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Elgar had originally planned The Kingdom as the third part
of The Apostles but,
delayed by illness, and realising the enormity of the task he had
set himself and the scale of the work
that would result, he sensibly decided to make The Kingdom a
separate, self-contained work. By the time he came to complete
it, he was already planning a third, related oratorio,
provisionally entitled The Last Judgement. This never saw the
light of day, Elgar believing by then that the British public was tiring
of large-scale choral works.
Within this context, Elgar found the room to explore at a
somewhat leisurely pace the descent of the holy spirit at
Pentecost and the foundation and early activities of the
Christian Church in Jerusalem. Elgar made Peter the focus of the
work, providing a forceful and impressive role that contrasts
with the rather underdeveloped role for Peter in
The Apostles.
The work shares a number of themes with
The Apostles and the
same leitmotif scheme - Jaeger noted 79 in the work, compared
with 92 in The Apostles.
But it would be totally wrong to regard The Kingdom as little
more than a reworking of previously used
material. The two works are clearly complimentary and are often
performed in close succession, but The Kingdom also stands as a
masterpiece in its own right. Indeed, Elgar's close friend Frank Schuster
confided to conductor Sir Adrian Boult that, compared with
The Kingdom, he consideredThe Dream of Gerontius
to be the work of a raw amateur. It contains much genuinely
original material. The soprano solo The Sun Goeth Down is
particularly beautiful, and the powerful New Faith theme, which
may have provided the inspiration for the popular 1960s song Softly as
I Leave You, first recorded by Matt Monroe and subsequently by Frank
Sinatra and Elvis Presley, is as stirring as anything Elgar wrote.
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