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

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. 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.. 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. 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. 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