Like most operas, an oratorio includes the use of a choir, soloists, an instrumental ensemble, various distinguishable characters (e.g. soloists), and arias. However, opera is musical theatre, and typically involves significant theatrical spectacle, including sets, props, and costuming, as well as staged interactions between characters. In oratorio, there is generally minimal staging, with the chorus often assuming a more central dramatic role, and the work is typically presented as a concert piece – though oratorios are sometimes staged as operas, and operas are not infrequently presented in concert form.
A particularly important difference between opera and oratorio is in the typical subject matter of the text. An opera libretto may deal with any conceivable dramatic subject (e.g. history, mythology, Richard Nixon, Anna Nicole Smith and the Bible); the text of an oratorio often deals with sacred subjects, making it appropriate for performance in the church, which remains an important performance context for the genre. Catholic composers looked to the lives of saints and stories from the Bible. Protestant composers often looked to Biblical topics, but sometimes looked to the lives of notable religious figures, such as Carl Loewe's"Jan Hus", an oratorio about the early reformer, Jan Hus. Oratorios became extremely popular in early 17th-century Italy partly because of the success of opera and the Catholic Church's prohibition of spectacles during Lent. Oratorios became the main choice of music during that annual period for opera audiences.[citation needed]
Conventionally, oratorio implies the sincere religious treatment of sacred subjects, such that non-sacred oratorio is generally qualified as 'secular oratorio': a piece of terminology that would, in some historical contexts, have been regarded as oxymoronic, or at least paradoxical,[2] and viewed with a degree of scare-quoted skepticism.[3] Despite this enduring and implicit context, oratorio on secular subjects has been written from the genre's origins.
History
Etymology
The word oratorio comes from the Latin verb ōrō (present infinitive ōrāre), meaning to orate or speak publicly, to pray, or to beg or plead, related to the Attic Greek noun ἀρά (ará, “prayer”).[1][4] (Hence the disambiguation entry for 'oratory', including oratory (worship).) The musical composition was "named from the kind of musical services held in the church of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Rome (Congregazione dell'Oratorio) in the latter half of the 16th cent." The word is only attested in English from 1727, with the equivalent 'oratory' in prior use, from 1640.[1]
The origins of the oratorio can be found in sacred dialogues in Italy. These were settings of Biblical, Latin texts and musically were quite similar to motets. There was a strong narrative, dramatic emphasis and there were conversational exchanges between characters in the work. Giovanni Francesco Anerio's Teatro harmonico spirituale (1619) is a set of 14 dialogues, the longest of which is 20 minutes long and covers the conversion of St. Paul and is for four soloists: Historicus (narrator), tenor; St. Paul, tenor; Voice from Heaven, bass; and Ananias, tenor. There is also a four-part chorus to represent any crowds in the drama. The music is often contrapuntal and madrigal-like.
Philip Neri's Congregazione dell'Oratorio featured the singing of spiritual laude. These became more and more popular and were eventually performed in specially built oratories (prayer halls) by professional musicians. Again, these were chiefly based on dramatic and narrative elements.
Sacred opera provided another impetus for dialogues, and they greatly expanded in length (although never really beyond 60 minutes long). Cavalieri's Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo is an example of one of these works, but technically it is not an oratorio because it features acting and dancing. It does, however contain music in the monodic style.
The first oratorio to be called by that name is Pietro della Valle's Oratorio della Purificazione, but due to its brevity (only 12 minutes long) and the fact that its other name was "dialogue", we can see that there was much ambiguity in these names.
1650–1700
During the second half of the 17th century, there were trends toward the performance of the religious oratorio also outside church halls in courts and public theaters. The theme of an oratorio is meant to be weighty. It could include such topics as Creation, the life of Jesus, or the career of a classical hero or Biblical prophet. Other changes eventually took place as well, possibly because most composers of oratorios were also popular composers of operas. They began to publish the librettos of their oratorios as they did for their operas. Strong emphasis was soon placed on arias while the use of the choir diminished. Female singers became regularly employed, and replaced the male narrator with the use of recitatives.
The most significant composers of oratorio latino were in Italy Giacomo Carissimi, whose Jephte is regarded as the first masterpiece of the genre (like most other Latin oratorios of the period, it is in one section only), and in France Carissimi's pupil Marc-Antoine Charpentier (34 works H.391 - H.425).
oratorio volgare (in Italian) – representative examples include:
Lasting about 30–60 minutes, oratori volgari were performed in two sections, separated by a sermon; their music resembles that of contemporary operas and chamber cantatas.
Late baroque
In the late baroque period oratorios increasingly became "sacred opera". In Rome and Naples Alessandro Scarlatti was the most noted composer. In Vienna the court poet Metastasio produced annually a series of oratorios for the court which were set by Caldara, Hasse and others. Metastasio's best known oratorio libretto La passione di Gesù Cristo was set by at least 35 composers from 1730 to 1790. In Germany the middle baroque oratorios moved from the early-baroque Historia style Christmas and Resurrection settings of Heinrich Schütz, to the Passions of J. S. Bach, oratorio-passions such as Der Tod Jesu set by Telemann and Carl Heinrich Graun. After Telemann came the galante oratorio style of C. P. E. Bach.
The Georgian era saw a German-born monarch and German-born composer define the English oratorio. George Frideric Handel, most famous today for his Messiah (1741), also wrote other oratorios based on themes from Greek and Roman mythology and Biblical topics. He is also credited with writing the first English language oratorio, Esther. Handel's imitators included the Italian Lidarti who was employed by the Amsterdam Jewish community to compose a Hebrew version of Esther.
Classicism
Joseph Haydn's The Creation (1798) and The Seasons (1801) have remained the most widely known oratorios from the period of classicism. While the first of these Händel inspired works draws from the religious theme of creation, the second is more secular, containing songs about industry, hunting and wine.
Victorian era
Britain continued to look to Germany for its composers of oratorio. The Birmingham Festival commissioned various oratorios including Felix Mendelssohn's Elijah in 1846, later performed in German as Elias. German composer Georg Vierling is noted for modernizing the secular oratorio form.[5]
^Smither, Howard E. A History of the Oratorio. Vol. 2: The Oratorio in the Baroque Era - Protestant Germany and England. The University of North Carolina Press. p. 350. Seven works by Handel are sometimes classified as "secular oratorios": Acts and Galatea, Alexander's Feast, Ode for St. Cecilia's Day, L'Allegro, Semele, Hercules, and The Choice of Hercules.63 Nevertheless, none of these compositions was originally called an oratorio by its composer. In Handel's England the term secular oratorio was not used and would have seemed self-contradictory. Thus in a genre classification of Handel's works based on the terminology charac- teristic in England of his time, these seven compositions would be excluded from the oratorio category.
^"Rev. of Semele. An Oratorio. Edited... by Ebenezer Prout". The Musical Times. 19 (424): 338. 1 June 1878. doi:10.2307/3357342. JSTOR3357342. For want of a better term this work may be called a 'Secular Oratorio;' but... Arnold, not wishing to style it an Opera, mentions it as a 'dramatic performance' and certainly the nature of the libretto precludes the possibility of our surrounding it with any religious associations. Victor Schœlcher, in his Life of Handel... dwells on the absurdity of the feeling which, in the composer's time, prompted persons to forbid Esther or Judas Maccabaeus to be played in action, whilst they could listen with equanimity to Semele even in Lent, because it was 'after the manner of an Oratorio.'
