Oratorios for Now

When you see the word oratorio, you might immediately think of Handel’s Messiah or Haydn’s The Creation, where a story is told by orchestra, vocal soloists, and choir. But many contemporary composers find this enduring format valuable in creating impactful new works, from Caroline Shaw’s The Listeners (2019) to John Adams’s El Niño (2000) and Craig Hella Johnson’s Considering Matthew Shephard (2016) to more recent works by Adolphus Hailstork, Jonathan Leshnoff, Nkeiru Okoye, Carlos Simon, and others.

“What the heck is an oratorio in the first place?,” asks Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang, who has written a new one, the wealth of nations. It’s based, in part, on the influential 1776 tract by Scottish economist Adam Smith. The New York Philharmonic, as part of its “US at 250” celebration, premiered it from March 19 to 22, with Music and Artistic Director Designate Gustavo Dudamel conducting. “This idea of ‘How are we going to divide doing things that have live music and have stories and have singers and soloists and chorus?’,” Lang says about the oratorio form. “You know, how did they divide that up in the early 17th century when they were inventing both the fields of opera and oratorio? I think then it was pretty blurry.” (The New York Philharmonic co-commissioned the wealth of nations with the Aspen Music Festival and School.)

“Oratorio emerged as a response to opera, to have the option of having this sort of entertainment during sacred periods of the liturgical year, where opera was not so much appropriate,” explains Malcolm J. Merriweather, director of the New York Philharmonic Chorus, who prepared the choir for the wealth of nations. “But I think the boundaries have widened over the years and it’s very exciting.”

Indeed, in 2019, Lang blurred the boundaries between oratorio and opera with prisoner of the state, inspired by Beethoven’s Fidelio, which was performed at the New York Philharmonic with a simple staging, placing the chorus onstage throughout, rather than the coming-and-going standard in opera. “I don’t really consider prisoner of the state to be an oratorio,” Lang explains. “It’s kind of like a hybrid piece. It’s an opera that’s meant to be staged.”

But Lang had written an oratorio before. He and fellow Bang on a Can founders Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe collaborated on a piece in 2001 called Lost Objects, which looked at memory and loss—from objects like keys and socks to aphasia, the condition that causes a loss of language. The work featured a baroque orchestra, rock and roll band, a DJ, three soloists, and chorus, and came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival in 2004, after its 2001 premiere in Dresden. “It was really when I first started thinking about what an oratorio was good for,” recalls Lang. “Of course, I had sung Messiah many times—not in a real choir, but in a community sing.”

Department of Labor

His colleague Julia Wolfe has since become something of an oratorio specialist. She began with a trio of labor-related historical works, starting with Steel Hammer, which premiered in 2009, about legendary railroad worker John Henry. Wolfe picked up a Pulitzer Prize for Anthracite Fields, in 2014, about Pennsylvania coal miners. Fire in my mouth, from 2019, focuses on the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire and the immigrant women who worked there. Wolfe has subsequently written Her Story (2022) which was inspired by the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment and looked at women’s suffrage, featuring texts from sources as diverse as Abigail Adams, Emily Dickinson, and Sojourner Truth; and unEarth (2023), about climate change, which includes a children’s chorus (singing some of their own words), along with men’s chorus, soprano soloist, and orchestra.

“It’s a really good form for me, the oratorio,” Wolfe says. “I get my message across, and people are doing the pieces. So, it feels like a very good avenue, but it is a big ask for the orchestra. Everything’s huge.”

Still, for Wolfe, it’s an ask many orchestras are happy to fulfill. Her Story, which featured the Lorelei Ensemble women’s vocal group, was commissioned by five orchestras: the Nashville Symphony, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the National Symphony Orchestra. When it was performed by the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in February 2025, shortly after President Trump took over as Kennedy Center board chair, one Abigail Adams quote in the first movement, “Foment,” got a big emotional response from the audience. Wolfe cites the line: “Abigail Adams writes, ‘Dear John, I desire you to remember the ladies and be more generous to them than your ancestors. Do not put unlimited power into the hands of husbands. All men would be tyrants if they could.’ Which is a very heavy line to sing in the Kennedy Center.”

Most recently, Wolfe’s adapted Anthracite Fields from a chamber ensemble to a full orchestra; that version was premiered by the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester this March. The new version’s co-commissioner, the Louisville Orchestra, will perform it with Music Director Teddy Abrams in January of 2027.

Both Wolfe and Lang enjoy doing historical research and adapting period texts into modern oratorios. When she was an undergrad at the University of Michigan, Wolfe studied social sciences and labor history. But she took some music classes and discovered being a composer was something she loved, too. She’s attracted to these mostly historical stories. “Why would you write a piece of music that people can read about and watch a film and read articles or whatever?,” she asks. “For me, it’s a telling of history, an emotional response to history. It touches on a different part of us, I think, when you’re singing.”

Of all her oratorios, Wolfe thinks Anthracite Fields is the most personal. Growing up in Pennsylvania, she didn’t just do historical research, she did primary research: talking to retired miners, their loved ones, and tour guides at the Anthracite Heritage Museum in Scranton, about the mostly defunct coal industry in the state. And she crafted music that takes their words and fragments them in hypnotic ways. One movement, “Flowers,” was inspired by an interview with a miner’s daughter, who talked about the gardens they all owned and lists flowers, ending poignantly with “forget-me-not.”

“I would find these little magical moments,” Wolfe explains. “I was listing the flowers in the movement “Flowers,” and the last one was forget-me-not. That’s because they’re all in the order of the number of syllables, so forget-me-not [came at the end]. Somewhere in my memory I must have been drawing on a man I’d interviewed who said, ‘forget me not,’ and so that was a really deep dive.”

Das Kapital

With the wealth of nations, David Lang’s been doing a deep dive, not just into the theories of Adam Smith, who looked at the history of trade, the dangers of economic inequality, and the famous “invisible hand,” which posits that markets will regulate themselves, but into some prominent American figures who spoke or wrote about economics, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Frederick Douglass to Eugene Debs to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The piece takes a familiar form: Lang, a self-professed “music nerd,” has used Handel’s Messiah as a template. And, like that piece, which took texts from the Old Testament and mixed them with the New Testament, Lang is using these different texts in counterpoint. “The really beautiful thing about the Handel, which made it possible to write the piece,” Lang explains, “was to remember, as in Messiah, as in all those pieces, that they are popular entertainments on really serious subjects.” And, Lang adds, Handel’s oratorios feature variety. “I originally tried to very self-consciously follow the form of Messiah, its arias, its small ensembles. There’s a lot of light music, the ensemble changes all the time, the chorus has a lot of variety in it.

“The choral music in the wealth of nations is very much taken from the Handel model,” continues Lang. “So there’s a lot of homophonic singing; they’re all singing chords together with the same rhythms. There’s a little counterpoint where they do little canons and they do a little imitation. There are a couple of moments where they’re split, the men and the women.” And, he adds, “The piece is massive. I mean, it’s definitely the biggest thing I’ve done.”

“In this piece, there are lots of—what shall we say—musical relics that harken back to Handel’s Messiah,” says Malcolm Merriweather. But, he points out that, in addition to the solos and duets from the baritone and mezzo soprano, some of the choral movements feature solos from members of the choir, “so that we can hear different voices and have a different sort of sonic soundscape, which I haven’t really seen in another oratorio.”

Climate and Sustainability

Another piece which expands the idea of oratorio and features choral singing to tell a story is Pulitzer Prize winner Ellen Reid’s Earth Between Oceans. Like Wolfe’s unEarth, Reid’s score deals with environmental threats. In it, the choir is wordless and used for color, much like Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe. This programmatic piece was co-commissioned to celebrate Gustavo Dudamel’s transition from music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic to his new role at the New York Philharmonic. Since Reid makes a home on both coasts, she chose to focus on both cities in the piece. The Los Angeles Philharmonic gave the world premiere of Earth Between Oceans in September 2025, and the New York Philharmonic will perform it at the end of April/beginning of May.

“Earth Between Oceans is written really inspired by Dudamel energy and I was considering that the whole time I was writing this work,” Reid explains. “It’s about the four elements, and each element is associated with one city.” The first two movements, “Earth” and “Air,” are inspired by New York City. “ ‘Earth’ goes from, like, winter, kind of barren land to that lushness of springtime and flowers and everybody’s in the park; that feeling of just teaming with life,” she points out. And “Air” represents “The city from the sky, from a skyscraper or from above when you’re coming in on a plane and then you kind of dip into the chaos of the city in the middle of the movement and then go back up and watch the beauty from above at the end.” That movement “is really driven by the voices versus the other movements, and the choir functions throughout as a section of the orchestra, kind of like a timbrel, another instrument family.”

The other two movements look at Los Angeles, including the harrowing third movement, “Fire.” Reid recalls, “I started writing that movement the day that the fires broke out earlier this year [2025]. It was such an uncanny moment and such a devastating, devastating moment to think about how to put any of that in the music. But it seems that everyone in LA was affected on some level.” The music is rhythmic, in rondo form, and Reid said she “wanted to explore what the choir could do with their mouths, with their breath, that’s not singing, but also make that within the story of the movement.”

In the final movement, “Water,” Reid imagines the surf of the Pacific Ocean. It begins softly and “builds and builds and builds,” she explains, and the chorus bursts out, in a musical, melodic crest.  In fact, the movement ends on “a Big C major chord, because I couldn’t end it any other way. I couldn’t make the audience not have anything less positive.”

“One of the things that I love about this piece is how she trusts the choir with more responsibility as far as their technical demands,” says New York Philharmonic Chorus Director Malcolm Merriweather. “Ellen utilizes the choir in a soloistic way. There are actually three very high solo soprano roles that are very virtuosic and very, very important to the texture.” He adds, “I would put it in the oratorio genre because it has voices, it is programmatic, it is a concert piece.”

Reid certainly wants the audience to go on a journey with Earth Between Oceans. So, does she think it’s an oratorio? Her response harkens back to David Lang’s initial question. “A story can be anything, each of the movements goes on a journey, and it uses the voice,” she says. “I think it’s like at the far end, but what is a story? What is an oratorio, even? The boundaries around it are fuzzy.”