“The Oratorio”: the oratorio that changed New York

What secrets does the old Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York hide? Martin Scorsese invests him not as a director, but as the narrator of the documentary The Oratorio written and directed by Alex Bayer, Jonathan Mann and Mary Anne Rothberg.

The goal is to take us back to 1826, when New York was, as Scorsese tells us, lagging behind Philadelphia and Boston. A prominent figure of the 17th century^e century, the Venetian Mozart librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte fled his creditors in 1805 to New York, where he died in 1838. “Martin Scorsese tells the story of an 1826 performance that forever changed the American cultural landscape in bringing Italian opera to New York, ”the press release tells us. The story is fascinating and the anecdotal musical reconstruction of an oratorio from music by Cimarosa, Zingarelli, Haydn, Händel and Arne remains sympathetic.

But, in fact, it was the arrival in the United States in 1825 of the touring company of tenor Manuel Garcia that caused the rage and the real event of 1826, these were the nine performances of Don Giovanni ridden by Garcia and Da Ponte. These beginnings of opera in New York are narrated in chapter 33 of the book A certain Da Ponte of Aleramo Lanapoppi. As for the sacred works of the eighteenth century^e, they had been served since 1823 by the New York Choral Society. This does not detract from the merits of this warm, just a little pretentious documentary, shortened from 66 to 55 minutes for television purposes.

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