The History of A Baroque Oratorio: Johann Joseph Fux's La Deposizione dalla Croce di Gesu Cristo, Salvator Nostro (1728)

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: The Passion Oratorio in Vienna, 1700-1740; Provenance and sources 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.