Baroque Word Painting

Of the many new genres that developed during the Baroque period, the oratorio perhaps allowed the greatest flexibility in blending old and new. A sacred genre, oratorios usually took biblical stories as their basis. Structurally akin to opera (a drama set to music), oratorios included recitatives, arias, and choral numbers. They usually had characters, a chorus that could function as a crowd or as commentators on the action (much like an ancient Greek chorus), contained numerous pieces, and were accompanied by an orchestra. They did not usually have sets and costumes, however, a fact that set them apart from the theatrical productions of operas.

While recitatives and arias aligned oratorios with the secunda prattica [link to glossary] of the Baroque, the choral pieces permitted composers to keep one foot in a more traditional medium. The examples we will be considering below explore different types of choral traditions in three contiguous pieces—something of an anomaly but nonetheless representative of the options a composer writing in the mid-eighteenth century might employ. Two of three are strictly based on functional tonality (as examples of European church harmony), while the other grafts an older idea—polyphony, but in its new guise, the fugue—onto this harmonic style.

Handel and the oratorio

A successful German composer who had studied in Italy, Handel traveled to England to try his hand at Italian opera there. Initially he was quite successful. Various elements contributed, however, to a decline in the popularity of Italian opera in London, and Handel brilliantly turned to the closest substitute—the oratorio.

Why the oratorio? Three reasons come to mind. First, Handel was trained as a composer of opera. He was probably the best opera composer in Europe at the time. If the exact genre