Elijah | Gravesham Choral Society

One hundred and eighty years ago Felix Mendelssohn began to plan an oratorio on the subject of Elijah. In 1845 the Birmingham Festival Committee commissioned him to 'provide a new oratorio'. Elijah fitted the bill perfectly, and its first performance was at Birmingham Town Hall in August 1846 conducted by the composer. The Times wrote 'Never was there a more complete triumph'. Its immense popularity with the Victorians was only exceeded by that of Messiah. Mendelssohn regarded Elijah as his finest achievement and its appeal has remained constant with choirs and audiences to this day.

Deeply conservative, Mendelssohn reacted against the musical radicalism of Wagner and Berlloz in bringing forth a work that would espouse the moral and musical authority of the eighteenth-century masters. Although Elijah is packed with musical invention, and superbly written for voices and instruments, Mendelssohn employed familiar musical styles and methods immediately appealing to the concert-going public, royalty included, with whom he was already tremendously popular.

Mendelssohn first set a German text of the episodes relating to Elijah from Kings I and II together with other quotations mostly from the Old Testament. He supervised the English translation in great detail to ensure it perfectly fitted the music. The score is highly descriptive throughout with many intensely dramatic scenes such as the resurrection of a dead youth; a sequence of increasingly frantic but ineffectual prayers to the heathen god Baal; and Elijah's vision of God and ascension into heaven on a fiery chariot.