Phil Rickman - The Remains of an Altar

‘Then it all went wrong.’

‘First performance in Birmingham… complete disaster. Chorus was under-rehearsed and performed badly. The chorus master had died suddenly and the man they brought in to replace him wasn’t up to the job. All went to pieces. Elgar was suicidal.’

‘ Actually suicidal?’

‘It brought on the most dreadful depression. I wish I were dead, he kept saying. He wrote, I’ve always said God was against art. Swore he’d never again attempt to write religious music. Closed his mind against the spiritual. ’Course, in later years G would be beautifully performed, its genius exalted, but in the early days…’

‘Elgar thought it was cursed? Why?’

‘Because he thought God was punishing him for overreaching his… mere humanity. For daring to approach… to approach God, I suppose. Head-on.’

‘You mean through the music.’

‘After the soul has withstood the torments of the demons, after his encounter with the Angel of the Agony, as he approaches judgement

… he’s given one glimpse – sudden, cataclysmic – of the Holiest.’

‘God.’

‘A glimpse of God, yes.’

‘And Elgar had to convey that in music.’

‘Couldn’t do it,’ Tim said. ‘Or wouldn’t. Shied away from it. As a Catholic, he was afraid it might be approaching blasphemy. Anyway, thought he’d finished – I’ve put my heart’s blood into the score, he said, and sent the manuscript to his publishers. Thought he’d got away with it, but his friend there – friend and confidant – August Jaeger, accused him of bottling it, running scared of the big moment. Jaeger’s saying, you’re not doing enough with this. You’re not showing us God… you’re not giving us the moment. Pushing him. And Elgar, the timid Catholic, going, Can’t. Not humanly possible, almost blasphemous to try to convey in music the ultimate blinding light.’

Tim’s deceptively warlike face glowing now with sweat in the unnatural night whiteness.

‘And this, you see… in my own work, this is Elgar’s most agonized solo. We agreed, Winnie and I, that it should contain elements of foreboding… perhaps a premonition of that disastrous first performance in Birmingham.’

‘Nice touch,’ Lol said.

‘Jaeger was joshing him, knew exactly how to handle the poor chap. He said something like, Of course, conveying the full glory of God, that would take a Wagner…’

Lol nodded. Elgar’s major influence had been Wagner.

‘So Elgar goes back? To try again?’

‘Looks like muso-banter to us now, Jaeger winding Elgar up. But it would have cut him to the quick. Yes, of course he went back.’

‘Back here. To Whiteleafed Oak?’

‘Where else?’

‘And… what happened?’

‘On a basic level, I suppose you’d say he… simply restructured some chords to manufacture a climactic moment. This short series of swiping chords, and then… Do you know G?’

‘To a point.’

Certainly this point. The Guardian Angel had warned the soul that the momentary vision would blow him away with its power. When it finally happened, it was barely flagged-up and it went through your spine, that single chord, every time you heard it, like a razor-edged, shining scythe.

‘You see, my job here… I have to capture the moment it came to Elgar. Or Mr Phoebus fails.’

‘That’s why you’re here?’

‘Have to catch the moment, and more.’

‘More?’

‘No good just copying Elgar, Dan. You have to try to take it further or what’s the point?’

‘Further than Elgar?’

‘Winnie believes that whatever happened to him was so personal and terrifying that he was still afraid to orchestrate the full intensity of it. Clearly, the build-up to that one frightening, revelatory slashing chord was enough to convince Jaeger. Winnie – God knows, Dan, I’m not the bravest chap on the block either – but Winnie believes I can widen the crack in the door.’

‘That’s…’ Lol stepped back. ‘That’s a big thing, Tim.’

‘The biggest.’

‘That’s what the preparation’s all been about? Those three simultaneous choirs in the three churches?’

‘Yes. And the…’

‘She’s not without ambition, is she, Winnie?’

‘And the exercises. The meditation and the visualization. Endless. And the need for Elgar to be part of it. I just couldn’t hack it at first. Too much of an ordinary bloke, Dan.’

Tim sighed, sat down on the grass.

‘There was a girl. On a bike. Legs pumping up and down. For a while we… No! ’ His voice going shrill and transatlantic. ‘ Don’t you realize you will never have a chance like this again? You gonna throw it all away? ’

‘Winnie.’

‘I owe her so much, you see. Saved my life. Made my life.’

Lol said nothing. Tim blotted the sweat from around his eyes with the heel of his palm.

‘Yes, we had a practice, in the three churches. Would have been wonderful to have the three cathedrals, hundreds of choristers, but even Winnie’s energy doesn’t extend that far.’

‘And did you come here – to Whiteleafed Oak – when the choirs were in the three churches?’

‘No, I was at Wychehill, then drove to Little Malvern. It was a run-through. Only a run-through.’

‘Did Winnie think it was going to be just a run-through?’

‘Dan, I was scared. Quite often scared. Gerontius has always scared me. You think it’s easy to live with something so… cosmically huge? Day in, day out? And the nights. Tried to psych myself up, on the quiet. Booze wasn’t doing it. I even went up the hill one night, scored a few – not my thing at all, normally – few grams of coke offThey said I’d killed him, did you know that?’

Lol nodded.

‘I was scared, Dan. This hallowed place. I don’t know. Is it hallowed? Are we fed – still – by the old choirs? Help me.’

‘Would be good to think so.’

And Lol saw it all now. The psychology of it. She said the journey could be accomplished in this life through the use of symbolism. With great art as a by-product.

All it needed was for Tim to believe in it strongly enough, through months of meditation, visualization, conditioning, and the magic would happen.

‘Are you frightened?’ Lol said.

Tim covered his face with his hands for a moment and then tore them away and looked all around at the strange, blanched landscape, a winter landscape in the heat of June. Looked up into the northern sky where the white, gaseous clouds hung like smothered lamps over the southern Malverns.

‘A great orchestral slash of light, Dan. His one shattering glimpse of God. And Gerontius sings… worshipful submission as a kind of triumph…’

Tim stepping away from the tree, raising his arms, releasing this vast torn and piercing tenor.

‘ Take me awayyyyyyyyyy! ’

Tim sank to his knees, kept his eyes down.

‘Think it’s time for you to bugger off, Dan.’

‘You need to be alone for this?’

‘Otherwise there’s no courage required,’ Tim said. ‘Is there?’

‘Suppose not.

‘What are you going to do?’

Tim placed a hand on his chest, over the stained singlet.

‘All happens in here.’

‘Right.’ Lol turned and walked away from the oak. ‘Just… be careful.’

Tim grinned.

After a few paces, Lol looked over his shoulder to see what he knew he was going to see: what the combination of the moon and those northern clouds had done to the leaves of the oak.

Life-Force

A painfully slow and twisting half-mile short of Whiteleafed Oak, Syd Spicer asked Merrily to feel under her seat for a small leather case.

‘Night glasses. High-tech.’ He cleared his throat. ‘We all loved our gadgets, the Hereford boys.’