ABSTRACT
Hubert Parry constructed a text for The Soul’s Ransom that displays a surprising poetic flair and coherence and vividly reflects his profound immediate humanism. The Soul’s Ransom moves from the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries to an historical and stylistic centre – to meet Ludwig van Beethoven. For many years Parry had wished to create a new choral–symphonic form to supersede the nineteenth-century oratorio. It is evident in the musical structure of The Soul’s Ransom that Parry wanted to create formal principles on which the Ethical Cantata concept could be based; to achieve this he gathered together stylistic and formal elements from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The earlier cantatas structure their musical argument, with varying success, round the opposition of negative and positive conditions, such as darkness–light, war–peace and love–fear. The resolution is achieved by the positive winning the conflict.
