a kind of living presence in the pages of Welsh working-class fiction.

This inspired performance by BBC Wales’s orchestra of biblical dimensions under Thierry Fischer, if not exactly revivalist, was a notable occasion of revival. In these unlooked-for times of relative hardship, it evoked a barely-remembered folk ritual of a people beset by material privation and addicted to rites of dedication and sacrifice. If only I could have been there... but it turned out that an even more important musicological commitment precluded attendance. To my surprise and joy a small miracle of modern technology awaited my return. The entire occasion had been recorded and was available on demand via the Beeb's iPlayer service to savour at leisure. How appropriate it seemed that this new-minted instrument of cultural democracy should be put at the disposal of Elijah and his Welsh supporters!   

Of course, the home computer is not built to reproduce the Cecil B. de Mille soundscape of a great oratorio or the resonances of an enthralled audience. Yet to experience performance in this medium has compensating advantages, analogous to watching a big match on TV. From my multi-camera perspective I could observe the conductor's every nuance of expression and gesture, a privilege denied the paying punters. Thierry's movements were as subtle and powerful as those of his great sporting namesake, sharp in front of goal, often with finger on lips after hitting the back of the net. All the soloists were imposing: if the mezzo was a bit wobbly at the start, she too was well up to the mark by the time she assumed the role of the evil Jezebel. I was treated to close-up encounters with choir members, soloists, and orchestral players, a feature which by some accoustical property beyond my ken, enhances the music one is hearing at the time. Via this inadvertent virtual voyeurism I noticed that lady choristers were prosaically clad in slacks, and for the most part severely buttoned-up; perhaps an obeisance to our puritanical past, or more likely following a protocol of not competing with the lady soloists. Sure enough, the latter looked suitably like Jezebels in their strapless evening gowns. Above all, the intrusive lenses revealed the ingenuity of Mendelssohn's treatment. Often his all-too-perfectly modulated middle way between classical and romantic styles easily seduces us into a promised land of mellifluous harmony, imbibing the endless flow of milk and honey, a pre-Wagnerian version of ewige melodie. But this time I was able to savour the composer's challenging version of the generic “overture”, the organist's contribution to the dramatic tutti scenarios, and the use of chamber effects in the choir's sectioned obligatos - women's, men's and mixed quartets providing exquisite contrapuntal moments, almost as in a late Mahler symphony.

The event raised more ghosts than glory to my contemplation. I was troubled by a still, small voice. Even considering Mendelssohn's elision of boundaries between oratorio and opera — which helped to bring an acceptable version of the latter to the faithful masses in an age when they were never brought to the opera-house — failed to quiet my conscience. I was among the heretics who a decade or more ago opposed the whole notion of a new, dedicated opera house in Cardiff, to be set (of all places) in its historically sweaty, salty docklands; physically patronised by an economically elite audience, but fiscally subsidised by communities which are (in general) culturally immune to the charms of classical music. “An exotic, irrational and costly entertainment” Dr Johnson called the Italianate operas of his day, and things have changed little. Have the costs of this vast one-off production, billed as “the largest-ever Elijah in Wales”, a valid justification? (To highlight a detail, the second soprano sang for some five minutes of its nearly two-hour duration, and never as a solo voice.) This said, I can recommend without reservation any DVD which might be issued commercially to balance the B[ethesda] B[aptist] C[hapel]'s books.

More awkward yet, the St David's Day event took place in the aftermath of the war in Gaza: dust still settling, wounds real and metaphorical still open. “Rend your hearts and not your garments,” Elijah from the depths below his impeccably white bow tie rightly urged us: we, who once saw ourselves as the lost tribe of Israel but now send our hand-me-downs to the embattled Palestinians. How many hearers (I wonder) responded uncomplicatedly to Elijah's stentorious demands, or the Angel's plangent pleas, for God's help to the Israelites?  I'm not the first to note the role of Mosaic law, a spirit of vengeful belligerence, in the texts chosen by Mendelssohn, arguably the most civilised of composers, and ethnically Jewish as well as German. In his novel Rhondda Roundabout, Jack Jones sets Elijah's baleful contests between God and Baal, and faithful Israelites fighting apostates, against an impending championship fight in faraway London between a local pugilistic hero and the English title-holder. Our boy wins it. Turn a few pages, and you'll find a whiff of populist contemporary anti-semitism in a scene where Jewish merchants from London get beaten up by vigilantes when trying to buy wedding rings cheaply from desperate wives of unemployed colliers.It's all a question of perspective, I suppose. Shift your stance, look again, and all those daffodils on people's chests could just be yellow stars, honouring another David - harpist, bard, politician and warrior - from a prophetic world ages before our Dewi Sant.