audience demanded an inconvenient number of arias, most of
which are clumsily accounted for by a conventional assignment
to dramatic roles with a futile attempt at love-interest; which
makes many of the best solos in Saul and Joshua rather absurd.
The third Handelian method is that which has since become
embodied in the modern type of sacred or secular cantata; a
series of choruses and numbers on a subject altogether beyond
the scope of dramatic narrative (as, for instance, the greater part
of Solomon), and, in the case of the Messiah and Israel in Egypt,
treated entirely in the words of Scripture.
After Bach and Handel the history of oratorio becomes disjointed. The rise of the sonata style, which brought life to the opera, was almost wholly bad for the oratorio; since not only did it cause a serious decline in choral art by distracting attention from that organization of texture which is essential even to mere euphony in choral writing (see Counterpoint and Contrapuntal Forms), but its dramatic power became more and more disturbing to the essentially epic treatment demanded by the conditions of oratorio. Bach and Handel (especially Handel) were as dramatic in characterization as the greatest epic poets, and were just as far removed from the theatre. Any doubt on this point is removed by the history of Handelian opera and the reforms of Gluck. But the power of later composers to rise above the growing swarms of 18th-century and 19th-century oratorio-mongers depended largely on the balance between their theatrical and contemplative sensibilities. Academicism naturally mistrusted the theatre, but, in the absence of any contemplative depth beyond that of a tactful asceticism, it has then and ever since made spasmodic concessions to theatrical effect, with the intention of avoiding pedantry, and with the effect of encouraging vulgarity. Philipp Emanuel Bach's oratorios, though not permanently convincing works of art, achieved a remarkably true balance of style in the earlier days of the conflict; indeed, with judicious reduction to the size of a large cantata. Die Israelilen in der Wüste (1769) would perhaps bear revival almost better than Haydn's Tobias (1774), in spite of the superior musical value of that ambitious forerunner of The Creation and The Seasons. These two great products of Haydn's old age owe their vitality not only to Haydn's combination of contrapuntal and choral mastery with his unsurpassable freedom of movement in the sonata style, but also to his priceless rediscovery of the fact (well known to Bach, the composer of “Mein glaübiges Herze,” but since forgotten) that, in Haydn's own words, “God will not be angry with me for worshipping him in a cheerful manner.” This is the very spirit of St Francis of Assisi, and it brings the naively realistic birds and beasts of The Creation into line with even the Bacchanalian parts of the mainly secular Seasons, and so removes Haydn from the dangers of a definitely bad taste, which began to beset Roman Catholic oratorio on the one hand, and those of no taste at all, which engulfed Protestant oratorio on the other.
From the moment when music became independent of the church, Roman Catholic religious music, liturgical or other, lost its high artistic position. Some of the technical hindrances to greatness in liturgical music after the Golden Age are mentioned in the article Mass; but the status of Roman Catholic non liturgical religious music was from the outset lowered by the use of the vulgar tongue, since that implied a condescension to the laity, and composers could not but be affected by the assumption that oratorio belonged to a lower sphere than Latin church music. With this element of condescension came a reluctance to foster the fault of intellectual pride by criticizing pious verse on grounds of taste. Even in Protestant England this reluctance still causes educated people to strain tolerance of bad hymns to an extent which apostles of culture denounce as positively immoral: but the initial impossibility of basing a non-Latin Roman Catholic oratorio directly on the Bible would already have been detrimental to good taste in religious musical texts even if criticism were not disarmed. It must be confessed that Protestant taste (as shown in the texts of many of Bach's cantatas) was often unsurpassably bad; but in its most morbid phases its badness was mainly barbarian, and could either be ignored by composers and listeners, or easily improved away, as Bach showed in his alterations of Brockes's vile verses in the Passion according to St John. But the bad taste of the text of Beethoven’s Christus am Oelberge (The Mount of Olives, c. 1800) is ineradicable, for it represents the standpoint of writers who may be very devout and innocent, but whose purest source of sacred art has been the pictures of Guido Reni. It was one thing for Sir Joshua Reynolds to admire the wrong period of Italian art: he had his own access to great ideas; but for Beethoven's librettist, who had no such access, it was very different. The real sacred subject has no chance of penetrating through a tradition which is neither naive nor ecclesiastical, but is simply that of a long-tolerated comfortable vulgarity. An operatic tenor represents the Saviour; an operatic soprano represents the ministering angel; and in the garden of Gethsemane the two sing an operatic duet. The music is brilliant and well worthy of Beethoven's early powers, but he afterwards greatly regretted it; and indeed its circumstances are intolerable, and the English attempt at a new fibretto {Engedi, or David in the Wilderness) only substituted ineptitude for irreverence.
Schubert's wonderful fragment Lazarus (1820) suffers less from the sickness of its text; for the music seizes on a certain genuine quality aimed at by all typical Roman Catholic religious verse-writers, and embodies it in a kind of romantic mysticism unexampled in Protestant oratorio. Modern literature shows this peculiar strain in Cardinal Newman’s Dream of Gerontius, just as Sir Edward Elgar's setting of that poem to music of Wagnerian continuity and texture presents the only parallel discoverable later or earlier to the slightly oppressive aroma of Schubert's unique experiment.[1] Lazarus also surprises us by a rather invertebrate continuity of flow, anticipating early Wagnerian opera; indeed, in almost every respect it is two generations ahead of its time; and, if only Schubert had finished it and allowed it to see publicity, the history of 19th-century oratorio might have become a more interesting subject than it is.
The ascendancy of Mendelssohn, as things happened, is really its main redeeming feature. Mendelssohn applied an unprecedented care and a wide general culture to the structure and criticism of his fibretto (see his correspondence with Schubring, his principal helper with the texts of St Paul and Elijah), and was able to bear witness of his new-found gospel according to Bach by introducing chorales into St Paul as well as by disinterring and performing Bach's works. But he had not the strength to rescue oratorio from the slough into which it had now fallen, no less in Protestant than in Roman Catholic forms.
As the interest in Biblical themes becomes more independent of church and dogma, oratorio once more tends to become confused with Biblical opera. The singular fragrance and tenderness of the best parts of Berlioz’s little masterpiece L’Enfance du Christ (put together from sections composed between 1847 and 1854) give it high artistic value; but if “oratorio” means “sacred music” Berlioz was incapable of anything of the sort; for the Christianity of his Grande Messe des morts and his Te Deum is the Christianity of Napoleon; and, if oratorio means a consistent treatment of a legend or subject in terms of musical epic, Berlioz can never fix his attention long enough to remember how he began by the time he has got half way through. Though Berlioz's essay in oratorio is not quite so irresponsible a vocal symphonic-dramatic medley as his Roméo et Juliette and Damnation de Faust, it unmistakably marks a transition towards the complete secularizing of the Bible for musical purposes. But the long-continued prejudice in England against the representation of religious subjects on the stage has wrought peculiar confusion in the theory of their romantic treatment in music. It may be noted as a curiosity that Saint-Saens’s Biblical opera, Samson et Dalila (written in 1877), after being known in England for many quiet years as an oratorio, suddenly, in 1910, was permitted by the censor of plays, under royal command, to be produced at Covent Garden for what it was intended. It may
- ↑ Schubert's well-known cantata, Miriam’s Siegesgesang, has been discussed as a small oratorio; but it is of slight artistic and no historic importance.
