Beethoven’s only oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives received its premi?re on 8 April 1803, the Tuesday of the Holy Week in that year, at the Theater an der Wien. Composed to the text of Franz Xaver Huber, the oratorio tells the beginning of Jesus’s passion, his fear of death during the night spent in the Garden of Gethsemane and his capture. It consists of six main parts:

1. orchestral introduction and Jesus’s monumental recitative and aria;

2. recitative and virtuoso coloratura soprano aria of Seraph (who only appears in the Gospel of Luke), which is joined by the choir;  3. recitative and duet of Jesus and Seraph; 4. Jesus’s recitative and the soldier’s march (chorus);

5. capture of Jesus (recitative and chorus); recitative and trio (Peter (bass), Jesus and Seraph), final chorus with tenor solo.
Beethoven’s Christ is a dramatically conceived oratorio, highlighting Jesus’s human nature, fears and emotional turmoil. Typically, the composer wrote Jesus’s part for tenor solo, and the Saviour enters at the start of the work in a recitative and an aria almost like an operatic hero. Jesus’s capture in the fifth part is depicted as a complex dramatic series of events, condensed in the music of the two choirs: the brute force of the soldiers and the paralysed, fearful disciples. The dramatic character is no accident, since Beethoven had in fact signed a contract with the Theater an der Wien for composing an opera. Because he was getting on slowly with this project, he instead composed an oratorio of a solitary, afflicted man, which many critics believe to be a preliminary to Fidelio. Another parallel with Christ’s solitude and anguish in the oratorio presents itself in the famous Heiligenstadt Testament which the solitary Beethoven, facing the dread of complete deafness, had composed in October 1802.