33 - The Bible in music

Summary

The mid-eighteenth century was marked by the deaths of the major composers of the Baroque period, and with them also ended the dominant position of sacred music. Besides an abundance of minor forms, the main carriers of biblical texts remained oratorios and settings of the Passion. This chapter discusses these two carriers of biblical texts, and gives an overview of some general trends that can be observed throughout the period after 1750. The general tendency within biblical oratorios was away from Old Testament and towards New Testament subjects with an increasing non-Christian influence. The purely biblical Passion setting virtually died out during the first half of the eighteenth century, though three other types survived later: the oratorio Passion, which supplements the biblical narrative with lyrical insertions; the Passion oratorio, which retells the Passion account in free poetic paraphrase; and the entirely non-dramatic, contemplative Passion meditation.