Biblical Families in Music: Conflict and Heterodoxy in Oratorios, 1670–1770
University of Chicago Press, 2025
eISBN: 978-0-226-83814-4 | Cloth: 978-0-226-83604-1
Library of Congress Classification ML3220.K45 2025
Dewey Decimal Classification 782.23094
eISBN: 978-0-226-83814-4 | Cloth: 978-0-226-83604-1
Library of Congress Classification ML3220.K45 2025
Dewey Decimal Classification 782.23094
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
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, or the Egyptian slave Hagar and her son Ishmael, were put 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 looking at 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.
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, or the Egyptian slave Hagar and her son Ishmael, were put 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 looking at 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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