The reception of the oratorio Elijah (MWV A25, op. 70) at the Birmingham Musical Festival in 1846 is a well-rehearsed episode in Mendelssohn biography. Writing to his brother Paul, the composer commented, “No work of mine ever went so admirably at the first time of its execution,” and this impression is largely confirmed by contemporary reviews in the English press. Charles Gruneisen, music critic of the Morning Chronicle, a friend of Meyerbeer and (later) one of the first English critics to champion Wagner, penned a lengthy and ecstatic review, which included the following passage:

Then, to this catalog of superlatives, he adds, “It was also advantageous to have a first-rate organist like Dr. GAUNTLETT on such an occasion.” Gauntlett was Mendelssohn's choice as organist. Because the organ keys were placed eighteen feet in front of the organ case, and immediately below the conductor's rostrum, Gauntlett sat literally (as well as metaphorically) at the composer's feet, with the instrumentalists seated on rising tiers behind the console and the singers to either side; it was a common arrangement in English musical festivals of the period.

For the organist, it was far from ideal. Unable to see the conductor except through the agency of a mirror, he was surrounded by instrumentalists and singers, and had to grapple with the heavy key touch (so heavy that Mendelssohn declined to play at the 1846 festival) and stop actions that, according to the resident organist, required “the force of a steam engine” to operate. But this was not the end of Gauntlett's troubles at the first performance of Elijah. Somehow, the organ part had been lost, and hence he was obliged to play from the full score, “which he did,” nineteenth-century writers tell us, “to the composer's entire satisfaction.”