XI
Certain Famous Oratorios
About the middle of the sixteenth century, San Filippo Neri, a zealous Florentine priest, opened the chapel, or oratory, of his church in Rome, for popular hours with his congregation. His main object being "to allure young people to pious offices and to detain them from worldly pleasure," he endeavored to make the occasions attractive as well as edifying, and supplemented religious discourse and spiritual songs with dramatized versions of Biblical stories provided with suitable music. Associated with him in his labors for a good cause, was no less a composer than that great reformer of Catholic church music, Giovanni Pierluigi Sante da Palestrina, whose harmonies were declared by a music-loving Pope to be those of the celestial Jerusalem. The laudable enterprise proved successful. People flocked from all quarters to enjoy the gratuitous entertainments, and a form of sacred musical art resulted that derived from them its name.
Roswitha, a nun of the Gandersheim cloister, in the tenth century, made the earliest attempt recorded to invest church plays with artistic worth. Her six religious dramas, written in Latin for the use and edification of her sister nuns, were published in a French setting, in 1845. It was a woman, too, Laura Guidiccioni, a brilliant member of the Florence group of aristocratic truth-seekers in art, who wrote the text of the first religious musical dramatic composition to which the name oratorio became attached. It was set to music of a declamatory style by Emilio del Cavalieri, the author's collaborator in the pastoral plays that were really embryo operas. The title of the piece, "The Representation of the Body and the Soul," indicates the allegorical nature of the subject.
Its initial performance occurred at Rome, February, 1600, in the oratory of San Filippo's church, Santa Maria della Vallicella. The composer had died some months earlier, but his minute stage directions were accurately observed. Behind the scenes was placed an orchestra comprising a double lyre, a harpsichord, a large guitar and two flutes, to which was added a violin for the leading part in the ritornels, that is, instrumental preludes and interludes. The chorus had seats assigned on the stage, but rose to sing, employing suitable movements and gestures. Time, Morality, Pleasure, and other solo characters bore in their hands musical instruments and seemed to play as they acted and declaimed their parts, while the playing actually came from the concealed instruments. The World, the Body and Human Life illustrated the transitoriness of earthly affairs by flinging away the gorgeous decorations they had worn when they appeared on the stage, and displaying their utter poverty and wretchedness in the face of death and dissolution. The representation ended with a ballet, danced "sedately and reverently" to music by the chorus.
Some idea of the oratorio in its infancy may be gained from this description. Except that the subject had a religious bearing, it differed little from the opera. With Giacomo Carissimi, director of music at San Apollinare, Rome, from 1628 until his death, in 1674, the paths of the two diverged. He laid down lines that have been followed in the oratorio ever since. Dancing and acting were excluded by him, and the rôle of narrator introduced. His broad, simple treatment of chords enhanced the purity and beauty of everything he wrote, and in his hand recitative gained character, grace and musical expressiveness. Only a small portion of his epoch-making work has been preserved, but quite enough to make clear his title "Father of Oratorio and Cantata."
His pupil, Alessandro Scarlatti, founder of the Neapolitan school and practically the musical dictator of Naples, from 1694 to 1725, was an incredibly prolific composer in almost every known species of musical form. His many improvements in vocal and instrumental music operated greatly to the advantage of the oratorio. Possessing feeling for orchestration to an unusual degree for his time, he grouped musical instruments of different timbres with marked boldness and skill, and was the first specially to orchestrate recitative. His genius and knowledge enabled him to restore counterpoint to its rightful place, and his oratorios show great gain in elasticity and form.
Another Alessandro, he who bore the surname Stradella and was the hero of Flotow's opera of that name, has figured so freely in romance that it is not easy to separate truth from fiction in accounts of his life. Dr. Parry says of him that he had a remarkable instinct for choral effects, even piling progressions into a climax, that his solo music aims at definiteness of structure, that, in 1676, he used a double orchestra whose principal instruments were violins, and that his oratorios were specially significant, as he cultivated all the resources of that form of art. His most celebrated composition is an oratorio, "San Giovanni Battista," and one of the airs attached to it "Pietà Signore," a beautiful, symmetrical, heart-searching melody, is sung to-day, although it is by no means as well known as it deserves.