ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on purgatory as evoked and imagined in The Dream of Gerontius, and what it implies about the attitudes of confidence and anxiety that have been central to our concerns. Edward Elgar draws his libretto from an epic poem by John Henry Newman, the most prominent English Roman Catholic of his age. Especially notable is an ambivalence that seems to pervade the work, generated through what might best be described as an unresolved oscillation between confidence and anxiety, a striving and a shrinking, a reaching forth and a holding back. It is hardly surprising that Elgar's Dream of Gerontius, considered by many to be the finest Victorian music ever written, has been characterized as a work of consolation and comfort, borne along by broad currents of affirmation, confidence and hopefulness. Elgar could never have concluded the piece with a 'simplistically positive outcome', purgatory being only a temporary transit.
