Oratorio and Cantata

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Oratorio and Cantata

The Rise of the Oratorio.

The oratorio rose to prominence as a genre of religious vocal music performed outside of churches; the name came from houses of prayer built for devotional groups in Rome, in which these early works were performed. An oratorio is dramatic like an opera, and the form developed at nearly the same time as opera. One of the very earliest musical dramas, Emilio de' Cavalieri's Rappresentatione di Anima et di Corpo in 1600, seems in many ways as much like an oratorio as an opera. An oratorio's story line is normally religious, while that of opera normally is not. Another difference is the absence of acting; the singers in an oratorio do not act out their parts on a stage, so they do not usually use costumes or sets. Rather, they simply stand and sing, as do the rest of the chorus, and a narrator describes the action. Oratorios began to serve as substitutes for opera during Lent in Italian cities. Opera seemed too flamboyant for the penitential season; the religious subject matter of oratorios seemed more appropriate, yet audiences could still enjoy attending a performance that featured musical styles similar to opera. Giacomo Carissimi (1605–1704) was an important early composer of oratorios in Rome, helping to establish the genre's characteristic features. Like operas, oratorios relied on a mixture of recitative, arias, and choruses, with recitative usually being used to narrate events and arias to highlight particularly important parts of the biblical stories on which the libretti were based. Choruses were usually more prominent in Carissimi's oratorios than in operas, and such was true of the genre as it continued to develop in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Oratorios relied on all the musical styles popular in Italy at the time, but as the form spread to France and composers like Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704) began to write them, they used styles developed from French opera as well. By the later seventeenth century, the German-speaking regions of Central Europe were adding the oratorio to their own long-standing traditions of presenting religious plays during Holy Week and Easter as well as at Christmas and other religious holidays. The oratorio became a particularly important form of music in Protestant as well as Catholic regions of the Holy Roman Empire, and Hamburg, a Lutheran city in northern Germany, became an especially important center for oratorios.

Handel and the English Oratorio.

Thanks to the presence of the German composer George Frideric Handel (1685–1759), the oratorio also became a popular form of religious music in eighteenth-century England. Handel had worked in Hamburg when he was a young composer and in 1707 he had traveled to Rome. Although he was a Lutheran, he had composed two oratorios there in the Catholic style between 1707 and 1708. Returning to northern Europe in 1710, Handel spent most of the next thirty years as a composer of operas, musical dramas, and other choral works for the city's churches and royal court. In these years he made only sporadic efforts to develop the composition of oratorios for English audiences. Toward the end of the 1730s Handel returned to the form, and he eventually developed it into a new genre that differed significantly from its Italian or continental European sources of inspiration. In 1741, he presented two of his works in the genre, Samson and his great masterpiece Messiah, at concerts in Dublin. They were enormous successes, and were soon performed in London. Although the Messiah is the most widely known of these works, it was also the most atypical of Handel's oratorio compositions because it relies on a libretto that is not dramatic. There are, in other words, no major events that are narrated in the work. Instead Handel chose a text for the Messiah that had been arranged by Charles Jennens from the Old Testament prophets and certain passages in the English Book of Common Prayer. The manner in which the work presents its message—that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy—was a departure from many of the oratorios of the past. The work does not, in other words, concentrate on the activities of Jesus' life or on his Passion, but on the way in which his mission fulfilled the promises of the Old Testament. Despite this subtle and essentially non-dramatic approach, Handel's Messiah still manages to treat the important events of Christ's ministry through allusions to those events in the words of the Old Testament Prophets. In Handel's other English oratorios, his approach was more fundamentally dramatic—that is, he served to narrate a biblical story—and his works were, like their Italian counterparts, essentially substitutes for operas. They adopt as their subjects incidents from the Old Testament and the books of the Apocrypha, which their librettists gave a theatrical cast that was often influenced by their understanding of Greek drama. Most of Handel's seventeen oratorios are preceded by an overture that is usually written in the French style. In this form a lively fugue usually follows a stately introduction. One of the most distinctive and beloved features of Handel's oratorios is their choruses, which display considerable vitality and variety. Some, like the famous "Hallelujah Chorus" from the Messiah, are conceived as mixtures of massive and strong chords with generous doses of counterpoint. Some are conceived of as fugues; others are influenced by the long-standing traditions of madrigal and motet writing, and are complex exercises in polyphony. And still others present a melody set against simple, and sometimes even haunting, harmonies. Handel's example helped to establish a distinctively English form of oratorio that persisted in the country throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Cantata.

The cantata was also developed in Rome and spread from there to the rest of Europe. Like the oratorio, it was sung but not staged, but it used any sort of theme and any number of voices, from one to many; for example, a secular cantata for two voices might use a man and a woman and have a romantic theme. A cantata also resembled an opera in that it combined arias with sections of recitative, and might in fact seem rather like a scene from an opera that simply stood on its own. Cantatas also became very popular in German Protestant regions as church music, particularly within the Lutheran Church. These sacred cantatas, or chorale cantatas, were often built around a familiar hymn or chorale. References might be made to the chorale throughout the cantata, and the chorus sang it at the conclusion in its traditional four-part harmony. The demand for cantatas from composers, many of whom served as church organists, was particularly great during the years of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and enormous numbers of cantatas were written at this time. Georg Philipp Telemann (1686–1767), for example, seems to have written as many as 1,700 cantatas during his life, of which 1,400 survive today in printed and handwritten versions. Telemann was atypical, but his output illustrates the almost insatiable appetite for cantatas in the Lutheran church during the first half of the eighteenth century. Many of Telemann's cantatas were composed while he was musical director of the court of Saxe-Eisenach, and in the cities of Frankfurt and Hamburg. It was a common requirement of these positions that composers like Telemann regularly compose a new cycle of cantatas for the church year, which were then revived and performed at later dates. These cycles demanded at least sixty independent compositions for the weeks of the year, and the other feasts that were commemorated with music in the church. During Telemann's time in Eisenach, he was expected to finish a cycle of cantatas and church music for the city's churches once every two years. In Frankfurt, the town demanded that he produce a new cycle every three years. But in Hamburg, where the composer spent the years between 1721 and his death in 1767, he was expected to provide two cantatas for each Sunday as well as a concluding chorus or aria for the service. Despite this punishing schedule, a schedule that was also crowded with the demands of directing the city's opera and its choral school, Telemann proved more than able to produce the necessary music. During these years he also managed to write 35 operas and other works for the city's theater and to take on commissions for occasional music for Hamburg's wealthy citizens and nobles elsewhere in Germany. Telemann, who was ever open to the commercial possibilities his talents offered, was able in Hamburg to publish several of his cantata cycles, a relative novelty at the time. The composer's cantatas were widely performed throughout the Lutheran churches of Germany, and by the second half of the eighteenth century, they were among the most commonly sung works in the German Lutheran church.

The Cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach.

While he did not outdo Telemann in quantity, the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach rank among the most widely revered composition of the Baroque period. The great German composer wrote cantatas throughout his entire life in every court and church position in which he served. Bach's cantatas used both sacred and secular texts, although far fewer of his secular cantatas have survived than his sacred ones. Of the works written for the celebration of Sunday and holiday services, it is estimated that forty percent have not survived. Like other composers of the day, Bach reused much material, sometimes adapting melodies and arias composed from his early days in Weimar and Cöthen to the needs of his position in Leipzig. It was in this last city where Bach spent the greater part of his creative career. His position as organist of the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig and city musical director was one of the most respected musical positions in Germany, and in it, Bach was expected to provide new music for the choirs of the city's major churches. At the small Calvinist court of Cöthen where Bach had been immediately before beginning his tenure in Leipzig, the role of service music in the court chapel had been relatively limited. As Bach began his tenure in the new position in 1723, he evidenced enormous ambitions to develop a new kind of sacred music for the celebration of weekly services. During his first year at Leipzig he completed a cycle for the liturgical year consisting of sixty cantatas. Given the press of time and his other duties as music master at St. Thomas's boarding school, Bach was forced in these early years to rely heavily on compositions he had already written in other positions. Despite these pressures, the first cycle that he composed in 1723–1724 includes an enormous amount of new material, and was conceived of as a "double" cycle—that is, it included two cantatas for each Sunday, one for before and one for after the sermon. He followed this first series of cantatas with a second cycle written in 1724–1725, a third between 1725–1727, and a fourth between 1728–1729. A fifth cycle was likely written over many years during the 1730s, although only fragments of these cantatas survive. Unlike the cantatas written in Central Europe to this time, Bach's works were truly innovative and designed with an intellectual program that was coherent and readily intelligible. He relied on similar organizational schemes in many of these works, often alternating choruses with recitatives followed by arias and in many cases including a French overture to precede the entire work. In the earliest Leipzig works he relied upon texts of previously developed cycles that included a large amount of sacred poetry. Later he relied more firmly on the biblical texts from the lectionary of the particular Sunday. Many of the Leipzig cantatas, too, can be distinguished by opening movements, which are often conceived in a grand and stately style with rich orchestral accompaniment. These works, too, often conclude with a chorale or hymn sung by the entire choir. In his Leipzig years, Bach also wrote cantatas on secular themes and subjects, although the press of his church obligations there meant that he produced fewer of these kinds of works in this position than he had at earlier times in his career. Of the secular cantatas written during this period one of the most famous is his "Coffee Cantata," a comical work about a girl who loved drinking coffee. As in Bach's other works, the "Coffee Cantata" displays a wealth of fertile invention.