Joanna Bullivant | Musical Oratory and Imaginative Assent: Towards an Understanding of Elgar’s Catholic Imagination

Event details

Speaker: Dr Joanna Bullivant

Date: 2 February 2023

Time: 5.15 - 6.45pm 

Venue: Alison House, Atrium (G10)

Abstract

Despite new, partial discussions in the past twenty years, Elgar’s Catholicism has never been satisfactorily explained. An older generation of scholars sought to minimise the composer’s relationship to religion on the basis of later crises of faith, and to claim him instead for an Englishness inspired by the natural world. More recent commentators, troubled by Elgar’s connections to imperialism, have cast the lower-class, provincial Roman Catholic as outsider within Protestant Victorian Britain. In both cases, the varieties of what Catholicism might mean to Elgar in terms of aesthetics, faith, identity, community, or practice, have been under-explored, as have his networks and reception within English Catholic communities.

With this in mind, this paper seeks to present pathways towards a richer understanding of Elgar’s Catholicism. While the larger study of which this forms a part will be more encompassing, this paper specifically focuses on The Dream of Gerontius and the notion of ‘Catholic imagination’, particularly as the concept was understood and practisd by Cardinal Newman and after his death at the Oratory of St Philip Neri. Focusing on notions of ‘musical oratory’ and ‘imaginative assent’, I present new contexts for interpreting both Elgar’s sacred and secular works around 1900, and for understanding the composer as both Catholic and English.

Biography

Joanna Bullivant is Lecturer in Music at Magdalen College, Oxford and Honorary Adjunct Lecturer at the Elder Conservatorium of Music, The University of Adelaide, having previously worked at the University of Oxford, the University of Nottingham, and King’s College London. Jo’s research centres on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British music, particularly musical and cultural histories of minority groups. Her first monograph, Alan Bush, Modern Music and the Cold War: The Cultural Left in Britain and the Communist Bloc was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017, and she is now embarking on a second monograph project entitled Elgar and the Catholic Imagination.