The sacred oratorio Jacob's Ladder was begun in the autumn of 1882 when Grundy was staying with friends in St Bees. According to his biographer Jurat Jarkman, Grundy was standing on the cliff top overlooking the leaden Irish Sea when, through an interaction of faint November sunlight and oceanic spray, the pattern of a golden ladder seemed to emerge. Grundy had considered a number of Biblical subjects for the basis of a choral work to mark his new appointment at Charing Cross and decided that he had received some kind of divine revelation. He began sketching the dream sequence the same day. But Jacob's Ladder was a troubled project...
Mr Jambres beamed at his choir and indicated that they might sit, all but the sopranos, who had somehow failed to hit the top A cleanly enough. The basses blew their noses and played whist behind the chair backs, the contraltos sucked on boiled fruit-flavoured sweets and the tenors studied the racing pages.
The oratorio draws its text exclusively from Genesis, chapters 25 to 35, and falls into three parts. Part One tells of the birth and childhood of Jacob and Esau and the conflict between them. Its centrepiece is the conspiracy between Jacob and his mother Rebecca to procure Isaac's blessing for Jacob instead of Esau and concludes with Esau's rejection by his father and Jacob's flight to Harran. Part Two tells of Jacob's wanderings and meeting with Laban and Leah. At its heart is the vision of the ladder at Bethel. Part Three shows the reconciliation of the brothers, the wrestling match between Jacob and God and the bestowal of the name Israel on the central figure. The score demands a large orchestra and four soloists. The Narrator (Tenor) through a series of recitatives, tells the story, with other soloists taking character parts - the bass sings Jacob, the soprano the Angel of the Lord, and the contralto sings Rebecca, the mother of the twins, although the four soloists also leave these named parts behind for several quartets and arias commenting on the action.
The first part is notable particularly for the grandeur of its largely fugal choral commentary ("Two nations in your womb"), the grief-laden tenor aria "Bless me too, father" in which Esau laments the conspiracy to deny him his birthright, the canonical duet for contralto and baritone "For my brother is an hairy man and I am a smooth man", and the closing chorus with its driving rhythms, reminiscent of Handel, "Your dwelling shall be far from the richness of earth." (Gen. xxvii. 39). Musical highlights of Part Two are the crackling 'cello lines and blazing brass cadences (in parallel fourths) announcing the ladder to heaven and the quivering strings at "How fearsome is this place!", a wonderful moment of theatricality. Part Three's wrestling match at Peniel is equally vivid, with a ponderous orchestral prelude and a theme carried, almost comically, by the bassoons and clarinets. The influence of Wagner can be heard with a motif played on cellos and violas when Jacob's journey takes him across firstly the River Jordan and then through the ford at the River Jabbok. This so-called "Jabbok motif", a descending chromatic five-note slide, forms the basis of the entire oratorio and is strikingly similar to a theme found in the earlier Jackdaw of Rheims.
The chorus was back on its feet.
Jambres And the Lord said "Jacob is your name, but your name shall now be
Chorus (Shout) Israel
Jambres And the Lord said unto him
I am God Almighty. Be fruitful, be fruitful, be
fru-u--u-u-u-uitful as a nay-tion
He flicked over a page. A hundred arms followed his action.
And the choir sang:
"A Host of Nations Shall come from you and Kings shall spring from you body"
The music raced away in another spirited fugue accompanied by imagined spiky strings, clashing cymbals, blaring brass and thunderous ff chords to the closing crashing cadence of "Thisssssss (3-4)
LAND."
As the choir broke up, the contraltos bustling away to luncheon engagements, the tenors and sopranos dashing to supermarkets or childminders, the basses rushing to the pub down the road, Veda waited and waited and waited and waited and waited
and wished she'd brought a muffler. And mittens. Instead she blew on her fingers and waited and waited and waited
until
the caretaker arrived and the morning's proceedings drew to a hasty close.
"Well?" asked the Maestro. "What did you think?"
"It was... interesting," lied Veda. "Where did you get all that info on Grundy?"
"There's a chapter in Herbert's British Music in Late Victorian England. Have you not read it?" Mr Jambres crammed shreds of tobacco into the bowl of his pipe with a square yellow thumb. "There is also Jurat Jarkman's new biography, Grundy. I'm told he wanted to call it Born on a Monday (Joshua Grundy) but the publisher thought it too frivolous for an academic work." He clicked his lighter.
"A ho-o-o-o-ost of nations shall spri-i-i-i-ing from you," trilled Jerboa as he climbed into the black Jowett Javelin.
"Are you ready for your competition?" asked Veda.
"The first railway in Egypt," he replied, "Opened in 1856. It was built by Robert Stephenson and ran from Alexandria to Cairo."
She sighed and stared at the passing sights of Jarrow, the derelict shipyards, the once prosperous factories, the corrugated tin fences.
"At its maximum height, the Trans-Andean Railway reaches 10,515 feet in the international tunnel linking Chile with Argentina."