Full Description
The History of a Baroque Oratorio examines the internal dynamics and cultural history of Fux's La Deposizione dalla Croce as a definitive examplar of the Viennese sepolcro oratorio. With the sovereign exception of masterworks by Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi, the scholarly literature on baroque music is strikingly characterised by a tendency to assimilate individual works within broad, generic studies, rather than to recover the reception of such works as self-standing entities. This book, by contrast, affords an opportunity to consider for the first time the historical and aesthetic integrity of a single work from the tradition of the Viennese oratorio. It thereby affords a vital space in which to examine not only the tradition itself, but also the self-contained aesthetic object which derives from this tradition as a substantive whole. Written as the prelude to a fundamental evaluation of Fux's musical discourse, The History of a Baroque Oratorio is also offered as an investigation of the relationship between generic prototypes and the individual musical imagination during the High Baroque period.
Contents
Contentssources of La Deposizione dalla Croce; The libretto; The music; The structural dynamic of La Deposizione dalla Croce; Subsequent settings of Pasquini's libretto; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
