oratorio

The Pulitzer that Marsalis won in 1997 for his two-and-a-half-hour jazz oratorio, “Blood on the Fields,” was historic: since the jury started honoring music in 1943, they’d never recognized jazz, only classical composers.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 24, 2026

“Messiah,” an Easter oratorio beloved for Christmas, suggests Christ’s meaning rather than clearly tracing his life.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 11, 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

An opera disguised as an oratorio to get around the church’s ban on profane opera, the impolitic work about past and present is formed as the conflict between extravagance and sanctity.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 1, 2025

Indeed, against the backdrop of scientific endeavour and machine-like precision there was a very human emotion that enriched every note of Handel’s solo arias in opera and oratorio: compassion.

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

It joins Wolfe’s body of large-scale, historically minded works that lean toward oratorios — what the National Public Radio journalist Tom Huizenga recently called, to Wolfe’s delight, “docu-torios.”

From New York Times ● Sep. 16, 2022

Their next recording, scheduled for release this fall, is a lineup of numbers from Handel oratorios titled “Eternal Heaven.”

From New York Times ● Aug. 12, 2022

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