oratorio

And it is fascinating to observe that Handel’s oratorio and Melville’s novel, two works of immense popularity that are among the greatest works of their genres, both function on the outskirts of narrative.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 11, 2026

Harry Bicket and the English Concert presented the composer’s highly theatrical but little-known 1745 oratorio in an uneven but frequently arresting performance.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 18, 2026

The composer struts in during a rehearsal, uncorks an embarrassingly stagey speech about his life and views, and forbids Guthrie from putting his modern spin on the oratorio.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 24, 2025

Phil artist collaborator, began a three-year Handel festival with a dazzlingly sung and played performance of the oratorio “Triumph of Time and Disillusion.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 10, 2025

Beethoven, inspired by study of and admiration for Handel and Bach, merely had the idea of appending to a symphony something you might expect in an oratorio.

From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall

George Frideric Handel wrote some 42 operas across his career — his unstaged oratorios such as “Messiah” constitute a separate category — but Seattle Opera has presented only three of these to date.

From Seattle Times ● Sep. 6, 2023

The texts that Wolfe uses in “unEarth” have a sense of literary adventure familiar from her earlier oratorios.

From New York Times ● May 31, 2023

Generally sacred in subject, not meant to be staged, and organized as unruffled parades of tableaus more than sustained plots, these oratorios were at the time viewed as more populist than opera.

From New York Times ● Mar. 13, 2023

But common to both tellings, as well as the dozens of operas, oratorios, plays and films since derived from the myth of Iphigenia, is that she’s not the one who gets to tell the story.

From Washington Post ● Dec. 2, 2021

A Child of Our Time intersperses quasi-operatic narrative passages with arrangements of African-American spirituals, as Bach had done with Lutheran hymn-chorales in his oratorios on the passion and crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall