Biblical Families in Music : Conflict and Heterodoxy in Oratorios, 1670-1770.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kendrick, Robert L.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (307 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

List of Music Examples and Tables

Note on the Text

ONE Families and Representations

TWO Fratricide, Sin, and Despair

THREE Obedience and Division

FOUR Fathers, Sons, and Waiting Mothers

FIVE Sacrificing Daughters

SIX Fears, Returns, Blindness

SEVEN Grieving Spouses, Fierce Motherhood

EIGHT Connections

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Metastasio/ Caldara, Opening of Lamorte d'Abel (Vienna, 1732)

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780226838144

OCLC:

1506097990