‘When a man takes it upon himself to write an oratorio — perhaps the most gratuitous exploit open to a 19th-century Englishman — he must take the consequences,’ wrote George Bernard Shaw, reviewing Parry’s oratorio Judith in 1888. The consequences for Judith seem to have been unusually drastic. Premiered at the Birmingham Triennial Festival, it was a major success: if not quite on the scale of its obvious model, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, then certainly not far behind it.
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