The Essay

Elgar's masterpiece The Dream of Gerontius was given a notoriously inadequate first performance, which may have undermined his Catholic faith. After Gerontius, he began work on a trilogy of oratorios based on the life of Christ and his Apostles, but completed only two of them, The Apostles and The Kingdom. Pianist and conductor Stephen Hough, himself a Catholic, wonders how deeply rooted Elgar's faith actually was.