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In this wide-r anging and challenging book, Ruth Smith claims that the words to Handel's oratorios reflect the events and ideas of their time and have far greater meaning than has hitherto been realised. She explores eighteenth-century literature, music, aesthetics, politics and religion to reveal Handel's texts as conduits for the thought and sensibility of their time. The book thus enriches our understanding of Handel, his times, and the close relationship between music and its intellectual contexts.
With this volume, Howard Smither completes his monumental History of the Oratorio. Volumes 1 and 2, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1977, treated the oratorio in the Baroque era, while Volume 3, published in 1987, explored the genre in the Classical era. Here, Smither surveys the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century oratorio, stressing the main geographic areas of oratorio composition and performance: Germany, Britain, America, and France. Continuing the approach of the previous volumes, Smither treats the oratorio in each language and geographical area by first exploring the cultural and social contexts of oratorio. He then addresses aesthetic theory and criti...
Written by an eminent scholar in a style that represents American musicological writing at its communicative best, A History of the Oratorio offers a synthesis and critical appraisal so exhaustive and reliable that the serious student of the oratorio will be compelled to look to these volumes as an indispensable source. No work on the history of the oratorio has yet appeared in the English language that is comparable in scope and treatment with Howard Smither's comprehensive four-volume work. The first part of volume 2 examines in depth the antecedents and origins of the oratorio in Protestant Germany in the seventeenth century. It includes discussions of the Lutheran Historia, sacred dramat...
History of the Oratorio: Vol. 2: the Oratorio in the Baroque Era: Protestant Germany and England
En generel og speciel beskrivelse af Händels enkelte oratorier