This week’s theme is…Musical Farewells! Parting is such sweet sorrow, but it’s always inevitable. Musicians have explored the rich feelings of saying goodbye for as long as there has been music. This week we examine examples of this from all across history.
Musical Farewells, Day 4 – “Miei genitori, adio” from The First Murder by Alessandro Scarlatti
I remember that back in 2000, my freshman year in college, I was kind of a hotshot, excessively proud of my interest in music history (maybe I still am?). My music theory teacher had a ritual of playing a new piece of music for us at the beginning of class every day and commenting on it a little, just to broaden our horizons and expand our repertoire of art music. That’s a good idea – it’s actually surprising how easy it is for music students to get caught in their own little bubbles of interest and not take the time to listen around for new things. Having taught similar classes myself, I’m also impressed at the discipline that he showed in finding varied and interesting music to present daily and commenting on it, not to mention fitting all the class material into the shortened periods that resulted from taking the time to do this.
Well, being the outspoken music history geek, I was always happy to contribute my own obscure findings to this ritual, which he graciously allowed me to do from time to time (it expanded his horizons as well), and so I eagerly culled little-known and colorful items from my own collection to play for the class and he, often bemusedly I imagine, offered the introductions, writing the composer, title, and genre on the board to provide concrete context to my classmates. I remember he made a mistake one day in doing so, a most understandable mistake, and like a dutiful student in an Orthodox yeshiva responding to a scriptural mispronunciation, I called out the correction, which he cheerfully accepted (in retrospect, he was awfully good-natured about all of this). I brought in a recording of this piece (you are welcome to listen to the entire 2 hours if you wish, but if you play a few minutes of the beginning you will hear as much as my theory class was exposed to that morning. Later in the post we will listen to a specific excerpt):
And as the overture played he began to write on the whiteboard:
Alessandro Scarlatti – opera: Il Primo Omic
At which point I called out “oratorio!”. And he acquiesced, erasing the offending genre label and replacing it with the correct one. But like I said, it’s an understandable mistake. Because in this particular work, the two labels are essentially indistinguishable, especially if you don’t speak Italian or know the subject.
When most of us see or hear the word oratorio, I suspect we almost automatically think of George Frideric Handel and his notable contributions to the genre written for British audiences during the 1740s and 1750s. Messiah of 1742 is of course the most famous of these, even though it is atypical of Handel’s mature oratorio practice in several respects. For a more typical example, see this post. Handelian Oratorio was something of an invention, not quite like anything that had come before. When the demand for Italian operas in London declined during the 1730s Handel, who had spent a couple decades making a rich living composing for the stage, formed this hybrid of Italian opera, English choral singing, and the Italian practice of presenting sung religious dramas in a spare manner free of elaborate staging, as opposed to opera, which often relied on scenery, stagecraft, spectacle, and acting (even if the singers were inept at it) to impress its audiences. For more about Handel’s pivot, see this post. This breed of oratorio was Handel’s greatest legacy, and also that of English music for a couple centuries. The English did not tolerate any composers, domestic or foreign, who would not fill their orders for music composed in this manner.
The Italian oratorio to which Handel looked for an element of his model has a bit of history itself, with different manifestations exhibiting different flavors. The oldest notable examples were composed by a Roman cleric and church musician, Giacomo Carissimi, around the middle of the seventeenth century. These early oratorios featured biblical stories cast in the new monodic styles which formed the praxis of the earliest operas. Carissimi’s most colorful examples combine recitative, proto arias, and motet-like choruses into a fast-moving Greek drama of biblical vignettes. Their name, oratorio, comes from their original venue, the Oratorio of Santissimo Crocifisso (the Oratory of the Most Blessed Crucifixion), where they were presented as a sort of adult Sunday school.
It’s important to note that these works are not sacred, in that they were not written for worship. Masses and motets are sacred but oratorios, even when written on sacred stories or themes, are a secular genre.
They seem a little bare and direct to our modern ears, pampered by a few hundred years of evolution with regard to melody, harmony and orchestration. You can hear an example of this fascinating genre here, an excerpt from Carissimi Latin oratorio Jeptha:
It sounds very much like the Roman and Venetian opera of the same time. You can see this post and this one for examples of that and note their similarity.
Within the next few decades the Italian oratorios found their way to theaters, and probably more often the performing spaces within palaces of wealthy patrons, like Cardinal Ottoboni, a checkered figure who lived lavishly and almost became pope in 1740, but for the fever which precipitated his death 3 days after the conclave. Ottoboni was a notable patron of music and other arts, collecting paintings, and supporting the careers of musicians like Corelli and Handel. Before he went to London to write Italian operas, Handel wrote a vivacious Italian oratorio in Rome, The Resurrection. It is based on models by Alessandro Scarlatti, written just a little later than Carissimi. Scarlatti’s operas are the most important link between the archaic-sounding operas of the middle 1600s and the very modern-sounding ones of the 1700s and beyond. In Scarlatti we see the crystallization of the tonal idiom and the practice of channeling monody into clearly delineated recitative and arias, the arias richly clothed in elegant and sonorous orchestral music.
While he did most of his work in operas and chamber cantatas, Scarlatti also wrote some oratorios, more or less in the same cast. The First Murder, which dramatizes the story of Cain and Abel, is an example and, again, if you did not know the story, you would find little to distinguish it from one of his operas. This is the model to which Handel looked for his Roman oratorios of the 1700s, but it was combined with the English choral tradition for his English oratorios of the 1740s and later. In other words, oratorios like Messiah are a much different animal than the early oratorios Handel wrote in Italy and their Italian models. You can hear the elegant and moving idiom that so inspired Handel in Scarlatti’s setting Cain’s farewell to Adam and Eve which follows the tragic events of the central drama:
Scarlatti’s oratorios are not as well known as his operas, and I think that is probably justified. While beautiful and dramatically moving, they are not where he made his primary innovations, but they do brilliantly reflect the light of the place he did, which was opera. And so his operas are still his best-known contributions to Western culture. His oratorios are not really distinct from his operas. But Handel’s were, and so today we know his oratorios better than his operas, even though his operas are very well done. These stories are both great examples of the fact that our historical interest tends favor innovation, which is a perpetual theme in the history of art (read more about that here).
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