A History of the Oratorio. Vol. 4, The Oratorio in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (review)

A History of the Oratorio. Vol. 4, The Oratorio in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. By Howard E. Smither. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. [xxiv, 829 p. ISBN 0-8078-2511-5. $80.]

With this volume, Howard E. Smither brings to a triumphant conclusion his survey of the oratorio, a project that he began in the early 1960s and that led first to the publication of the two substantial volumes of The Oratorio in the Baroque Era in 1977, followed by The Oratorio in the Classic Era in 1987. The breadth and scope of this career-long endeavor is unparalleled in modern musicology, and pressures these days on scholars on both sides of the Atlantic to keep up a regular and frequent flow of publications make it extremely unlikely that it will be rivaled in the foreseeable future.

"Oratorio" is a notoriously slippery term, applied at different times to works as diverse as Giacomo Carissimi's Jephtha in the seventeenth century, the English oratorios of George Frideric Handel in the eighteenth, Felix Mendelssohn's Elijah and Charles Gounod's Redemption in the nineteenth, and William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast and Michael Tippett's The Mask of Time in the twentieth. In addition, the term has been used at times to mean a concert of oratorio excerpts and a music festival consisting of oratorio performances and other concerts. In fact, there is no one definition that does not immediately need qualifying with a host of exceptions. In the context of a discussion of how the term was understood in nineteenth-century Germany, Smither gives a list of the most popular works described as oratorios in contemporaneous press advertisements and reviews. It makes interesting reading. Its inclusion of works such as Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew Passion, Robert Schumann's Das Paradies und der Peri, and Handel's Alexander's Feast alongside the expected Messiah, Creation, and Elijah shows quite clearly what a very broad meaning, or set of meanings, the term had at the time. All these works are large-scale compositions for chorus, soloists, and orchestra, but not all are sacred (often considered an essential defining characteristic of an oratorio), and there is a mixture of the dramatic and the nondramatic. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising to find that Smither defines his subject broadly; he is more concerned with inclusiveness than the exclusion of works that somehow fail to meet the conditions of some fairly arbitrary definition. As a result, inquiring readers can be confident that if a work falls even loosely and problematically into the category of oratorio, it is likely to be discussed or at least mentioned here.

Smither states in his preface that his aim in this volume, as in its predecessors, is "to report on the present state of knowledge in the field of oratorio history. As a synthesis of thought represented in specialized studies as well as an investigation of primary sources, the volume is intended to serve as a springboard for further research" (p. xix). This rather matter-of-fact formulation fails to convey the achievement of the volume, which is the result of an enormous amount of reading in both primary and secondary sources and the study of a prodigious number of oratorio scores, many of them rarely, if ever, performed today.

As in earlier volumes, Smither organizes his material on a country-by-country basis. Eleven of the thirteen chapters are devoted to the "long" nineteenth century, going up to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Within this period, the treatment of each country comprises three chapters or large sections: one on terminology and social and cultural context; one on aesthetic theory and criticism, the libretto, and the music; and one containing more detailed examinations of a small number of case studies. The German oratorio (i.e., oratorios in German) receives the most attention (246 pages), followed by the oratorio in Britain...