Variations on an Enigma : GERONTIUS, <i> By James Hamilton-Paterson (Soho Press: $19.95; 265 pp.)</i>

Music is an interpretive art, and, as every musician knows, a piece never is ready for performance unless you have so internalized it that it seems yours. Leonard Bernstein said his most enraptured performances were ones in which he felt that he was composing the music as he conducted it. Listeners internalize, too, since we all tend to enjoy repeated hearings of favorite pieces, which we ultimately feel we possess. They are, after all, playing our song.

That quality of musical possession also can give anyone writing about composers a special feeling of power over music makers. And it is the sense that Edward Elgar’s music, like all engrossing music, can be possessed that makes “Gerontius,” a novel about a curious six-week cruise to the Amazon that the British composer took late in his life, so interesting.

At his best, James Hamilton-Paterson gives us a virtuoso performance of Elgar. His prose sounds the way prose about Elgar should sound: Its flowing rhythm, ingratiating pomp and perceptive old-fashionedness is just like Elgar’s music. Hamilton-Paterson certainly has his failings--his attempts to describe the act of composing are mainly romantic claptrap--but one senses throughout that the novelist feels he is making Elgar’s music as much as Bernstein did when he conducted the “Enigma” Variations.

Indeed, “Gerontius” is a kind of literary “Enigma” Variations. Although it takes its title from Elgar’s mystical turn-of-the-century oratorio, “The Dream of Gerontius”--that syrupy musical journey of the soul, after death, to heaven--the novel attempts to be a series of variations on the enigmatic nature of Elgar himself as he takes his own soul-searching, if less fulfilling, journey.

When Elgar, 66, sailed down the Amazon, his wife was dead, his friends were dead, and, as the composer says pretty accurately in the novel, his music was dead. Elgar’s last significant score, his autumnal Cello Concerto, had been completed in 1919.

His wife Alice, six years his senior and upon whom he depended for maternal support, died in 1920. From that point on, the composer entered into a curmudgeonly funk that lasted the remaining 13 years of his life, a funk brought on by guilt from a presumably adulterous affair with another Alice as well as from his feeling little part of the postwar world or its modern music.

In his declining years, Elgar seemed to take little delight in being the most famous British musician, bitter that the celebration had come too late and meant too little.

Elgar apparently made the Amazon journey on a whim, hoping to find some new source of inspiration or, maybe, just to get away. Almost nothing is known of the trip, and it is generally glossed over by biographers in a sentence. And so Hamilton-Paterson invents the cruise, its events, its passengers and its crew.

A British writer who divides his time between Italy and the Philippines, Hamilton-Paterson writes persuasively of the sea--his novels, short stories, poetry and nonfiction and children’s literature are all water-oriented. “Gerontius,” his first novel (finished in 1989 but only now published in the United States, following the success of his second novel, “That Time in Malomba”), is essentially an ocean meditation in the tradition of, and even the style of, Conrad. It’s a good style for Elgar, since the composer happened to be a friend of Conrad, and the language seems just right for him.

Hamilton-Paterson has populated Elgar’s ship with some finely eccentric English characters--such as the ship’s deliciously misanthropic doctor--and he has painted an amusing picture of the composer so very much out of his element. Elgar’s journal entries--with their brusque whinny and sometimes surprisingly flip style--sound very much like the Elgar of his letters. All the peculiarities of Elgar are faithfully represented: his need for acceptance, his self-involved pompousness disguised as disinterested bluff, the insecurity that led him to return constantly to musical themes he had written in childhood.

Still, it is Hamilton-Paterson’s voluptuous descriptions of the sea that best capture Elgar’s musical voice. Those descriptions have nothing to do with Elgar or his music--he was not a composer particularly associated with the sea. Hamilton-Paterson’s own personal feeling for the sea is profound, however, and it is in his own poetic ability to amplify that, to break away from the constraints of character or theme, that he begins to match Elgar’s own grandly amplified musical style.

Musical explanations come less convincingly. Hamilton- Paterson shows Elgar a great but still failed composer, who might have been a greater, more forward-looking composer had he just been more self-confident and self-reliant. But Elgar’s musical sensibilities were Victorian to the core; there is not a note he wrote that moved music into the future, and his appeal today is, I suspect, a strongly nostalgic one that revels in the melancholic splendor of the lost British empire.

More telling is Hamilton-Paterson’s invented scene of Elgar, at the heart of his journey, stumbling upon his first love, Helen Weaver. Through Weaver, now the widow of a German businessman who operates the Schiller Institute in Manaos but still is devoted to the composer, Elgar has an opportunity to face his demons and, through self-knowledge, regain his muse.

But Elgar’s defenses are as Victorian as his music. “Gerontius” may have been irresistible music, but the novel tells us--I think rightly--that it was a spiritual fraud. Its creator always lacked the fortitude for a real soul’s journey.

And so Hamilton-Paterson’s Elgar returns to England with souvenirs and a few tales, but basically unchanged, unprepared to make anything out of his final, bleak decade, still afraid of an authentic Gerontian journey of the soul. Just like the real Elgar.