Oratorio at Home

Performed during the 2023 National Arts Festival as part of SpiritFest, Oratorio at Home is the culmination of an idea that was sparked in 2020. To keep ourselves occupied, Saeculum Aureum collaborated with John Jackson in learning the final part of Handel's Messiah, to be performed whenever the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions would allow. This part is not always fully performed and posed a good challenge. This was performed as part of An Easter Celebration in 2021 and was such fun that we decided to do it again with another work. In November and December 2022, we performed Mozart's Requiem in D-Minor in the same manner and began planning for Oratorio at Home.

Oratorio is a type of musical work typically for choir, soloists and orchestra – often with a religious or biblical theme, and first developed as a distinct form in Italy in the 17th century. In England, the man who really made the oratorio popular was George Frederick Handel. He had made a name for himself writing Italian opera, but, though they liked Handel’s music, the staid and upright English audiences weren’t especially keen on this vulgar and extravagant foreign art form. So Handel turned his attention to oratorios – which were essentially operas without the vulgar and extravagant staging and costumes.   

The Victorians were very keen on music (and oratorios especially), but in the days before recorded music, one’s only option if one wanted to hear the music was to attend performances, or to do it oneself. Staging an oratorio is a major undertaking, so, even in the cities, people might not actually hear a full performance very often. Amateur music-making at home was taking off in this period, and evenings around the piano, singing through a selection of favourites would have been the musical outlet for many.

A couple of things that allowed for the broader middle-class popularity that the oratorio as a genre enjoyed during the Victorian period were the large-scale dissemination of print media and the explosion of middle-class piano ownership. Middle-class people were being afforded easier access to cheap sheet music, mostly in piano reduction form, allowing people to listen to and engage with large works on a small scale at home. In addition, advances in construction and production technology made pianos (like the one used for this concert – itself a Victorian instrument of similar construction and design to the one featured in the poster) were becoming widely available and were increasingly to be found in most middle-class homes. This programme, then, is an effort to recapture something of how those audiences before the age of recordings would have accessed these works.