"Bruce Alan Wilson" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>I was under the impression that one of the reason the oratorio was
>invented was to keep opera singers employed during Lent.

Unlikely, since at the time the first oratorio was written, Opera had not
yet appeared!

The first oratorio was actually a Mystery Play ('The Representation of
Soul and Body') acted out on a stage, in costume, and set to music, with an
optional final dance.  That was in 1600, in the Rome of Philip Neri (since
canonized) and his religious Order, the Congregation of the Oratory.  (The
first opera came some ten months later, and in Florence.) Interestingly, in
more modern times certain oratorios (e.g.  Berlioz' 'L'enfance du Christ'
and Mendelssohn's 'Elijah') have on occasion been similarly produced on
stage.

It was something like a couple of hundred years later, and in London,
that because theatrical performances were prohibited by law on Wednesdays
and Fridays during Lent, miscellaneous concerts were given on those days,
billed (with a greater or lesser degree of accuracy) as 'oratorios' so as
to keep on the right side of the law.

By that time the oratorio had of course developed in various different
ways, from the original musical setting by Emilio di Cavalieri of a Mystery
Play, through other Italians such as Giacomo Carissimi and Alessandro
Scarlatti, to the highly devotional German Passion settings of Schuetz and
Bach, and of course to the very un-Germanic and in fact essentially British
(English, really) epic / dramatic oratorios of Handel (the Cecil B de Mille
of 18th century England?)

Alan Moss
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