‘Eden,’ a dramatic oratorio, is a strong setting of Robert Bridges’ poem and found first presentation, as have several others of Stanford’s choral works, at the Birmingham Festival, this one in 1891. The poem is an elaborate epic of large dimensions, involving in its action many characters (Adam, Eve, Satan, Michael, Angels of Earth, Sun, Music, Poetry, etc.) and for its choral elements, calling upon angels, devils, furies, all-seers, etc. With this complicated dramatic machinery Stanford has built an imposing musical structure--grand, terrible in places, of ravishing beauty in others--always skillfully fashioned and of compelling appeal, especially in the choral parts. The poem is divided into three acts: I, Heaven; II, Hell; III, Earth (Part 1, The Fall; Part 2, Adam’s Vision). In the first and third acts the composer drops into the old ecclesiastical modal style for pages at a time with beautiful effect. Indeed, he takes for some of his most important thematic material two phrases of the plain-song melody _Sanctorum meritis_ (from the _Sarum Missal_) and weaves them into choral passages with the skill of a sixteenth-century church-contrapuntist. Especially beautiful, among such portions, are the opening six-part chorus of all angels (‘God of might! God of love!’) and a five-part _a cappella_ chorus (‘Flames of pure love are we’)--the latter in the pure style of a _Madrigale spirituale_. ‘The Prodigal Son,’ which is the first of Sullivan’s oratorios, received its first performance at the Worcester Festival, Sept. 3, 1869, for which occasion it was written. The text, compiled by the composer, is based on the well-known parable, the shortness of which, however, has necessitated the introduction of other Scriptural material; so that only six of the eighteen numbers deal directly with the narrative, while the other twelve reflect on the lessons it teaches. In a preface to the work, Sullivan explains his conception of the Prodigal as ‘a buoyant, restless youth, tired of the monotony of home, and anxious to see what lay beyond the confines of his father’s farm, going away in the confidence of his own simplicity and ardor, and led gradually away into the follies and sins which at the outset would have been distasteful to him.’