ansitoriness of earthly affairs by flinging away the gorgeous
decorations they had worn when they appeared on the stage, and
displaying their utter poverty and wretchedness in the face of death
and dissolution. The representation ended with a ballet, danced
"sedately and reverently" to music by the chorus.

Some idea of the oratorio in its infancy may be gained from this
description. Except that the subject had a religious bearing, it
differed little from the opera. With Giacomo Carissimi, director of
music at San Apollinare, Rome, from 1628 until his death, in 1674, the
paths of the two diverged. He laid down lines that have been followed in
the oratorio ever since. Dancing and acting were excluded by him, and
the role of narrator introduced. His broad, simple treatment of chords
enhanced the purity and beauty of everything he wrote, and in his hand
recitative gained character, grace and musical expressiveness. Only a
small portion of his epoch-making work has been preserved, but quite
enough to make clear his title "Father of Oratorio and Cantata."

His pupil, Alessandro Scarlatti, founder of the Neapolitan school and
practically the musical dictator of Naples, from 1694 to 1725, was an
incredibly prolific composer in almost every known species of musical
form. His many improvements in vocal and instrumental music operated
greatly to the advantage of the oratorio. Possessing feeling for
orchestration to an unusual degree for his time, he grouped musical
instruments of different timbres with marked boldness and skill, and was
the first specially to orchestrate recitative. His genius and knowledge
enabled him to restore counterpoint to its rightful place, and his
oratorios show great gain in elasticity and form.

Another Alessandro, he who bore the surname Stradella and was the hero
of Flotow's opera of that name, has figured so freely in romance that it
is not easy to separate truth from fiction in accounts of his life. Dr.
Parry says of him that he had a remarkable instinct for choral effects,
even piling progressions into a climax, that his solo music aims at
definiteness of structure, that, in 1676, he used a double orchestra
whose principal instruments were violins, and that his oratorios were
specially significant, as he cultivated all the resources of that form
of art. His most celebrated composition is an oratorio, "San Giovanni
Battista," and one of the airs attached to it "Pieta Signore," a
beautiful, symmet