Overview

Examines how stories of biblical families were reconfigured and projected in the genre of the oratorio, a form of sacred opera, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Based to a great extent on the Old Testament, the largely Catholic musical-dramatic genre was popular in Italy, Austria, and southern Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Biblical Families in Music reveals how difficult stories of fratricide, child sacrifice, death, and forbidden love performed a didactic function in oratorios, teaching early modern audiences about piety and the rules of proper family life. In the century after 1670, the heavily adapted tales of Abraham and Isaac, Cain and Abel, and the Egyptian slave Hagar and her son Ishmael were set to music by figures such as Alessandro Scarlatti and Antonio Sacchini and performed during Lent in churches and other sacred spaces for an audience of court nobility, clergy, and the urban patriciate. By examining the resonance of Catholic oratorios within predominantly upper-class social realities, the book broadens our cultural understanding of the early modern European family and underscores the centrality of family and familial relation to social position, devotional taste, and identity.

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9780226836041

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Reviews

“Kendrick’s masterfully written book sheds new light on familiar oratorios and it introduces us to many works that have been neglected by scholarship. Kendrick takes us on a fascinating journey through family relationships, from grieving spouses to fratricide and sacrificing daughters. A must-read for everybody interested in baroque music but also for cultural historians and theologians.” * Markus Rathey, Yale University * “A penetrating examination of a vast, largely unfamiliar repertory, as created and recreated, performed and revived from Rome to Bologna to Vienna, by composers from Giacomo Carissimi to Alessandro Scarlatti to Franz Joseph Haydn. Kendrick elucidates how librettists, composers, patrons, and audiences expressed, reinterpreted, and responded to family matters and family values in some of the most familiar biblical narratives: Cain and Abel, Hagar and Ishmael, Abraham and Isaac, Jephthe and his daughter, and others. His detailed analyses among the myriad changing treatments of these stories suggests how familiar scriptural themes might change dramatically, depending on diverse familial, devotional, and political priorities. Kendrick’s engaging descriptions of unfamiliar dramas might even tempt more ambitious and adventurous performers to search out and revive works well worth a rehearing.” * Craig Monson, Washington University in St. Louis * “Though they played important social, musical, and religious roles in their own time, Catholic oratorios from Vienna and Italy have all but disappeared from the historiography of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, where they have been overshadowed by the English and German Protestant traditions. Kendrick provides a vital corrective, looking closely at a multitude of libretti and scores and illuminating their theology, structure, style, and connection to social circumstances. Biblical Families in Music stands to make a substantial contribution to our understanding not just of the oratorio but also of Italian and Italianate musical culture more broadly.” * Richard Will, University of Virginia *

Author Information

Robert L. Kendrick is professor emeritus of music at the University of Chicago. His recent books include Singing Jeremiah: Music and Meaning in Holy Week and Fruits of the Cross: Passiontide Music Theater in Habsburg Vienna.

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