Opera v. Oratorio
Post categories: Suzanne Aspden
| 02:02 UK time, Wednesday, 21 January 2009
'Why did Handel make the move from opera to oratorio?', 'kleines_c' and others wonder. This is one of the big questions in Handel's career: doctoral dissertations and books have been written on it, so a blog entry is only going to scratch the surface...
Not surprisingly, there are several answers, to do with patronage and money, cultural and national politics, and musical style. It seems that the audience for opera became fickle in the 1730s - they wanted opera, and they didn't, which meant that Handel's financial situation was frequently precarious.
Often, it seems, the aristocracy wanted to dictate the terms, and Handel was increasingly unhappy with that. He had seen the appetite for sung works in English - not just with (1728), but also with English opera experiments in the early 1730s. He also saw how well audiences liked the performance of his oratorio, , put on in a tavern(!) by the Master of the Children of the in 1732. A subsequent unauthorised production forced Handel to mount his own, expanded version of the work, and so his English oratorio career was born. For the rest of the 1730s, however, Handel persisted with opera, eventually intermixing it with oratorio, which he could perform during the run-up to Easter. So, he was evidently still attracted to the theatrical aspects of opera - although his oratorios were often highly dramatic, they weren't staged as such (in large part, because of religious objections).
What did he see in oratorio, then? Undoubtedly, the prospect of independence from the aristocracy, and the opportunity to form a wider audience base: after the success of in 1736, Handel apparently told an acquaintance that he was planning to write 'a New thing soon fitt for the Tast ... of the Wealthy Citizens'. 'Citizens' in this period meant 'men of the , who were traditionally puritan in spirit, and hostile to opera and the theatre - so, it seems Handel was looking to build a new market. And how better to appeal to that market than through Biblical stories, which tapped into the common sermonising habit of drawing parallels between Old-Testament Israel and modern Britain? In oratorio, Handel could tell allegorical stories about British life that everyone (not just classically educated aristocrats) would have recognised and enjoyed.
Musically, too, being able to work with malleable English singers, rather than tyrannical Italian stars, clearly allowed Handel greater flexibility, although the limitations of some of his singers must also have carried frustrations...
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