Oratorio
An oratorio is a significant genre in orchestral music characterized by the combination of orchestral compositions with choruses, narrators, and solo vocalists, all centered around biblical narratives. Originating from the sixteenth century through the efforts of Italian priest San Filippo Neri, oratorios were designed to educate and engage audiences with religious stories, making them accessible to listeners through dramatic musical retellings. While they peaked in popularity during the seventeenth century, their use of minimal staging and acting led to a decline in favor of opera, which included more theatrical elements.
Oratorios, unlike the sacred texts, are considered theatrical interpretations that rearrange biblical stories into lyrical verses, often using rhyming arrangements. The essence of an oratorio lies in its orchestral music, chorus, and sometimes solo narrators, who convey the emotions and narratives. While both oratorios and operas share structural similarities and storytelling elements, they differ in thematic scope and performance style, with operas featuring more elaborate staging and a broader range of subjects.
Despite the decline in the popularity of oratorios by the end of the eighteenth century, they have remained an important part of music history, with notable composers like Handel and Bach contributing to the genre. Even today, some composers continue to create oratorios, ensuring the genre's legacy lives on.
Oratorio
Oratorios are a unique genre of orchestral compositions. They add choruses, narrators, and solo voices over the traditional instruments found in an orchestra. Unlike normal orchestral pieces, oratorios tell musical versions of biblical stories.
Oratorios were very popular throughout most of Europe during the seventeenth century. However, because oratorios used few costumes and featured little acting, they declined in popularity during the eighteenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century, few composers wrote oratorios. They were replaced by operas, which featured many of the same themes but also included theatrics.
Background
Musicians have played instruments together since ancient times. Both drums made of animal hide and flutes made of wood and bone have been found at prehistoric archaeological sites. Records of how these instruments were played have not survived to modern times, though.
While the earliest records point to musicians playing together in groups, the instrumental composition of the groups was not usually a factor. Many early musical pieces were not composed for any specific sets of instruments. Instead, musicians were expected to play songs on whatever instruments they had available.
In the early seventeenth century, the composer Claudio Monteverdi began composing multi-instrument operas. Unlike prior composers, Monteverdi knew exactly which instruments he wanted for each part. He specified violas of different sizes, horns, woodwinds, and string instruments for various parts of the composition. This ensured that the piece would sound similar to his vision no matter what group of musicians performed it.
Other Renaissance composers followed Monteverdi's lead. Over time, composers began to pair specific groups of instruments together. These groupings became the parts of an orchestra. Composers also began to demand a consistent, stable core of instruments to work with. In the Renaissance, this amounted to a large core of stringed instruments and a variety of horns, woodwinds, and percussion instruments. Through the centuries, these stable groups of musicians evolved into the modern orchestra.
Orchestral music later evolved into several genres. Many genres, such as romantic and baroque classical, are loosely classified by the period in which they were written. Other genres, including opera and oratorio, are classified exclusively by their musical style. Both oratorio and opera build on an orchestra, adding vocalists, stories, and other themed elements.
Overview
The first oratorios can be traced back to the Italian priest San Filippo Neri, who lived during the sixteenth century. Neri founded the Congregation of the Oratory. His sermons drew larger crowds than many of his contemporaries, which prompted the construction of a special meeting room named after the congregation.
To assist him in teaching his congregation stories from scripture, Neri began recruiting groups of musicians. They gave performances in the oratory, performing biblical tales for the congregation. This style of performance came to be called oratorio after the congregation in which it originated.
Oratorios are dramatic orchestral productions that focus on biblical or religious stories. Unlike other forms of religious music, oratorios are never considered scriptures. Instead, they are considered theatrical retellings of the original tales. They dramatize stories from both the New and Old Testaments of the Bible, making them accessible to the average listener. For example, some famous oratorios tell the story of Samson, while others tell of the Passion of the Christ.
Unlike liturgical readings, oratorios do not preach the literal word of any religious text. Composers and writers rearrange the story into lyrical verses. These lyrics are often written in a consistent rhyming arrangement. For this reason, popularized phrases from the biblical tales may be modified or removed.
The most important parts of an oratorio are its orchestral music and its chorus. The chorus tells the story itself while the orchestra provides emotional backing music. In many cases, oratorios also feature solo voices as narrators.
Oratorios and operas are very similar. Orchestras and actors perform in both, and both are intended to tell a story. Further blurring the line between the two orchestral art forms, several traditional operas are sometimes performed as oratorios, while several traditional oratorios are sometimes performed as operas.
Unlike oratorios, operas deal with a wide range of topics. They may cover love, war, politics, or any other dramatic subject matter. Additionally, operas often utilize a full theatrical cast, whereas oratorios rarely feature more than a handful of voice actors. While oratorio performers simply stand in place while they tell a story, opera performers act out the plot. Many operatic performances also utilize props, scenery, and elaborate costumes.
Oratorios were most popular during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The earliest oratorios featured many of the same theatrical techniques as modern opera. As the genre developed, it came to focus more on vocal finesse. In some oratorios, the vocalists portraying the characters in the story would interrupt the chorus to perform detailed monologues, explaining their feelings and motivations to the crowd. In others, the chorus and narrator were the sole performers responsible for expressing the emotions of the main characters.
Many well-respected, historic composers wrote oratorios. Italian composers Emilio del Cavaliere and Giacomo Carissimi wrote oratorios about stories from the Old Testament. George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach helped popularize the genre in Germany, and Marc-Antoine Charpentier helped bring oratorios to France.
The popularity of oratorios began to fade toward the end of the eighteenth century. They were slowly pushed aside by more vibrant art forms. However, composers dedicated to the craft continued to compose oratorios into the middle of the nineteenth century, and some composers still produce oratorios in the twenty-first century.
Bibliography
Cooper, Michael. "As Trump Tries to Revive Coal, a Composer Confronts Mining's Past." New York Times, 4 Apr. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/arts/music/julia-wolfe-anthracite-fields-pennsylvania-coal-country.html. Accessed 15 Jan. 2025.
"New Oratorio by Martin Bresnick to be Premiered at International Festival of Arts and Ideas." Yale School of Music, 15 June 2017, music.yale.edu/2017/06/15/new-oratorio-martin-bresnick-premiered-international-festival-arts-ideas. Accessed 15 Jan. 2025.
“Oratorio Society.” University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign College of Fine & Applied Arts, School of Music, music.illinois.edu/perform/choirs/oratorio-society. Accessed 15 Jan. 2025.
"What Is an Oratorio?" Classical Music, 10 June 2016, www.classical-music.com/article/what-oratorio. Accessed 15 Jan. 2025.