ORATORIO (MUSIC). – The oratorio differs from theatrical production in being entirely without the aid of scenery and any visible means of expression; it also differs from the cantata through its greater scope, larger number of characters and therefore of recitatives and arias performed by them, and through the dramatic action that accompanies the unfolding of an event, sustained by the dialogue among its various parts. The oratorio is therefore entrusted exclusively to the ear, which must receive impressions of the actions taking place and of the feelings succeeding one another in the souls of the protagonists in this invisible drama: in its first phase, both actions and feelings were echoed by an anonymous figure, a faceless character, and also, in an abstract sense, a “voice” that narrated the antecedent events or commented on the events as they unfolded.
The oratorio, therefore, is the spiritual form par excellence that developed in depth and breadth a subject always interwoven with inner significance and, free from material trappings, acts upon the minds and hearts of listeners, rendering the hearing of edifying narratives or dramatic exhortations to goodness, virtue, and faith purer.
I. HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS AND IMMEDIATE ORIGINS
The remote origins of the o. must be sought in the dialogical element found in liturgical, paraliturgical, or even extra-liturgical texts, which over the centuries enriched religious music.Among the earliest and most striking biblical scenes, whose closely interwoven and incisive dialogue captured the imagination of medieval writers of mysteries, spiritual dramas, and sacred plays, are the happiness and fall of Adam, with the word of God condemning humanity to atone for its sin; then, from the New Testament, the Angel’s visit to the Virgin announcing the Incarnation.
But the passages that from the outset underwent especially fruitful development were those richest in dramatic pathos, in which the narrative, expressed through the conversations between the characters, reached peaks of profound human tragedy and spirituality. Thus the stories of the first Christian martyrs were elaborated, above all the «Passion» of Christ, drawn from the Gospels and rendered in the vernacular according to the spirit of the age; through its dialogue between Christ and his judges, it contains the most expressive dramatic power. From the Gospel narrative there also derives the voice of the «historian» CARISMI (v.). This subject always held a place of honor throughout the history of the o. and underwent particular development in eighteenth-century Germany and among the musicians (about twenty) who set Metastasio’s libretto of the «Passion» to music.
Not by derivation, but by affinity of genre, the sacred drama and the sacred play should be recalled:
two examples selected from the very many produced by the rich medieval flowering will give an idea of the profound analogy between the three forms. A spiritual drama of the German religious theater of the early Middle Ages, the Ordo virtutum, with music by s. Idegarde of Bingen (1098–1179), depicts the soul contested between the devil and God: the virtues that wish to save the soul call it by the sweetest and most compassionate names (O felix anima is an outpouring of joyful effusion that will recur in Carissimi), while the devil (to whom every form of musical expression is forbidden) insinuates, muttering or shouting amid the clanking of chains (the strepitus diaboli), the most powerful seductions and the most violent rebellion. It is one of those dramas in which the struggles between Heaven and earth, between Paradise and Hell, Good and Evil, acquire substance and artistic form, as, approximately 450 years later, in 1600, would occur in Rome in Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo. As regards the other related form, the sacred play, it will suffice to mention the Passion that was held for centuries on Good Friday at the Colosseum and which, suspended when (in the sixteenth century) it degenerated into a noisy street demonstration, continues even today in many cities throughout the world (Oberammergau, Sezze, etc.). A musical composition closer to the o., insofar as it lacked stage apparatus, was the Cantata performed on Christmas night in the Apostolic Palace, suppressed because it had degenerated into worldliness and restored several times by the popes.
The true historical origin of the o. in the vernacular lauda (v.), and in that particular type of lauda which spread in the sixteenth century in the Oratory of the Filippini, through the impetus of s. Filippo Neri and with the valuable contribution of the finest musicians of the time. From the various Filippini houses, the lauda, like the o. later, radiated throughout the Catholic world, carrying, on the wings of faith, the life-giving breath of a Christian art. The Filippini lauda may be divided into three principal phases, each giving the music a distinctive character: polyphonic, transitional, and monodic. In the first phase the narrative tone predominates, whereas in the third, monodic phase, the dialogical manner prevails. The dividing line and criterion of distinction between the two tendencies may be considered G. Francesco Anerio’s Il teatro armonico spirituale (1619), in which the aria of accompanied monody is already emerging and the advent of the o. is clearly not far off. Among the artists who followed and strengthened s. Filippo’s work, the foremost to be remembered are G. Animuccia (v.), G. Ancina (v.), F. Staro (v.), D. Isorelli (v.). A typical element that spread during the period of the Catholic Reformation, in order to reform frivolous or even obscene compositions, especially where creative fervor was not particularly strong, was the «spiritual adaptation», an expedient widely employed in Florence by Serafino Razzi and in Rome by Ancina. During the period extending from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, the word o. had three different meanings: 1) the place of assembly where s. Filippo and his first disciples entertained a number of devotees, at first small but soon very large, so that the construction of the Borrominian building near S. Maria in Vallicella became necessary; 2) the collection of devotional exercises, consisting of a sermon preceded and followed by a lauda in the vernacular (hence the later division of the o. into two parts), held in the evening at those gatherings; 3) the form properly called o.
The activity of the Filippini was the fertile soil in which the o. was born, developed, and spread throughout the world. Among the principal figures marking the formative period of the o. is Francesco Balducci, who gave the o. its first two complete poetic works in their own right (their music is lost): Il trionfo o l’Incoronazione di Maria Vergine and La Fede, o il Sacrificio di Abramo. With him the formative period of the o. comes to an end, and the transition is made from Seicentismo to the Arcadia: the name o., previously used interchangeably with «dialogue», is now permanently assigned to the fully developed form.
The influence of the theater would later be the principal cause of its decline, when, in the nineteenth century, the stage drew the o. toward itself and hybrid forms of staged o. emerged, threatening to deprive the o. of its character as a purely auditory and spiritual artistic form.
II. THE ORATORIO IN THE VERNACULAR
In the seventeenth century, as has been said, the oratorio in the vernacular developed within the circle of the Oratorio of the Filipini; it is by far more important than the oratorio in Latin. Among the principal composers of that century, S. Landi (1632) should be remembered, with his Alessio, which is above all an example of religious theatre, and D. Mazzocchi, with La querimonia di s. Maria Maddalena (ca. 1640). In this period, historians of the oratorio all emphasize in particular its epic element: thus Spagna, Quadriè, and Crescimbeni, while others regard the oratorio as a kind of drama or spiritual opera.III. THE LATIN ORATORIO
This type of oratorio, originating from the Latin motet, arose and developed in the Oratory of the Most Holy Crucifix at S. Marcello, opened in 1522, and with it experienced the glorious period of the activity of G. Carissimi ([v.] 1605–74), who, with 15 Latin oratorios, among which Jephte, Jonas, Judicium Salomonis, and Extremum Judicium stand out, reconnects with the ancient text of Sacred Scripture and the procedure it followed in presenting events through a special character, the “testo.” The performances held at the Crucifix also had another distinguishing feature: the abundant instrumental accompaniment, which, however, was never excessive in Carissimi, always supremely restrained even when colouring the harmonic background of his melodies. At Carissimi’s death, the Latin oratorio definitively declined following the closure of the Servite cenacle of the Most Holy Crucifix, of which it was the principal and direct emanation (1725).IV. ITALIAN ORATORIO OF THE 17TH–18TH CENTURIES
1. The Venetian school, which likewise arose around 1661 under the influence of the Oratorian Congregation at S. Maria della Fava, soon spread beyond Italy and found its most fertile and aristocratic centre in Vienna. Among the librettists are the two most illustrious names in the history of the oratorio, Apostolo Zeno and Pietro Metastasio; among the musicians, A. Lotti, B. Marcello, B. Galuppi, G. Legrenzi, etc.2. The Bolognese school, which arose around 1615 in the Oratorian institution of S. Maria di Galliera, is linked to the Roman tradition of the oratorio in the vernacular, whereas the Venetian school remained faithful to biblical sources (as at S. Marcello). Among the most eminent Bolognese composers who illustrated the oratorio form, we may recall the two Arresti, father and son (Giulio Cesare and Floriano), G. P. Colonna, G. A. Perti, G. Barrocini, Fr. G.B. Martini, G. B. Bassani, and G. B. Vitali.
3. The Tuscan school, which developed under Cosimo III (1670–1723), left, among others, two celebrated names, those of B. Pasquini and F. Gasparini (1668–1727), a pupil of Corelto and Pasquini.
4. The Neapolitan school is the richest in names and works and lasted longest, encompassing a period of approximately a century and a half. It is divided into epochs, each with its own characteristics, delineated and framed within the compositional activity of its principal exponents. In the first epoch, entirely under the sign of A. Scarlatti, from the oratorio I dolori di Maria Vergine (1693) to his death (1725), there is still a vivid trace of the polyphony of the golden Roman tradition, filtered through Carissimi’s monodic vocal writing, while contrapuntal fugal writing is combined with a certain search for chromaticism, tending more toward vocal virtuosity than toward the dazzling palette of Venetian pictorial expressiveness. The names are immortal: A. Scarlatti, A. Stradella, L. Vinci, G. B. Pergolesi (v.), etc. In the second epoch, which extends from the death of A. Scarlatti to that of N. JOMMELLI, NICCOLÒ (v.), opera, which had already begun its dangerous influence in the preceding epoch, bursts forth here, overwhelming with its lyrical impetus the epic and narrative choral character of the oratorio.
The second Neapolitan school also spread abroad, undergoing the influence of the Viennese court, especially in its literary component, from which it drew (Zeno and Metastasio), and of various German courts where Italian or Italianizing artists worked (such as Jommelli in Stuttgart, Porpora and Hasse in Dresden and Vienna). Particular mention must be made, in this phase—which may rightly be defined as the most fertile and happiest in the whole of Neapolitan oratorio—of the oratorios of L. Leo and N. JOMMELLI, NICCOLÒ (v.), all set to texts by Metastasio; they contain passages of singular beauty in the lyrical episodes and in the recitative, which succeeds in imbuing them with profoundly tragic pathos. The importance of the poetic text assumes at this moment a position of primary importance: what Apostolo Zeno proposed was a genuine reform of the genre. As imperial poet of the Viennese court, where he worked from 1718 to 1728, he envisaged, following in the footsteps of Arcangelo Spagna and in accordance with his own theories, a new type of oratorio that would adhere to the Aristotelian unity of time and place advocated by Spagna and possess the character of an opera, though not intended for performance. Yet, despite the dignity of his literary style, the accuracy of the biblical sources on which he drew, and the elevated tone he gives to the speech of his characters, his 17 sacred actions (published around 1735), solemn and classical but conventional and cold, do not possess that living effusion of lyricism with which the work of his successor at the Viennese court (from 1730 to 1782), Pietro Metastasio, is instead richly endowed, always fresh with an intimate feeling that transcends the limits of its setting and time in order to rise to a pure, universal expression of art. Metastasio does not follow the programme of reform proposed by Zeno, but gives the movement a powerful personal imprint. Thus, partly departing from the premises of Spagna and Zeno, while remaining within the forms of eighteenth-century taste, he creates an oratorio which, without excessive concern for reform, is divided into two parts, observes the unity of time and place, and follows an operatic plot, but possesses the distinctive character of lyrical melodiousness in its felicitous depiction of those affections that in every age are the heritage of the better part of the human soul, exalting goodness and virtue, charity and love.
Among the finest composers of the period who set Metastasio’s seven sacred actions to music, the following should be recalled: for the Passione di N. Signore (1730), Cadara (1730), Jommelli (1749), Morlacchi, Paisiello (1784), Zingarelli, etc.; S. Elena al Calvario (1731), Caldara (1731), Anfossi, Danesi, Leo, Giordanello; Giuseppe riconosciuto (1733), set to music 26 times; La Betulia liberata (1734), set to music 24 times, Reutter (1735), Jommelli (1743), Anfossi; Gioas re di Giuda (1735), Reutter; Iucco, figura del Redentore, Jommelli (around 1752), Cimarosa; La morte di Abele (1732), set by 22 composers: Reutter (1732), Leo, Piccinni, Jommelli, etc. In the third epoch, which extends from the death of Jommelli to that of N. Zingarelli (1837), the oratorio declined, entering the stages of the theatres most in vogue (especially under Ferdinando IV) as just another product of the frivolity of fashion. The composers’ names are numerous, but the celebrated ones are few. Among them, first of all, is D. Cimarosa (v.), with Absalon (1787) and Il sacrificio di Abramo; N. Piccinni (v.), with Gionata; Giordanello, with La distruzione di Gerusalemme, a subject that also attracted the attention of other authors, such as Pacini and Zingarelli (1811), who achieved great success with it at the Paris Opera as well. A notable example of staged oratorio is G. Rossini’s Mosè (v.), written to a libretto by L. A. Tottola, initially as an oratorio in two parts for Lent of 1818, and later reduced to an opera in four acts (1827), the form in which it is still performed.
Contributing further to the degeneration of the oratorio in the 19th century was the so-called concert oratorio, made up of excerpts from theatrical operas (arias, duets, etc.) stitched together according to a truly unprecedented anti-historical and anti-artistic criterion. Of this “pasticcio,” which has nothing more to do either with the oratorio form or with the theatre, one may cite, merely as an example and as an item of interest solely for the history of customs—for every artistic purpose is entirely excluded—S. Filippo Neri... ossia la letizia cristiana, performed in Rome in 1840, in which, among other things, the Saint sings Bellini’s aria Sonra il sen la man mi pose. Fortunately, these deplorable outrages against art and religion were soon put aside.
V. L'O. TEDESCO NEI SECC. XVII-XIX. - In Germany too, the Oratorian houses introduced the Italian oratorio, which, together with our melodrama, exerted a notable influence on German musical art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the German flowering, pride of place must first of all be given to the oratorio of the Passion, which, with a great affinity to the genre of the cantata, under whose influence it developed and grew, numbers among its distinguished practitioners such composers as Bach and Händel. At first the Passions were faithfully modelled on the authentic text of the Bible: among them are the works of Thomas Selle (1643), of Henrich Schütz, with his Sieben Worte Jesu Christi am Kreuz (ca. 1645) and the Historia des Leidens und Sterbens unseres Herrn und Heylandes Jesu Christi (ca. 1665-72), then those of Christian Flor (1667), Johann Sebastiani (1662), and J. Theile (1673); later, rhymed paraphrases were used, among which Brockes’s met with the greatest favour and was set to music by more than twenty composers (Keiser, Telemann, Händel, Mattheson); until the art of J. S. Bach made use of both kinds of text, employing the pure biblical text for the recitatives and modern poetic texts (by Brockes and Picander, for example, in the Passions respectively according to St John and St Matthew) for the arias and choruses.
After J. S. Bach, his sons must also be remembered as authors of important Passions, for example Carl Philipp Emanuel, and then K. H. Graun (Der Tod Jesu, 1755), Haydn, with the instrumental quartet later reduced by others to vocal form and revised by him: Sieben Worte am Kreuz (1783), etc. For the figure of J. S. Bach (v.), besides the two great Passions: Johannes-Passion (1723) and Matthäus-Passion (1729), his oratorio Weinachtsoratorium (1734) must be recalled, consisting of six cantatas to be performed successively on the days from Christmas to Epiphany. In choosing this subject too he had been preceded by Heinrich Schütz, who in 1664 had composed a Christmas oratorio, Historie der freuden und gnadenreichen Geburt Gottes und Mariens Sohn Jesu Christi. The work of G. F. Händel ([v.] 1685-1739) calls for separate consideration. His music bears a remarkably strong Italian imprint, owing to his stays in our country and to the influence exerted on him by Carissimi through A. Steffani in Hanover. He too left a Passione secondo s. Giovanni (1704) and a Passion nach Brockes (1720), but his most celebrated works are the biblical oratorios Ester, Saul, Sansone, etc., and, most famous of all, the Messia, performed in Dublin in 1742.
In Bach, the oratorio attained its full maturity; in his work, the artistic and technical formation of the oratorio appears to be constituted by the three major representatives of the art of musical composition: the polyphony of the lauda of the mid-sixteenth century is found in the broad expansiveness of his chorales, the monody of the lauda of the late sixteenth century lives again in the arias, while the narrative lauda echoes in the declaimed account of the “historian.” The three elements are fused in him, issuing from the sources of tradition to form a marvellously harmonious and complete whole of sovereign beauty. After Bach and Händel, the German oratorio still counts three great names, those of the Viennese classics, but its expressive power is now in decline, and already between Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven a lesser impulse in the oratorio can be observed in comparison with their other works. For Mozart and Haydn, the Italian influence was still alive and powerful, impelling them to set to music librettos in Italian whose style was wholly imbued with the most exquisite Italian vocality. The former elaborated the Metastasian Betulia liberata (1771-72), and the latter Il ritorno di Tobia, performed at the court of Vienna in 1774-75. Different, however, is Christus am Ölberg (Op. 85), written in 1800 and published in 1811 by L. van Beethoven, in which Italian influence has by then weakened under the overwhelming, highly personal force of the Beethovenian style. In 1829 Bach’s Passione secondo s. Matteo was revived, after a century of oblivion, and performed at the Singakademie in Berlin under the direction of Mendelssohn, to whom musical history owes the composition of two oratorios: Paulus (1836) and Elias (1846). Romanticism now permeated the German musical world and helped to give the oratorio tones and colours of a melodiousness and passion that increasingly distorted its essence, which must necessarily be sober and serene, even while expressing the most tragic events. It will suffice to mention A. G. Rubinstein (1829-94), who, although Russian, may be regarded as the last product of the German Romantic school, to complete, with his Das verlorene Paradies (Weimar 1858), the panorama of the German oratorio in the nineteenth century. Franz Liszt, on the other hand, belongs to a new current; although he too was a foreigner, with Leggende di s. Elisabetta (1862) and Christo (1866) he established in Germany the new school that propelled a modern restoration of the oratorio through a return to the pure sources of the classical Roman tradition of Palestrina and Carissimi.
VI. THE ORATORIO IN EUROPE AND AMERICA. 1. In France. - It had a great representative in M. Charpentier ([v.] 1634-1704), a pupil of Carissimi; in the following century there was Leseur, and in 1800, besides David and Dubois, Berlioz (v.) cannot be passed over, with the sacred trilogy L'Enfance du Christ (1850), nor that of C. Franck, with Les Béatitudes (1879), or Gounod, with la Rédemption (1882). In all these works, however, the influence of melodrama is so strong that any oratorio could be represented on the stage without its character being altered, since what one encounters is an opera without a stage.
2. In Belgium. - E. Tynel, a pupil of Gevaert, enriches the oratorio with lively colours in both its instrumental and vocal portions, embodying his contrapuntal experience in the oratorios Franciscus (1881) and Godelieve (1897).
3. In Spain and Portugal. - In the Iberian Peninsula, G. Posile of Barcelona must be remembered, who, among other works, set Metastasio’s Giuseppe riconosciuto (1633) to music, as well as D. Teriadellas in Spain; D. Perez, together with A. and C. de Silva, in Portugal.
4. In England. - In the revival of the modern school, highly significant oratorios are found. Parry and Edgar are noteworthy, as are W. Davies and W. Walton, who bestowed deliberately sonorous grandeur upon the choral sections of his Belshazar's feast (1931).
5. In America. - H. Parker (1931) must be remembered for his Hora novissima and The legend of st. Christopher, and Paine for St. Peter.
6. In Italy. - The restoration movement, which saw the figures of Tomadini, Capocci, Raimondi, etc., in the 1880s, did not remain silent in the nineteenth century; indeed, it was exceedingly fruitful, taking concrete form not only in the works of M. E. Bossi, Tebaldini, and Hartmann, but also in the work of L. Perosi: Passione secondo s. Marco (1897), La Trasfigurazione (1898), La Resurrezione di Lazzaro (1898) and La Resurrezione di Cristo (1898), Il Natale del Redentore (1899), L'Entrata di Cristo in Gerusalemme (1900), La strage degli Innocenti (1900), Il Giudizio universale (1904), and Mosè (1901); in him the oratorio lives again, although filtered through Wagnerian symphonic experiences and those of an entire operatic age, the gentle echo of the most vital tradition of the Italian oratorio. Among the oratorios of the twentieth century, La samaritana (1930) by L. Refice may also be mentioned.