""Music is an expression of community. It's a way to survive. But it's also a way to insist that in spite of this terrible disaster, this catastrophe that is being visited upon them," Hytner added. "There is an insistence that there are ways of getting to the other side without collapsing into complete despair. And I suppose that's what music does in this film.""
""It's Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius. The oratorio was written for orchestra and voices. But due to wartime limited means, Guthrie arranges the piece for a string trio, choir and three soloists. He has a young wounded veteran playing the part of a man dying and journeying through purgatory, causing Elgar himself, who is played by Simon Russell Beale, to storm out of a rehearsal.""
Ramsden in 1916 loses many young men to conscription as World War I devastates communities and top choir singers leave for the front. The choral society hires Henry Guthrie, an uncompromising musician trained in Germany, to rebuild the choir from those too young, too old, or injured to fight. Guthrie adapts Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius for a string trio, choir and three soloists, staging a wounded veteran as a dying man journeying through purgatory. The music becomes a communal act of survival and a way for the town to resist despair and sustain spirit.
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