The history of the oratorio proper begins in St. Philip Neri’s oratory chapel, where the story of salvation was brought to life with the best of human art, causing audiences fall in love with their faith through the power of beauty.
When I was in the eighth grade and the time came to choose my Confirmation saint, I didn’t have to think twice: I went for St. Philip Neri (1515–1595). His writeup in my Picture Book of Saints appealed strongly to my artistic nature, and as I grew, I came to appreciate his accomplishments more and more. In the midst of the Italian Renaissance, St. Philip harnessed the power of culture and the arts, and especially music, to serve the glory of God and draw souls to Christ. But Philip’s evangelizing through culture had a very specific artistic result. Histories of music agree that the musical genre of the oratorio was born in Philip Neri’s oratory, a spiritual session (and eventually a religious order) he held that included prayer, preaching, and sacred music.
The Oratory, and hence the oratorio, were products not only of the Counter-Reformation but of an Italian Renaissance culture informed by the spirit of humanism, a movement that gave us vivid new styles of music and art and especially the new dramatic art of opera. Opera developed into a lavish spectacle, a feast for the senses with sumptuous costumes, scenery, poetry, and music. The plots of the early operas were taken mostly from classical history and mythology. Oratorio grew up as opera’s sacred sibling, portraying stories from scripture and the lives of the saints, without scenery or costumes but still with an accent on portraying human emotion through music. Musicologist Howard E. Smither defines an oratorio succinctly as “nearly always a sacred, unstaged work with a text that is either dramatic or narrative-dramatic.”
Starting out with just a handful of friends, St. Philip’s “oratories” soon attracted dozens of attendees from across Roman society; they eventually grew into pilgrimages through Rome by crowds in the hundreds. Fr. Paul Türks observes: “As so often with Philip, religion, culture and nature were brought together into a happy harmony.” Young people, fashionable courtiers, and artists were drawn by the beauty of the musical performances, and such beauty acted as honey to draw souls to the gospel message. Yet beauty was not merely utility in this case, for it blossomed into one of the major art forms of Western culture.
Studying the early history of the oratorio, you sense a powerful nexus between religion and art, church history, and culture. The Mass itself is a kind of oratorio, or even an opera. And when searching for historical forerunners of the oratorio, historians point to the liturgical dramas and mystery plays of the Middle Ages and the laude (songs of praise in the Italian vernacular) fostered by the Franciscan order.
But the history of the oratorio proper begins in St. Philip’s oratory chapel, where congregants gathered to hear readings from the scriptures, a sermon, and some sacred music, often in the form of a dialogue between God and the Soul, two biblical characters, or the like. These brief dramatic presentations were performed by various singers portraying the respective roles and came to be called rappresentazione (dramatic representation). One of the earliest oratorio-like works was La rappresentazione di anima e di corpo by Emilio de’ Cavalieri, first performed in 1600: a moralistic allegory with music, depicting a dialogue between the body and the soul. But Cavalieri’s work featured an elaborate stage production, leading some historians to call it a “sacred opera” rather than an oratorio.
The absence of scenery and costumes would be the main feature distinguishing oratorio from opera going forward. But apart from the question of staging there was little functional difference between opera and oratorio. Both were structured similarly—a succession of arias and choruses connected by conversational recitative to move the plot forward—and oratorio arias can be every bit as theatrical as opera arias. You could think of oratorio as theater of the mind, with a story drawn from sacred history or exploring moral and spiritual themes. When opera performances were suspended during Lent to honor the penitential season, oratorios took their place as spiritually edifying entertainment.
Among the topics chosen for oratorios during their golden age (namely, the Baroque), the Lord’s Passion looms large. And the greatest Passion oratorios were written by Johann Sebastian Bach. Some critics consider the Passion to be a genre separate from the oratorio, but this seems pedantic to me. There can be no doubt that Bach’s Passions according to St. John and St. Matthew (he may have set the other evangelists as well, but if so, the works have not survived) are some of the greatest oratorios ever written. The St. John is my personal favorite: succinct, urgent, and with a forward-moving drive. Bach also wrote “oratorios” for Christmas and Easter that are in fact assemblages of his cantatas for those seasons.
Bach’s contemporary George Frideric Handel is another of the most illustrious names in the history of oratorio. Already an established opera composer in London, he turned to the genre when opera fell out of favor. Handel, according to Mr. Smither, found the oratorio not only “artistically viable” but “economically sound.” Since it required no scenery or costumes, oratorio was good business. And it could therefore be patronized by the middle classes, those without the huge financial resources that went into opera. Attending a sacred story in music was virtuous and edifying. Whereas opera was in Italian and thus appealed to the inner snob, Handel’s oratorios were in English and thus spoke directly to the common man. English people of the 18th century, an era of widening prosperity and expanding empire, tended to identify with the Hebrews of the Old Testament, and Handel responded by setting many of those stories. Handel enhanced the role of the chorus in his oratorios, giving it almost the function of a Greek chorus in commenting on the action and playing the role of the believing community. Messiah, a non-narrative contemplative oratorio, stands as one of the most famous works of classical music in the English-speaking world. Handel’s nearly 30 oratorios also include Israel in Egypt, Judas Maccabeus, Solomon, Jephtha, and my personal choice, Theodora, on the life of an early Christian martyr.
Handel cast a long shadow in the world of the oratorio, and you can feel his influence in many later works. Haydn’s masterworks The Creation and The Seasons (the latter a rare example of a secular oratorio) continued the Handelian tradition, as did Mendelssohn’s St. Paul and Elijah. England and Germany continued to be enamored of the oratorio. Meanwhile, Romanticists like Berlioz (L’Enfance du Christ) and César Franck (Les Béatitudes) tried to strike new ground, and one would be derelict not to mention Edward Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, based on a poem about the afterlife by that great Oratorian and Philip Neri enthusiast, St. John Henry Newman. But the oratorio really had a second life in the 20th century. Impressions that the modern musical age was stridently secular are belied by works like Honegger’s Le Roi David and Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher (Joan of Arc at the Stake) and Frank Martin’s Golgotha, the latter one of the outstanding Passions of all time. These composers moved away from the Victorian sanctimony of the 19th-century oratorio with a more biting style. The revival reminds us that cultural traditions are susceptible to a rebirth and a new burst of creativity.
Intended in most cases for the concert hall rather than the church, the oratorio was an attempt to bring holiness and sacred significance out into the secular square. It was dramatic entertainment based on sacred history. In this way, the oratorio became a vehicle for expressing an artistic and spiritual vision to a wider audience than other musical genres could reach. Just as in Philip Neri intended, the oratorio bridged the gap between the secular and the sacred, bringing people together as a community in shared spiritual beliefs. It fostered a kind of lay spiritual devotion and a unique form of Christian humanism.
I might venture a guess that in our own day the oratorio’s place as religious drama has been taken by cinema in the form of the new faith movies, which have achieved no little success. But just because oratorios no longer occupy a central place in culture doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the backlog of masterpieces from Western culture going back to the year 1600 or so. I have named a few of them here, but there are many more to explore and even more that deserve rescuing from oblivion. (The Academy of Sacred Drama, an organization out of New York run by an acquaintance of mine, is dedicated to doing just that.) And let us not forget St. Philip Neri, the power behind this unique art form. What he envisioned in his upper room in Rome some 450 years ago was to bring the story of salvation to life with the best of human art, and thus make audiences fall in love with their faith through the power of beauty.
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The featured image is “St Filippo Neri in Ecstasy” (1614), by Guido Reni, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
