Elijah

With his devotion to the Passions of Bach and oratorios of Handel, Mendelssohn was well placed to write religious choral works. His oratorio St Paul (1836) had been successful in Germany, with Elijah even more so in the UK. In 1845 he received a commission from the Birmingham Triennial Festival and worked intensively on the piece for more than 18 months with Julius Schubring, whose text was drawn from the Book of Kings with some additions, notably from the Psalms. Elijah’s premiere at Birmingham Town Hall on 26 August 1846, afforded Mendelssohn one of his greatest successes, repeated the following April, when the work was performed in London before Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Its first German performance in Leipzig was not until February 1848, three months after the composer’s death. Written for eight vocalists, mixed chorus and orchestra, it falls into two halves whose mixture of recitatives, arias and choruses is treated flexibly—not least at the start, where Elijah’s proclamation leads directly into the overture that itself leads straight into the opening chorus. Inevitably, a work ideally suited to the taste of the mid-Victorian era was found wanting by later generations, but it has remained a staple of amateur choral societies and, over recent decades, has managed to shed a good deal of its sanctimonious veneer so that its emotional eloquence and dramatic immediacy can more readily be appreciated.