The very name of Handel's first English oratorio, Esther, and the facts of its primary purpose as a masque and the origin of its libretto in Racine, show the transition from the stage to the Church; and, on the other hand, Haman's lamentation on his downfall is scandalously adapted from the most sacred part of the Brockes Passion.
We may roughly distinguish three main types of Handelian oratorio, not always maintained singly in whole works, but always available as methods. First, there is the operatic method, in which the arias and recitatives are the utterances of characters in the story, while the chorus is a crowd of Israelites, Babylonians or Romans (e.g., Athalia, Belshazzar, Saul, etc.). The second method retains the dramatic roles both in solos and in choruses, but (as, for instance, in "Envy, eldest born of Hell," in Saul) also uses the chorus as the voice of universal Christendom. Handel's audience demanded plenty of arias, most of which are accounted for by futile, when not apocryphal, love affairs. The haughty Merab and the gentle Michal are characterized with fatal ease, and make parts of Saul almost as impossible as most of Susannah. The third Handelian method is a series of choruses and numbers on a subject altogether beyond the scope of drama, as, for instance, the greater part of Solomon and, in the case of The Messiah and Israel in Egypt, treated entirely in the words of Scripture, and those not in narrative but in prophecy and psalm.
After Bach and Handel, oratorio fell upon evil days. The rise of the sonata style, which brought life to opera, was bad for oratorio; since not only did it accentuate the fashionable dislike of that polyphony which is essential even to mere euphony in choral writing, but its dramatic power became more and more disturbing to the epic treatment that oratorio naturally demands.
Philip Emanuel Bach's oratorios, though cloying in their soft ness and sweetness, achieved a true balance of style in the earlier days of the conflict; indeed, a judicious selection from Die I sraeliten in W iiste ( i 769) would perhaps bear revival almost as well as Haydn's Tobias The C;Tation (Die Schopfung) and The Seasons (Die Jahres zeiten) will always convey to unspoilt music-lovers the profound message of the veteran Haydn, who could not help "worshipping God with a cheerful heart." This spirit was well known to Bach, the composer of "Mein glaiibiges Herze," and it is compatible with the romantic sound-pictures and Handelian sublimity of the opening Representation of Chaos and the great chord of C major at the words "and there was light." The childlike gaiety of much
of the rest ought not to blind us to its fundamental greatness, which brings the naïvely realistic birds and beasts of The Creation into line with even the wine-chorus in the mainly secular Seasons, and removes Haydn from the influence of the vile taste which henceforth pervaded oratorios, until Mendelssohn effected a par tial improvement. Haydn strenuously resisted the persuasion to undertake The Seasons which had a close connection with Thom son's poem, as The Creation had a distant connection with Para dise Lost. He thought the whole scheme "Philistine" (his own word) and, both before he yielded to persuasion and after he had finished the work, said all the hard things about it that have ever been said since.
Roman Catholic oratorio was under the disadvantage that it was not permitted to take Biblical texts except in the Latin lan guage. Jomelli's Passione for once had the benefit of a meditative text with some distinction of style ; and in closing the first part with a dominant seventh on the word "pensaci" he achieved a stroke of genius which at the present day would still startle the listener and leave his mind in the desired frame of meditative astonishment.
But words fail to characterize the libretto of Beethoven's un fortunate Christus am Oelberge (c. i800). The texts of Lutheran church-music had often been grotesque and even disgusting ; but their barbarity was pathetic in comparison with the sleek vul garity of a libretto in which not only is the agony of the garden of Gethsemane represented by an aria (as in Handel's lamentation of Haman), but Christ sings a brilliant duet with the minister ing angel. In after years Beethoven had not a good word for this work, which, nevertheless, contains some beautiful music ex quisitely scored. And justice demands praise for the idea of mak ing a Hallelujah chorus conclude the work as soon as the be trayal of Christ has been accomplished, thus compensating for the irreverent opening by avoiding all temptation to treat the rest of the passion-story with the same crassness. A well-meant effort was made to provide the Mount of Olives with an inoffensive subject in English, but the stupidity of Engedi: or David in the Wilderness passes belief.