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Elgar proposed to call this, his first oratorio, Lux Christi, but
his publishers Novello persuaded him to provide an English title.
He chose The Light of Life. The story is of the blind beggar
whose sight Christ restored. The words are taken from St John's
Gospel with some rather unsatisfactory additions by the Reverend
Capel-Cure.
Inevitably, the work does not quite achieve the standard and
consistency of the oratorios that soon followed it - it would be
unreasonable to expect Elgar to attain perfection with his first
foray in the genre. It nevertheless represents an important step
in his musical development. It was the longest work that Elgar
had at that time composed, and the first in which he adopted
leitmotifs for the main characters and concepts. It shares some
of these with The Apostles
and The Kingdom, most notably the
gentle motif representing Jesus as the giver of light. First
introduced towards the end of the work's prelude, it occurs
repeatedly in different forms throughout this work then re-emerges
as the principal crescendo in the prologue of
The Apostles. Indeed, while
The Light of Life tells a self-contained story, it is appropriate to regard it
musically as the first of the trilogy of New Testament oratorios
continued by The Apostles
and The Kingdom.
The work is only occasionally performed but well worth hearing
when the opportunity arises.
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