Sullivan’s Golden Legend: Warming the Spirit
What gives Sullivan his peculiar power to touch us? Not cleverness—heaven knows the Victorians had that in spades. Not orchestral wizardry, though he possessed it. Something more elusive, something that makes this neglected 95-minute cantata glow with an inner warmth even as its subject matter—virgin sacrifice, Christian redemption, Longfellow’s verse—makes modern audiences squirm.
The Golden Legend triumphed at Leeds in 1886, then virtually disappeared. One understands why. The libretto Joseph Bennett cobbled from Longfellow is pure Victorian treacle: Prince Henry dying, maiden Elsie offering her life, last-minute reprieve, happy marriage. Alkestis with antimacassars. Yet Sullivan’s score—ah, there’s the puzzle. Put aside the dated sentiments and you find music of genuine beauty, orchestrated with a lightness that makes Mendelssohn seem stolid and inflected with touches of Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust that surprise on every hearing.
Listen to how Sullivan characterizes Lucifer—not with gothic bombast but with witty academic precision, a light-fingered devil descended from Berlioz’s Mephisto. Or hear the sunset radiance of Elsie’s “The Night is calm,” where Sullivan achieves something close to transcendence. That long-limbed melody in the final scene has a sensuous sweetness nobody else could have written. Not Mendelssohn, not Schumann (though he comes closest), certainly not the English also-rans. And Elgar knew it—the dying Gerontius owes more than a passing debt to Sullivan’s ailing Prince Henry, down to shared musical material.
Ronald Corp’s Hyperion album arrives like an answer to prayers nobody quite dared voice. The performance lacks the white-heat fervor of David Lyle’s Edinburgh reading (available on private pressings, a collector’s grail), but Corp has prepared it with obvious love. His pacing lets the music breathe. No striving for effect, no Victorian bombast. The London Chorus sings with crystalline diction—those unaccompanied motets, “O gladsome light” and “O pure in heart,” emerge with chapel-like purity. All Saints Church, Tooting provides warmth without excessive reverberation, and Hyperion’s engineers have captured Sullivan’s nuanced scoring beautifully.
The soloists matter enormously here. Mark Wilde brings the lyric sheen of an ENO Tamino to Prince Henry—clean, rich tone, aristocratic phrasing. He’s in the Richard Lewis mould, which is precisely right. Janice Watson’s Elsie has the creamy weight and pure line the role demands, though the voice shows slight strain at the top. Still, she makes “The Night is calm” genuinely moving, even if Florence Austral’s legendary 1927 recording with the young Barbirolli remains untouchable—that kind of Wagnerian radiance comes once in a generation.
Jean Rigby avoids the emotive excess that can make Ursula insufferable, opting for youthful reflection rather than matronly passion. Sarah Walker in the Mackerras centennial rendition (still circulating on illicit cassettes—BBC Legends, where are you?) had more dramatic heft, but Rigby’s approach suits Corp’s conception.
Only Jeffrey Black disappoints. His Lucifer sounds woolly, generalized, missing Sullivan’s musical jokes entirely. The character should gleam with malicious intelligence; Black merely intones. It’s the one serious blemish.
The final chorus “God sent His messenger the rain” wants more tenors and basses—they sound underpowered in the sweeping opening, though the central fugue catches fire. But these are quibbles. The London Chorus handles the complex part-writing with assurance, and Sullivan’s orchestral magic registers with proper presence. That sunset-glow scoring, those unexpected harmonic shifts, the way he frees himself from Germanic heaviness—it’s all there.
The Golden Legend cannot match The Dream of Gerontius for spiritual depth or Berlioz for dramatic integration. It remains a Victorian artifact, complete with period upholstery. But Sullivan’s gift for melody—that special touching quality—gives it life beyond its era. The music warms the spirit in ways that defy rational analysis.
This Hyperion set is essential for anyone seriously interested in English choral music. Even Savoyards raised on the gospel that Sullivan without Gilbert was Sullivan without spark will find themselves surprised. The cantata stands as proof that Sullivan’s muse could flourish in unexpected soil. Not The Mikado, certainly—but something genuine nonetheless, captured here with devotion and considerable accomplishment.
