The Birth of Oratorio
Religious character of the Greek drama--The early Christian
plays--The liturgical drama--Miracle plays and their
introduction of abuses--Reformatory efforts of St. Philip
Neri--Ascent of the music to a place of importance--Recitative
and Cavaliere's work--Improvements of Carissimi, Stradella, and
Cesti--Alessandro Scarlatti and the aria--Advent of Handel and
Bach.
Having traced the development of piano music, chamber music, and the
symphony, from the time at which these began to be separate branches of
art up to the present, it now becomes necessary to return to the point
of departure and follow a new line of progress. It is the task of the
reader now to accompany me in an examination into the origin of
oratorio. Difficult as it may be to realize it now, the oratorio was in
its infancy a dramatic performance, and it took its origin from the
ancient religious drama, which, indeed, is the source of all modern
drama. Greek plays, as imitated very badly by the Romans, most directly
affected oratorio. The Greek drama began at the altar of Bacchus, where
the priestesses sang about the sacrificial goat, the goat song, the
"tragos ode," the tragedy. At Delphi grew up representations of the
slaying of a serpent by Apollo, and at Eleusis the "Eleusinian
mysteries" portrayed in dramatic action the rape of Persephone and the
wanderings of Demeter. So originated the Greek drama, which until the
death of Æschylus was chiefly an embodiment of the religious beliefs and
hopes of the Greeks.
When Christianity was introduced in Greece and Rome the people clung to
the play form and continued to use the old mythological personages. The
fathers of the Church speedily perceived that such plays were distinctly
hostile to the progress of the true faith, so they set about writing
religious dramas which should present to the people the facts of
Christianity quite as attractively as the older plays presented those of
Paganism. This work began in the second century (if not earlier), but
the old ideas clung firmly. A curious drama called "Christ's Passion,"
long supposed to have been written by St. Gregory Nazianzen, Patriarch
of Constantinople near the end of the fourth century, contains a curious
mixture of Biblical personages, church hymns and extracts from Greek
plays. About one-third of the verse, for instance, is taken from
Euripides. Dr. Brambs, of Leipsic, has proved that this "Christ's
Passion" dates from the tenth, not the fourth century. It is not
difficult to see how the early Christian dramas could have developed
from the elaborate liturgical presentations of such events as the
nativity, the annunciation, and the crucifixion. Indeed there are extant
some twenty-seven or twenty-eight liturgical arrangements which are
purely dramatic in form and style. Their musical part was provided by
the old Latin hymns. In one of these dramas, "The Shepherds," occur
passages used in Handel's oratorios, such as "Glory to God in the
highest," and "Behold, a virgin shall conceive and shall bear a son."
It was a natural outcome of the social condition of the era that in the
course of time these dramas, enacted frequently in the open air, forced
to appeal to a heterogeneous mass of densely ignorant persons, and bound
to employ their very superstitions in order to gain their comprehension,
should have permitted the introduction of all kinds of triviality and
vulgarity. In "The Fall of Lucifer" the devil was introduced with horns,
tail, cloven hoof, and a glaring red beard. Noah's wife, in another
play, refused to go into the ark, and Noah took a stout cudgel to her.
Adam and Eve appeared naked, and donned their fig leaves in the presence
of the audience. One very popular play in the fifteenth century was
performed on a three-story stage, of which the top story represented
heaven, the middle one earth, and the lowest one hell. The devil had now
become the buffoon of the drama, and was driven about by the populace
with blows from inflated bladders tied to the ends of sticks. In one
play there were four devils to keep the fun going, and jugglers,
acrobats, and buffoons were introduced, until the medieval religious
drama resembled the modern "farce comedy."
A reform, which led to the establishment of the oratorio, was caused by
the work of St. Philip Neri (born in Florence, 1515), founder of the
Congregation of the Fathers of the Oratory at Rome. An old Italian
writer, Crescembini, says: "The Oratorio, a poetical composition,
formerly a commixture of the dramatic and narrative styles, but now
entirely a musical drama, had its origin from San Filippo Neri, who in
his chapel, after sermons and other devotions, in order to allure young
people to pious offices, and to detain them from earthly pleasure, had
hymns, psalms, and such like prayers sung by one or more voices....
Among these spiritual songs were dialogues." The truth is that St.
Philip Neri induced capable Italian poets to make his librettos, which
consisted of dialogues interspersed with choruses. The music he had
written by the best composers, even Palestrina contributing to the good
cause. The beauty and purity of these works caused them to become
popular among the more intelligent young Romans, and St. Philip's
oratory (whence the name oratorio) was always crowded.
The invention of dramatic recitative near the close of the sixteenth
century produced a marked effect on oratorio. It very quickly took the
place of the dialogue, and thenceforward for many years there was
little difference between opera and oratorio except in the nature of
their subjects. The first oratorio with dramatic recitative, of which
any account has come down to us, was "L'Anima e Corpo," written by Laura
Guidiccioni and composed by Emilio del Cavaliere, one of the little band
of musical explorers who gave us opera. This oratorio was performed in
Rome in 1600. The orchestra, consisting of a double lyre, a harpsichord,
a large guitar, and two flutes, was placed behind the scenes, and the
oratorio was presented as a musical drama. The chorus sat on the stage,
but when singing arose and made appropriate gestures. Complete stage
directions were given in the work for the action of the various
characters. The oratorio ended with a chorus "to be sung, accompanied
sedately and reverentially by the dance," and there was provision for a
ballet, "enlivened with capers or _entrechats_."
The new form of religious drama soon won its way to general
appreciation, and composers were not slow to avail themselves of the
opportunities it gave them. Giovanni Carissimi (1582-1672) wrote a
number of oratorios, excellent for their time, among them "Jephthah,"
"Solomon's Judgment," "Belshazzar," and "David and Jonathan." Carissimi
made great improvements in the recitative, giving it more character and
real musical expressiveness than his predecessors had. He also showed
much skill in his choral writing, which was not so completely polyphonic
as that of the earlier church writers. He often used bold successions of
broad and simple chords and often his writing for the voices is much
like that of Handel, a century later. On the whole his work shows a
tendency to abandon a close adherence to the methods of the early opera
composers and to move toward the style subsequently formulated by
Handel. Alessandro Stradella (1645(?)-1681(?)) and Antonio Cesti
(1620-?), the latter, a pupil of Carissimi, did much toward developing
the choral part of the oratorio. Dr. Parry says: "Stradella had a very
remarkable instinct for choral effect, and even piling up progressions
into a climax; and his solo music, though apparently not so happy in
varieties of spontaneous melody as Cesti's, aims equally at definiteness
of structure. His work in the line of oratorio is especially
significant, as he stands comparatively alone in cultivating all the
natural resources of that form of art--on the lines which Handel adopted
later--at a time when his fellow composers were falling in with the
inclination of their public for solo singing, and were giving up the
grand opportunities of choral effect as superfluous."
The tendency of dramatic music, the state of public taste, and the skill
of solo singers all had their influence upon oratorio during the
sixteenth century, and the most popular oratorio composers were those
who also wrote the most successful operas. Alessandro Scarlatti, who has
been mentioned earlier in this book, was the musical dictator of his
day, and his oratorios show a great gain in the elasticity and direct
expressiveness of the recitative, which is quite as dramatic as that of
the contemporaneous opera. But perhaps his treatment of the aria was
more influential. It was he who made the aria the central sun of the
operatic system, and he naturally gave to the solo parts of his
oratorios more definiteness of melody. His treatment of the aria, with
its passages of pure vocal display combined with clearly formed tune,
led the way directly to the Handelian style.
George Frederick Handel was born at Halle, Germany, Feb. 23, 1685. He
studied first under Zachau of Halle, and began his musical career as an
opera composer at Hamburg. He went to Italy and studied faithfully the
works of the Italian masters, some of whom (the Scarlattis, Corelli, and
others) he met personally. His three years in Italy saturated him with
the spirit of Italian music, and he was always influenced by it. On his
return to Germany he became chapel master to the Elector of Hanover. In
1710 he made his first visit to England and wrote his opera "Rinaldo."
In 1712 he went to live in England, where he remained till his death,
April 13, 1759. Handel, having failed pecuniarily as an opera composer,
took up the work of oratorio writing. His principal oratorios are: "The
Messiah" (Dublin, April 18, 1742, and London, 1749), "Israel in Egypt"
(1740) "Judas Maccabæus" (1747), and "Saul" (1740). The oratorio as we
know it to-day dates from Handel, and it was in his day that Dr. Gibson,
Bishop of London, gave a decision which put an end to acting in this
branch of art and removed it entirely from the realm of dramatic
representation.
Contemporaneous with Handel was Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) who is
believed to have made five different settings of the story of Christ's
passion. Of these only two have been preserved: that according to St.
John (1724), and that according to St. Matthew (1729). The latter is
regarded as the greater, and is esteemed by most critics as the noblest
of all compositions in the oratorio form. The reader has seen how the
oratorio in Italy developed up to the time of Handel, who took up that
line of progress and advanced it. His oratorios are strictly in the line
of Italian development, with such modifications as the character and
nationality of the man would naturally produce. We shall best understand
the subsequent development of oratorio if we now review the history of
passion music and examine the peculiar character of this product as
compared with the oratorio of Handel.