The Department of Music is pleased to share the release of Biblical Families in Music: Conflict and Heterodoxy in Oratorios, 1670–1770, the latest book by Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, Robert L. Kendrick.
In Biblical Families in Music, Kendrick examines how stories of biblical families were reconfigured and projected in the genre of the oratorio, a form of sacred opera, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Based to a great extent on the Old Testament, the largely Catholic musical-dramatic genre was popular in Italy, Austria, and southern Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Biblical Families in Music reveals how difficult stories of fratricide, child sacrifice, death, and forbidden love performed a didactic function in oratorios, teaching early modern audiences about piety and the rules of proper family life.
In the century after 1670, the heavily adapted tales of Abraham and Isaac, Cain and Abel, and the Egyptian slave Hagar and her son Ishmael were set to music by figures such as Alessandro Scarlatti and Antonio Sacchini and performed during Lent in churches and other sacred spaces for an audience of court nobility, clergy, and the urban patriciate. By examining the resonance of Catholic oratorios within predominantly upper-class social realities, the book broadens our cultural understanding of the early modern European family and underscores the centrality of family and familial relation to social position, devotional taste, and identity.
Biblical Families in Music can be purchased through The University of Chicago Press.
Reviews of Biblical Families in Music
"Kendrick's masterfully written book sheds new light on familiar oratorios and it introduces us to many works that have been neglected by scholarship. Kendrick takes us on a fascinating journey through family relationships, from grieving spouses to fratricide and sacrificing daughters. A must-read for everybody interested in baroque music but also for cultural historians and theologians." —Markus Rathey, Yale University
"A penetrating examination of a vast, largely unfamiliar repertory, as created and recreated, performed and revived from Rome to Bologna to Vienna, by composers from Giacomo Carissimi to Alessandro Scarlatti to Franz Joseph Haydn. Kendrick elucidates how librettists, composers, patrons, and audiences expressed, reinterpreted, and responded to family matters and family values in some of the most familiar biblical narratives: Cain and Abel, Hagar and Ishmael, Abraham and Isaac, Jephthe and his daughter, and others. His detailed analyses among the myriad changing treatments of these stories suggests how familiar scriptural themes might change dramatically, depending on diverse familial, devotional, and political priorities. Kendrick's engaging descriptions of unfamiliar dramas might even tempt more ambitious and adventurous performers to search out and revive works well worth a rehearing." —Craig Monson, Washington University in St. Louis
"Though they played important social, musical, and religious roles in their own time, Catholic oratorios from Vienna and Italy have all but disappeared from the historiography of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, where they have been overshadowed by the English and German Protestant traditions. Kendrick provides a vital corrective, looking closely at a multitude of libretti and scores and illuminating their theology, structure, style, and connection to social circumstances. Biblical Families in Music stands to make a substantial contribution to our understanding not just of the oratorio but also of Italian and Italianate musical culture more broadly." —Richard Will, University of Virginia
About Robert L. Kendrick
Robert L. Kendrick works in early modern music and culture, with additional interests in Latin America, historical anthropology, traditional Mediterranean polyphony, laments, and the visual arts. His most recent book is Biblical Families in Music: Conflict and Heterodoxy in Oratorios, 1670-1770 (University of Chicago Press, 2025). In 2006, he won a Graduate Teaching Award. Forthcoming work includes an edition of Renaissance Lamentations and issues in Italian madrigals. Other books include The Sound of Milan, 1580-1650 (2002) and Celestial Sirens (1996) and he has edited the motets of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani for A-R Editions (1998). He has advised or worked with early music performers, including Chicago’s Newberry Consort, Bologna’s Cappella Artemisia, and Boston’s La Donna Musicale. At Chicago he is term faculty for the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and affiliated with the Center for Gender Studies, and the Center for Latin American Studies. A member of Milan’s Accademia Ambrosiana, Kendrick received his PhD (musicology) and MA (ethnomusicology) from New York University, after a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, and he is a former Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. In 2018 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2019 a Knight of the Italian Republic (Class VI). A former autoworker and union activist, he is keenly supportive of graduate-student, adjunct, and contingent-faculty labor in academia.