Oratorio

Oratorio, large-scale musical composition for voices and instruments, of a dramatic or contemplative nature, and usually on a religious subject. Although the libretto may contain dramatic incidents, as in opera, oratorios are usually performed in concert without scenery or costumes.

The history of the oratorio began in the mid-16th century, when the Italian priest St Philip Neri organized devotional services in the oratory, or prayer hall, of a church in Rome. The services included sermons, prayers, hymn singing, and devotional music. After opera spread from Florence to Rome in the early 17th century, some of its characteristics, including the recitativelike vocal style called monody, and the use of a dramatic libretto, were incorporated into music written for the oratory services. Works of this type were called oratorios. Some of the early oratorios were performed as operas, with scenery, costumes, and staged action. Soon, however, a narrator (testo) sang descriptions of settings and actions. By the mid-17th century, the oratorio was easily distinguishable from opera in its use of a testo, its lack of staged action, its generally contemplative tone, and its emphasis on music for chorus rather than for solo voices. The early composers of oratorios included the Italian Giacomo Carissimi, his student, the Frenchman Marc-Antoine Charpentier, and the Italian opera composers Alessandro Stradella and Alessandro Scarlatti. In Germany oratorios were written by a great number of composers, the most prominent of which were Heinrich Schütz and Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach's oratorios include his great settings of the biblical passion story, St John (1723) and St Matthew (1729). With works such as Messiah (1742), the German-born British composer George Frideric Handel created the English oratorio.

During the later 18th and 19th centuries, most major composers wrote oratorios with musical styles borrowed from their operas, symphonies, and other secular music. These composers included the Austrian Joseph Haydn and the German Felix Mendelssohn, the Hungarian Franz Liszt, the Englishman Sir Edward Elgar, the Frenchmen Hector Berlioz and Charles Gounod, and the Belgian-French César Franck. Oratorios were very popular in the United States in the 19th century, and notable examples were written by New England composers such as Horatio Parker. In Britain during the same period, the popularity of oratorios led to a huge development in amateur choral singing, with works like Messiah and Mendelssohn's Elijah becoming the staple fare of hundreds of choral societies, a tradition that extends, to a lesser extent, to the present.

The composition of oratorios decreased in the 20th century. Notable examples on biblical themes were written by Sir William Walton (Belshazzar's Feast, 1931), Arnold Schoenberg (Jacob's Ladder, 1922), and Elgar (The Apostles, 1903 and The Kingdom, 1906). The range of subject matter has, however, expanded to take in non-biblical and more generally philosophical areas more readily. Works of this type have a history dating back to Handel (L'Allegro, il Pensieroso ed il Moderato, 1740, to a text by John Milton) and Haydn (The Seasons, 1801, to a text by James Thomson). In the 20th century they included A Child of Our Time (1941) and The Mask of Time (1984), both by Sir Michael Tippett, Joan of Arc at the Stake (1935) by Arthur Honegger, Oedipus Rex (1927) by Igor Stravinsky, and The Perpetual (1931) by Paul Hindemith.