Christus (Liszt)

Christus (S.3, composed 1862-1866) is an oratorio by the Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt. The oratorio takes the traditional plot of Jesus Christ's life from his birth to his passion and resurrection, using Bible texts, and is thus somewhat reminiscent of another famous religious work, Messiah by George Frideric Handel.

When Liszt, after his prolific Weimar years, moved to Rome in 1861, the majority of his works for the next ten years would be religious music for choir. The composition of his most famous oratorio, Christus, occupied Liszt from 1862 to 1866, with shorter or longer pauses. He finished the score by the end of September 1866, but he wished to make some revisions and corrections, and therefore the work was not completed until the December of that year. 'Christus' was published in 1872 and premiered in the Protestant church at Weimar on 29 May 1873.

The oratorio is of around three hours in duration and requires significant orchestral and vocal forces, which makes it rather a rarity in concert halls of today, and despite this most of the work is of almost chamber proportions and quite personal in mood. For the text Liszt uses the Bible, the Catholic liturgy and some ancient Latin hymns; in that sense he did not want to experiment. It is of note that the role of the orchestra in the oratorio is really more significant than that of the chorus, the orchestra being the moving force of growth and development (like in Wagner's operas). This is unlike earlier, baroque and classical oratorios, where the chorus prevails, and the orchestra simply acts as a commentary, providing harmonic texture. The oratorio lacks recitative sections, although the score is periodically annotated with Latin passages as though explaining what the music is depicting, or the underlying emotional or religious relevance. It is unclear whether or not these passages are meant to be spoken by a narrator during the music. Some performances have done this to great effect, although the majority omit them.

The work consists of three parts:

The movements are so few (unlike 'Messiah') because of their length and structural span, in which the only exception is the 'O filii et filiae' from the Part Three, lasting merely two minutes. In his earlier works Liszt had often used the idea of musical motifs and themes undergoing transformations and modifications in order to achieve greater coherence and inter-connection: in this respect 'Christus' is no exception. Also, many motifs from Gregorian chants have been recognised, which greatly add to the unity of the work. The most obvious motif underpinning the entire oratorio is that of the simple perfect fifth interval, heard as the opening of the plainchant for Advent of the Rorate coeli at the very beginning of the oratorio, occurring in the majority of movements in some way, sometimes as a melodic gesture, sometimes with harmonic implications, and ending up as the main subject for the great fugue which closes the whole oratorio.

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