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Oratorio and Sacred Opera, 1700–1825: Terminology and Genre Distinction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1979

Howard E. Smither
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Extract

What distinguishes Italian oratorio from Italian sacred opera in the period from around 1700 to around 1825? The question arises from the significant difference between the use of the term ‘oratorio’ by Italian writers and composers at the beginning and end of this period. About 1700 nearly all Italian writers and composers applied the term to works performed without stage action. A century later, on the other hand, Italian writers and composers frequently applied the term to works that were presented as sacred operas. By the early nineteenth century the application of the term to a sacred work with stage action had become so common that it found its way into an Italian musical dictionary. In Lichtenthal's Dizionario ‘oratorio’ is defined as 'A species of drama, the subject of which is a theme selected from sacred history, performed by singers with the accompaniment of an orchestra, either in a church, or in a hall, or indeed on a theatrical stage - in this last case one means Opera sacra, and it bears the mark of the usual Opere in musica, having the same form and conduct.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 106 , 1979 , pp. 88 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

NOTES

1 In the present paper I integrate new material with some of that on terminology already treated in my History of the Oratorio (Chapel Hill, 1977), i, 3–9, 164–7, 221–5, 376–82.Google Scholar

2 I know of two exceptions before 1700: Il martirio di Sant'Eustachio, oratorio per musica (Rome, 1690), libretto by Crateo Pradelini, music anonymous, printed libretto in I/Rsc (all library locations use RISM sigla); and Il conte di Bacheville, oratorio posto in musica dal sigr Gio. Battista Bassani, recitato in Pistoja l'anno 1696, libretto by Francesco Frasini, printed libretto in D/Hs. For brief descriptions, see my History of the Oratorio, i, 276 (on Il martirio); and Arnold Schering, Geschichte des Oratoriums (Leipzig, 1911), p. 116, n. 1 (on Il conte). A possible third exception, cited by Victor Crowther, letter to The Musical Times, cxix (1978), 838, is Gefte - Oratorio da cantarst per la Solenmtà della SSma Annunziata (Modena, 1693 and 1698) by Antonio Gianettini. Thus far I have found no firm evidence that this work was performed with stage action.Google Scholar

3 Pietro Lichtenthal, Dizionario e bibliografia della musica (Milan, 1826), ii, 78. Under the heading ‘Opera’ (ii, 77), Lichtenthal sap, ‘The Italians distinguish four kinds of operas: Opera sacra, Opera seria, Opera sermseria, and Opera buffa. … Opera Sacra is discussed in the article Oratorio.’Google Scholar

4 Letter from Zeno to Giusto Fontanini, 10 April 1734, in Lettere di Apostolo Zeno (2nd edn., Venice, 1785), iv, 462 (letter 832).Google Scholar

5 I am particularly indebted to the extensive catalogue of Italian libretti assembled by Claudio Sartori of the Ufficio Ricerca Fondi Musicali at I/Mc.Google Scholar

6 Studies currently in progress that might contribute to the subject of this paper are Gemot Gruber, Das Wiener Sepolcro und Johann Joseph Fux, II. Teil (the I. Teil, Graz, 1972, treats primarily the seventeenth century and the background of the sepolcro); John Walter Hill, ‘Oratory Music in Florence, III: The Confraternities from 1655 to 1785’, Acta Musicologica (parts I and II of that study, with the same general title, appeared in Acta musicologica, li [1979], 108–36, 246–67); Joyce L. Johnson, PhD diss, in progress (University of Chicago) on the oratorio at Rome in the late eighteenth century.Google Scholar

7 Spagna, ‘Discorso’, in Oratoru, overo melodrammi sacri (Rome, 1706), as reprinted in Arnold, Schering, ‘Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte des Oratoriums im 17. Jahrhundert’, Sammelbände der internationalen Musikgesellschaft, vii (1906–7), 53.Google Scholar

8 Schering, ‘Neue Beiträge’, 52.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., 55.Google Scholar

10 Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, L'istoria della volgar poesia (3rd edn., Venice, 1731), i, 68, 313. The phrase ‘cantando senza rappresentarsi’ is not found in the previous editions (Rome, 1698; 2nd edn., Rome, 1714), but it seems implied by the discussion of oratorio in those editions (1st edn., pp. 71–2; 2nd edn., pp. 76–7).Google Scholar

11 Francesco Saverio Quadrio, Della storia e della ragione d'ogru poesia (Milan, 1739–52), iii/2 (1744), 497.Google Scholar

12 Saverio Mattei, ‘La filosofia della musica o sia La riforma del teatro’, in Delle opere di Saverio Mattei (Naples, 1779), v, 285–320; also in I salmi tradotti dall'ebraico originale, ed adatti at gusto della poesia italiana (Padova, 1780), vi, 188–221; and in Opere del signor abate Piero Metastasio, con dissertazioni, e osservazioni (Nice, 1883–85), vol. iii, pp. iii-xlviii.Google Scholar

13 Mattei, ‘La filosofia’, in I salmi tradotti, vi, 188.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., 215.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., 215–16. (Italics as in original.)Google Scholar

16 Ibid., 215.Google Scholar

17 Charles Burney, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Metastasio (London, 1796), iii, 375, n.c.Google Scholar

18 The earliest of these Lenten performances listed in Francescõ Florimo, La scuola musicale di Napoli e i sum conservatorii, con uno sguardo sulla storia della musica in Italia (Naples, 1880–82), iv, 350, is Il sacrificio d'Abromo (Teatro'del Fondo, 1786). On the title page of the printed libretto (in I/Nc) that work is called ‘dramma sagro’, but in the dedication, p. 3, it is called ‘l'Oratorio che si rappresenterà nel Real Teatro del Fondo’. On the Italian oratorio with stage action in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Schering, Geschichte des Oratoriums, pp. 241–5, and Guido Pasquetti, L'oratono musicale in Italia (2nd edn., Florence, 1914), pp. 465–98, passim.Google Scholar

19 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Die italienische Reise in Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, ed. Ernst Beuder (Zürich, 1948–54), xii (1950), 215.Google Scholar

20 Charles Burney, A General History of Music (London, 1776–89), iv (1789), 108. The context is a discussion of choruses in oratorios by G. P. Colonna, A. Scarlatti, L. Leo, N. Jommelli, and G. F. Handel.Google Scholar

21 Eberhard Preussner, Die musikalischen Reisen des Herrn von Uffenbach (Kassel and Basel, 1949), p. 77.Google Scholar

22 Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy (London, 1771), p. 365.Google Scholar

23 Cf. my History of the Oratorio, i, 51–7, 162–3; and Hill, ‘Oratorio Music in Florence, II; At San Firenze in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Acta musicologica, li (1979), 251.Google Scholar

24 Wöchentliche Nachrichten und Anmerkungen die Musik betreffend, i (1766), 47, quoted in Schering, Geschichte des Oratoriums, p. 247, n. 1.Google Scholar

25 Summarized from G. L. P. Sievers, ‘Ueber den heutigen Zustand der Musik in Italien, besonders zu Rom’, Cäcilia, eine Zeitschrift für die musikalische Welt, i (1824), 208–9, n.Google Scholar

26 This oratorio is presumably the same as L'Assunzione della Beata Vergine Maria (1703), listed in Edwin Hanley, ‘Alessandro Scarlatri’, MGG, xi (1963), 1496.Google Scholar

27 Manuscript in I/Rvat, Fondo Ottoboni, Urb. lat. 1706, fol. 1–4v: ‘Oratorio esposto al publico …’. Cf. my History of the Oratorio, i, 274.Google Scholar

28 Ursula Kirkendale, ‘The Ruspoli Documents on Handel’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, xx (1967), 223–38, 258–64.Google Scholar

29 Kirkendale, ‘Ruspoli Documents’, p. 235, n. 44. Kirkendale's conclusion corroborates that of Emilia Zanetti, ‘Le musiche italiane di Handel’, L'approdo musicale iii/12 (Oct.-Dec., 1960), 11. Kirkendale follows her conclusion with this claim: ‘We now know that not a single oratorio in Italy before 1750 was acted. The only thing sometimes to be seen on a “stage” was an altarpiece or a decoration, and, of course, the performers. …’Google Scholar

30 The sketches are in I/Tn: Ris. 59, 4, f. 81 (1) and Ris. 59, 4, f. 23 (1). In the oral presentation of this paper, slides of the sketches were shown. For reproductions, see my History of the Oratorio, i, 270–1.Google Scholar

31 The objects that I have interpreted as a harpsichord on either side and a bench in the centre are interpreted by the art historian Albert Erich Brinckman as three kneeling benches (‘tre inginocchiatoi’) in ‘I disegni’, in Filippo Juvarra, ed. Comitato per le Onoranze a Filippo Juvarra, a cura della città di Torino (Milan, 1937), i, 141. Given the musical purpose of the sketches and the comparison with a later performance in Ottoboni's theatre (see illustration on page 93), the musical interpretation seems the more plausible.Google Scholar

32 For a reproduction, see my History of the Oratorio, i, 272.Google Scholar

33 For a partial description of this event, see ‘Memoir of the Late F. H. Barthélémon’ (anonymous, but written by Barthélémon's daughter, Cecilia Maria Hanslow), in Selections from the Oratorio of Jefte in Masfa … by the Late F. H. Barthélémon (London, [1827]), p. 7.Google Scholar

34 This wording misled Schering, who concluded that the work was performed with stage action -cf. his Geschichte des Oratoriums, p. 128.Google Scholar

35 For a history of the Forty Hours, see Angelo de' Sanu, L'orazione delle quarant'ore e i tempi di calamità e di guerra (Rome, 1919); my History of the Oratorio, i, 41–2, 377–8; and Mark S. Weil, ‘The Devotion of the Forty Hours and Roman Baroque Illusions’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxvii (1974), 218–48. My study of music in the Devotion of the Forty Hours is in progress.Google Scholar

36 Weil, ‘The Devotion of the Forty Hours’, pp. 218–19.Google Scholar

37 For discussions of such works and for bibliography, see Hucke, Helmut, ‘Neapel’, MGG, ix (1961), 1325; Michael F. Robinson, Naples and Neapolitan Opera (Oxford, 1972), pp. 14–19.Google Scholar

38 Preface (‘Al savio leggitore’), pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

39 I have not considered the context of this work's performance to be a determinant of its genre. It was performed as part of a spiritual exercise sponsored by the Oratorians of Naples (cf. the libretto's title-page). Yet, not all works performed in oratories were oratorios - some were motets, others were cantatas for one or two voices, and this appears to have been a combined genre.Google Scholar

40 For genre labels attached to the Lenten works performed in Neapolitan theatres, see Florimo, La scuola musicale di Napoli, iv, 250ff.Google Scholar

41 Translated from the quotation in Giuseppe Radiciotti, Gioacchmo Rossini: vita documenta, opere ed influenza su l'arte (Tivoli, 1927–29), i (1927), 319, n. 3 (italics as in Radiciotti's quotation).Google Scholar

42 These works, anonymous in their sources, have been attributed to Torn in Robert Münster, ‘Neu aufgefundene Opern, Oratorien und Kantaten von Pietro Torri’, Musik in Bayern, xiii (1976), 53–8. The relationship between the anonymous printed libretto Giacob in B/Bc and the anonymous manuscript of Giacobbe in D/Mbs, which Münster attributes to Torri on p. 54, appears not to have been previously mentioned. Some of these oratorios may have been composed for the Elector of Bavaria's brother, the Elector of Cologne. On the library of the latter, which contained some of these works, see Brandenburg, Sieghard, ‘Die kurfürstliche Musikbibliothek in Bonn und ihre Bestände im 18. Jahrhundert’, Beethoven-Jahrbuch, viii (yr. 1971–72, pub. 1975), 7–47.Google Scholar

43 For a list of operas performed at Munich, in which a few sacred works are cited from the 1740s on, see Hubertus Bolongaro-Crevenna, L'Arpa Festante: Die Münchner Oper, 1651–1825, von den Anfängen bis zum ‘Freyschützen’ (Munich, 1963), pp. 232ff.Google Scholar

44 Cf. above, n. 42.Google Scholar

45 For a brief discussion of the sepolcro, its terminology, and related bibliography, see my History of the Oratorio, i, 366–82.Google Scholar

46 Alexander von Weilen, Zur Wiener Theatergeschichte: Die vom Jahre 1629 bis zum Jahre 1740 am Wiener Hofe zur Aufführung gelangten Werke theatralischen Characters und Oratorien (Vienna, 1901). Weilen's list of performances shows that the old sepolcro virtually disappears at Vienna after 1705.Google Scholar

47 The study in progress by Gruber (cf. above, n. 6) will no doubt shed further light on this practice.Google Scholar

48 Apostolo Zeno, Poesie sacre drammatiche (Venice, 1735). f. 7–8.Google Scholar

49 Zeno to Giusto Fontanini, 30 April 1734, in Lettere di Apostolo Zeno, v, 10 (letter 838): ‘I have modified my [librettos] to the point that they can be acted, as in fact some have been in some religious communities and with happy success.’Google Scholar

50 Wiener Diarum, 1759, no. 24, entry for 24 March 1759, quoted in Kann Breitner, ‘Giuseppe Bonno und Sein Oratorienwerk’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Vienna, 1961), 21 and ‘Anhang Nr. 11’.Google Scholar

51 For a list of operas performed in Vienna, including a few sacred Italian ones in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Bauer, Anton, Opern und Operetten in Wien: Verzeichnis ihrer Erstaufführungen in der Zeit von 1629 bis zur Gegenwart, Wiener musikwissenschaftliche Beiträge, ii (Graz and Cologne, 1955), items 888, 889, 973, 2992, among others.Google Scholar

52 All works performed by this society from 1772 to 1870 are listed in Carl Ferdinand Pohl, Denkschrift aus Anlass des hundertjährigen Bestehens der Tonkünstler-Soctetät … Auf Grundlage der Societäts-Acten bearbeitet (Vienna, 1871), pp. 57–79.Google Scholar