As told in the Old Testament (1 and 2 Kings), Elijah is characterised as a stern, unyielding prophet of God called to lead the Israelite people back to worship of their one true God. He has a pivotal role in acting between the true, just God and the Israelites, called to serve God as His loyal interpreter to a fickle and wayward people. They are swayed first one way in response to God's miracles and then the other by Queen Jezebel as she incites them to crowd violence. The mainspring of the drama is the tension between the Israelites and Elijah: a series of powerfully dramatic choral movements convey the role of the population while Elijah's response to them is vividly portrayed in his three main arias - his opposition to them (Lord God of Abraham), his winning back of the people's trust (Is not His word like a fire) and his desertion by them (It is enough). Mendelssohn's music shows his effective use of the dramatic Handelian sweep of the oratorio, interpolated with Bachian-style meditations on the story. Elijah takes centre stage from the beginning, calling down a drought upon the land as punishment for the people's deserting the true God and worshipping Baal. (Queen Jezebel had brought her heathen Baal gods with her to Israel and King Ahab had allowed their infiltration into the people's beliefs and worship.) The theme of drought and God's ultimate sending of rain takes up the first half of the oratorio, with two side plots in which God shows his mercy and his power. He shows his care by bringing back to life the widow's son and promising that her food supply will not run out. He provides dramatic evidence of his power to the Israelites in the contest on Mount Carmel between God and the prophets of Baal. The first half of the oratorio ends with the crowd acknowledging God's mercy and omnipotence.

The second part opens with God's words of reassurance to his people. Then Elijah confronts King Ahab. This gives Jezebel the chance to incite the people against Elijah and Elijah despairs of his mission. Angelic care and his witnessing the glory of the Lord at Mount Horeb restore his courage. The people describe the vigour with which Elijah returns to proclaim God's power and the miraculous consummation of his life as he is taken up into heaven in a 'fiery chariot'. Mendelssohn sees Elijah's life in its scriptural context as the forerunner of the Messiah, and in the final chorus he looks to the completion of Elijah's mission in the coming of the Christ.

"Borne aloft as if on angel's wings" the Genesis of EIjah.

Mendelssohn had become increasingly drawn to the figure of Elijah...... 'a real prophet through and through, the kind we could use again today strong, zealous, and yes even bad tempered angry, and brooding.'
"From an early hour, crowds of eager expectants marshalled themselves as near the building as the police arrangements would permit, and as soon as the doors were opened, every reserved seat was filled, and even the far-off corners where there was standing room were packed..." This was the scene that greeted Felix Mendelssohn when he arrived to conduct his new oratorio Elijah at the Birmingham Music Festival on August 26 1846.
The work was a special commission from the Festival, but its roots lay some ten years previously, when the composer first began to consider a large-scale sacred oratorio. At that point Mendelssohn had no strong feelings about which Biblical figure would Feature: he told his prospective librettist Karl Klingemann that it was all the same whether he chose "St. Peter, Elijah, or even King Og of Bashan" as the protagonist.
Although the two worked together on Elijah fior some time, Klingemann himself couldn't work up much enthusiasm for the figure of Elijah. Mendelssohn showed their drafts to his old friend Julius Schubring, the theologian, and a long correspondence ensued between the two. Schubring was enthusiastic about the Old Testament theme, but had some strong ideas of his own. When he proposed that Christ and St. Peter should sing a trio with Elijah at the climax of the work, Mendelssohn demurred, and the project was abandoned.
But with the invitation from Birmingham, the six-year-old plan was revived, and Schubring produced a German libretto based on a "selection of beautiful Bible passages" from Luther's translation of the Bible. By May of 1946 Mendelssohn was in contact with William Bartholomew, who had already translated many of his works into English. Mendelssohn begged him "Pray, give it your best English words, for so far I feel so much more interest in this work than for my other compositions."
Mendelssohn had become increasingly drawn to the figure of Elijah, whom he felt to be "a real prophet through and through, the kind we could use again today - strong, zealous, and yes, even bad-tempered, angry, and brooding - in contrast to practically the whole world - and yet he is borne aloft as if on angels' wings."
The composer may well have projected some of his own situation onto Elijah. By the time the Birmingham commission arrived, Mendelssohn had become deeply depressed .and cynical about his involvement with the new political regime in Berlin, one which had begun with promising reforms only a few years before. And the topic of a prophet who destroys false idols in the name of truth, must have spoken to him artistically as well as politically. By the mid-1840s Mendelssohn found himself more and more representing a conservative musical standpoint in an era that increasingly prized empty virtuosity.
Mendelssohn's own early musical studies, after all, involved an immersion in the musical languages of Bach and Handel: the culmination of this apprenticeship was his historic revial of Bach's St Matthew Passion. His mature compositional style was as influenced by Mozart and Beethoven and even Berlioz as by Bach and Handel, but when he came to compose his large-scale oratorios St. Paul and Elijah, he consciously turned back to the great masters of the Baroque.
Certainly the English public, who idolised the oratorios of Handel, recognised this conservative side of Mendelssohn's style, and welcomed it.
The success of "The" Elijah was extraordinary and immediate, and it quickly came to share a place in English musical life that previously had been reserved only for "The" Messiah.
Mendelssohn himself was amazed by the warmth of its reception. He wrote his brother shortly after the first performance "No work of mine ever went so admirably at its first performance, nor was received with such enthusiasm by both the musicians and the audience, as this oratorio... Had you only been there! During the whole three and a half hours that it lasted, the big hall with its two thousand people and the large orchestra were all so concentrated that not the slightest sound could be heard from the audience."
Despite the great success of the Birmingham premiere, Mendelssohn was far from satisfied with the work and spent much of the rest of the year revising it to his satisfaction. He wrote to Klingermann in December "I am sure you will be satisfied with the alterations - I can really say improvements. Elijah has become much more important and mystical ... it was the lack of these qualities that irritated me before."
This revised version was premiered by the 'Sacred Harmonic Society' conducted again by Mendelssohn himself, in London at Exeter Hall on April 16th 1847. At the second performance, the Queen and the Prince Consort attended, and afterwards Prince Albert wrote in his libretto: "To the noble artist who, surrounded by the Baal-worship of false art, through genius and study has been able, like a second Elijah, to remain true to the service of true art; who has freed our ear from the chaos of mindless jingling of tones, to accustom it once more to the pure sounds of truly reflected emotion and regular harmony; to the Great Master, who, in a steady stream of ideas, unrolls before us the whole panorama of the elements from the gentlest rustlings to the mightiest storms; in grateful recollection, Albert."
Mendelssohn intended Elijah, along with St. Paul to be part of a grand triptych that would end with Christus. Alas, he was never to complete his final panel of such a huge work: he died abruptly later that year, leaving as his final work this great monument of Victorian culture.