Complexities of agreement:

...It is a musical drama...

...Oratorios were originally dramatic musical entertainments in two parts divided by a sermon...

...Granted there are differences of perception and composition even in the stuff of the musical drama...

...Well, perhaps not just those themes but ones very similar...

...For three hours and more a rapt audience listened to the alternating recitative, choral renditions, arias, and orchestral music...

...There were agreements there, too - unwritten, unsaid - about "black tie" dressing, and the order decreed for the putting of food on the table, the order called courses...

...After dinner the official's wife was prevailed on to sing...

...At any rate the musical agreements held...

...that the handsome woman in black trousers and glittering sequin jacket was Lichas, a young herald - and so on...

...that the mature woman of commanding presence and clad in a beautiful gold-bordered sari-like dress was an innocent young princess and his captive...

...Abigail McCarthy Abigail McCarthy...

...I remember vividly my first meeting with a now very senior Soviet official...

...It was more or less a matter of agreement that oratorios were for the ear alone, operas for eye and ear...

...They can be conscious and the agreement of a sophisticated audience to the adaptation of an old device to new directions in music - such as Handel's use of the "secular oratorio" - a contradiction in terms as the critics point out...

...Everything depends on our believing in the possibility, and finding, and building on the agreements which do exist...

...These agreements are sometimes unconscious and can be as simple as the first agreement that blowing on a hollow reed could be a pleasant accompaniment to the chant of a lonely shepherd communing with the spirits of stream and forest...

...He would have gleaned from the program that the tall bald man in boots and dinner clothes was a mighty warrior home from the wars...

...The Treaty of Paris after the Revolution - the treaty which formally gave our nation life in the eyes of other nations - took almost five years to negotiate and occupied the full energies of our best minds for that time - Franklin, Adams, Jay, and others...

...The songs were pleasant and we enjoyed them...

...Might not he, as he listened and watched and observed our acceptance - no, our enthusiastic approval - of all this, think that there was something he had missed, something he did not understand...

...that the equally mature black man with the tenor voice was his son...

...And yet were some of the presuppositions behind those lyrics really more strange than those behind "I've Been Working on the Railroad" "Frankie and Johnny" when you come to think of it...

...The agreement has lasted from Handel's time to our own - over two hundred years...

...It occurred to me, as I enjoyed the transcendent compromise which is Hercules that if we and the Russians can and do share, in just this one aspect of our culture, so many unwritten and unsaid agreements, we must be knit together in many other ways...

...Philip Neri as a means of enticing the fractious and worldly youths of Rome to church...

...The music superseded the words...

...He would have seen six people standing at lecterns taking turns singing words apparently in response to each other but directed to the audience...

...I can see her now - fresh-faced, pretty, plumpish - standing in the curve of the grand piano and singing in a clear, true voice...

...And that was a Treaty between adversaries with a common history and ties of pride and blood...

...The curious agreements of the musical drama moved from country to country, from Italy to the German states, from the German states to England, and the acceptances of the conventions grew until they now spread throughout the world - all the way around from the tip of Alaska on one side of the Bering Strait to the tip of Siberia on the other...

...The worker in the field is happy that he can grow grain for the fatherland";' "The girl and the boy are in love but they give each other up so that he can go help a collective make its quota...

...When the oratorio was brought from the church to the stage the name was retained even when the subject matter was no longer religious...

...As we try to bridge the chasm between ourselves and the Soviet Union in order to reach an arms agreement we can take heart in the fact that underlying the one great difference there is a network of tiny filament-like agreement on things which combine the seemingly contradictory and the absurd in such a way as to produce the transcendent music...

...The oratorio, for example, is thought to have been invented by St...

...The stranger from another world might well be confounded...

...He could well be astounded to know that these singers and players are content to devote their lives to the practice and disciplines which enabled them to be part of this performance and the recipients of our applause...

...Each song was preceded with a grave precis of the content...

...Can we not hope that the same might be true of peace...

...And yet an oratorio like Hercules in which the second act with the highly tense and passionate exchange between the hero and his jealous wife is the stuff of drama could just as well be staged like an opera...

...The history of any art in any culture is made up of myriad agreements on the basis of which that art advances or is held back...

...And behind them still another group of singers who seemed given to sententious, if melodious, comment on the interchange of the first group...

...What would he have seen and heard...

...It must have been thirty years ago at a small formal dinner...

...To add to his confusion he would see behind these singers a group of men, and a few women, industriously and vigorously plucking, hitting, sawing at, blowing on, and fingering a variety of contrivances, thus causing them to emit sounds which - depending on the conventions of his own culture - he might or might not find pleasing...

...Handel's almost forgotten Hercules was revived by the Handel Festival orchestra for a premiere at the Kennedy Center...

...Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy BRIDGING THE CHASM DELICATE FILAMENTS OF U.S.-USSR AGREEMENT IT WAS a glorious evening but in the midst of it I was struck with the thought that the visitor from outer space or even the visitor from another culture might well wonder what it was all about...

...At the end, unwearied, they rose cheering and applauding and called the conductor, singers, and players back again and again...

...Negotiation is also an art and is based on a much shorter history and far fewer consensual agreements than is music...

...The subject matter was, of course, religious, but the dances and songs were based on the popular entertainment of the day...