[Chapter XV]

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 thence-forward 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."