Promised Land op. 140, The

The last of Saint-Saëns’s four oratorios, The Promised Land, premiered on 11 September 1913 in Gloucester under the composer’s baton, was the culmination of his encounter, years earlier, with the librettist Hermann Klein. Both had nurtured the idea of such a collaboration as early as 1887, but had put it aside until the composer took up the project again in the winter of 1912. Opening with a majestic prelude dominated by the woodwinds and brass, the oratorio comprises three parts, each consisting of a succession of numbers for soloists or chorus. In the first part, Moses leads the Israelites into the desert and, by the grace of God, brings forth water from a rock to quench the thirst of his people: “Behold, he smote the rock,” proclaims the chorus before a trio of soloists (soprano, contralto and tenor) joins him to praise God’s omnipotence. The second part evokes the doubts of the people in exodus and the prayers of Moses and Aaron; it closes with a melodious, solemn “Song of Moses” for solo baritone and chorus, punctuated by string pizzicati. In the third part, Moses’s death is announced by a tenor solo, “So Moses, the servant of the Lord, died,” followed by a choral lament and a final quartet paying a last tribute to God. Saint-Saëns admitted to some obscurity in the prose libretto that Klein drew entirely from the Bible, and confided in 1916: “Biblical language is often mysterious, and this mystery is one of its charms.” A French version of the oratorio was performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 20 February 1916, and another in German, to a text by Otto Neitzel, was published in 1914.