Oratorio singing at London’s Drury Lane: a sketch by John Nixon (c1760 1818) dating from 1814 (Bridgeman images)

Put simply, oratorio denotes a (usually) sacred work for soloists, chorus and orchestra intended for concert performance. A genre which reached its zenith in Handel’s London began, modestly, in Catholic Rome. From the 1560s hymns of praise (laude) were sung during the ‘spiritual exercises’ of the Congregazione dell’Oratorio, founded by St Philip Neri to keep dissolute youth off the streets. These meetings, held in a prayer hall or ‘oratory’, rapidly spread to other churches and cities.By the early 17th century their music, based on biblical stories, had become more elaborately operatic, and the term oratorio took root. The earliest famous example, Cavalieri’s all-singing, all-dancing spectacular Rappresentatione di Anima, e di Corpo, turned Rome’s Chiesa Nova into a theatre. More typical are smaller-scale works like Giovanni Francesco Anerio’s La conversione di S Paolo, unfolding as a series of operatic-style dialogues punctuated by instrumental sinfonias.

By the mid-17th century oratorio performances were a major cultural attraction in Rome. The star composers were Luigi Rossi and, especially, Giacomo Carissimi, whose Latin oratorios combine expressive recitative and arioso with pithy dramatic choruses. His masterpiece Jephte, culminating in a poignant lament for Jephtha’s daughter, left its mark on Handel. In an age that increasingly cultivated solo virtuosity, the oratorios of Stradella and Alessandro Scarlatti are effectively sacred operas, founded on the alternation of recitative and often flamboyant arias.

Scarlatti and Stradella were key influences on the young Handel’s two Italian oratorios, the allegorical Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno, and the sacred La Resurrezione. When Handel settled in England in 1712 there was no oratorio. The century’s supreme musical cosmopolitan would put that right. The seeds were sown by the two English masques Handel composed for the Duke of Chandos around 1718: Esther, with its roots in Racine, and Acis and Galatea, with its Purcellian flavour. Handel later expanded Esther as an oratorio for public performance in London, setting the precedent for a succession of masterpieces designed both to entertain and to edify during Lent.

The 19th century’s two favourite Handel oratorios, Messiah and the epic Israel in Egypt, are atypical in their virtual lack of narrative drama. In his other oratorios, from Saul to Jephtha, he forged an inspired synthesis of Italian opera seria and English anthem that also drew on Restoration masque, German Passion and Greek tragedy. Although the oratorios were never staged in Handel’s lifetime, modern productions have proved that they can be more excitingly dramatic than his operas.

In Germany a popular style of oratorio was the so-called Passion Oratorio, exemplified by the many works (including a fine one by Handel) based on Brockes’ gory Der für die Sünden der Welt gemarterte und sterbende Jesus. Like the related genres of cantata and opera seria, oratorio was in decline by the end of the 18th century. All the examples from this point onwards are to some degree retrospective. With The Creation, librettist Baron van Swieten annointed Haydn as Handel’s successor in the evocation of the musical ‘sublime’. Its follow-up, The Seasons, combines Handelian choral grandeur with a charming vein of pastoralism that recalls Handel’s Miltonic ode L’Allegro.

In 19th-century Germany and Britain the Handelian oratorio tradition was sustained by choral societies and festivals, often with a cast of hundreds. Spohr vainly attempted to scale the sublime in works like Die letzten Dinge (The Last Judgement). Far more enduring are Mendelssohn’s St Paul – more Bachian than Handelian – and the theatrically conceived Elijah.

After Mendelssohn the genre is represented by isolated masterpieces, from Berlioz’s consciously archaic L’enfance du Christ, through Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, to Stravinsky’s Latin opera-oratorio Oedipus rex. If The Dream of Gerontius is in essence a neo-Wagnerian symphonic poem with voices, the two most successful English oratorios post-Elgar recreate something of Handel’s spirit in a modern idiom: Walton’s riproaring Belshazzar’s Feast, and Tippett’s A Child of our Time, whose interpolated spirituals are a secular equivalent of Bach’s Lutheran chorales.

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