The Dream of Gerontius
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

The painfully taut limbs and thrown-back head of a Van Dyck Crucifixion; the clutching fingers and bulging veins of Christ at the centre of the Isenheim Altarpiece; the desperately balled fists of Van Gogh’s Sorrowing Old Man; Millais’ Ophelia, her last breath parting her still-pink lips. Whether agonising or peaceful, resigned or embattled, the moment of death is everywhere in art. In literature we have Little Nell, Juliet, Hardy’s embittered Jude Fawley, and you’re spoilt for choice in opera. But in sacred music it’s a different story.

The Requiem Mass may enact the public, collective ritual of death, but where is that ­personal, private moment of passing? Elgar’s (pictured) great – many would say greatest – oratorio, The Dream of Gerontius, is a rare and extraordinary exploration of precisely that. Following Gerontius from his dying moments, through death itself, into Purgatory and finally to Heaven, it traces a vast musical, emotional and spiritual arc.

But for all its power (or perhaps precisely because of it), the text – a poem by Cardinal John Henry Newman – has caused no small controversy in the UK. The work was composed originally for the concert hall, and when it came later to be performed at the Three Choirs Festival and its three great Anglican cathedrals, it was found necessary to censor references to the Virgin. This revised text continued in usage until 1910.