Sir Simon Rattle returns to the podium of the Berliner Philharmoniker with a major work by his countryman Edward Elgar. The oratorio The Dream of Gerontius describes the journey of the soul of a dead man on its way to the next world. The work was composed in 1900, one year after Sigmund Freud published his epochal The Interpretation of Dreams.The dream as the gateway to the subconscious. In Elgar’s version, which is deeply indebted to the fin de siècle, the dream appears in the form of a comforting meditation on death.