In the 18th century, the oratorio reached its zenith with works by composers such as George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach. The North German, Protestant variant developed independently from the Italian tradition. Among the most important precursors of this German Protestant oratorio are the compositions of Dietrich Buxtehude for his Lübeck Evening Music series.
The German Catholic oratorio of the 18th century has thus far been insufficiently researched, as noted in relevant works on the subject. As a musical genre, the oratorio exhibits a relatively large degree of internal variability, which can be partly explained by the respective social context.
The development of the English oratorio in the 18th and 19th centuries reveals interesting connections between the evolution of the genre and societal conditions. In the first period, the English oratorio was significantly shaped by the works of George Frideric Handel. The 'Esther' oratorio is considered the prototype, exhibiting distinctive characteristics compared to continental oratorios. The oratorio assumed the function of a substitute for opera and retained its dramatic character within the context of English theater.
In the 19th century, the English oratorio diversified into new types. The works of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy represented a significant development of Handel's oratorio. Alongside these, the Sacred Concert, modeled on Handel, and the Passion emerged as novel types of English oratorio.
The precursors of the German Protestant oratorio include responsorial Passion settings as well as historical narratives, which in the 17th century increasingly went beyond simply setting the biblical text to music and incorporated both textual and musical interludes. Dialogues and small sacred concertos, such as those by Heinrich Schütz, also played an important role in this development.
Buxtehude's contribution to the development of the oratorio consisted of performing a five-part, thematically coherent sacred composition on five Sundays a year following the afternoon sermon. The text of these works consisted of verbatim and paraphrased biblical passages, as well as sacred poems and choral verses. The musical structure clearly shows influences of the Italian oratorio.