Oratorios – Sheet Music & Scores

Looking for a wide selection of Oratorios from various periods of music history, then you’ve come to the right place! Browse our sheet music and scores, and explore all the wonderfully dramatic sacred works on offer from Stretta Music today!

From the Oratories to Rock Oratorios

In 1700, Pope Clement IX banned the latest wave of explicit and violent opera in Rome for five whole years. But not even his own members of the Roman Curia wanted to forego the dramatic musical pleasures, so they gave established opera composers such as Alessandro Scarlatti and Antonio Caldara theatrical spiritual texts to set to music. These new works were performed in the oratories, the prayer rooms of monasteries, without any staging or set. This is how a genre got its name, the oratorio, and it was in essence, musically identical to opera.

One of the most famous arias by Georg Frideric Handel, his Lascia ch’io pianga which is well known from his hugely popular opera Rinaldo, originally comes from his first oratorio “Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno”.

The genre became just as successful as opera, and as opera moved into the 20th & 21st centuries with modern rock operas like Tommy by The Who, the oratorio has also evolved, with works such as “Luther” by Dieter Falk.

Some selected Oratorios

• Bach’s St. Matthew Passion – Sheet Music
• Handel’s Messiah – Sheet Music
• Haydn’s Creation – Sheet Music
• Mendelssohn’s Elijah – Sheet Music
• Liszt’s Christus – Sheet Music
• Gabriel’s Emmaus – Sheet Music