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, symmetrical, heart-searching melody, is sung to-day, although it is by no means as well known as it deserves.

According to tradition, its tender, worshipful strains sung in the church of the Holy Apostles, at Rome, by the composer himself, once stayed the hand of an assassin whom jealousy had prompted to slay the “Apollo della Musica.”  So Alessandro Stradella was called, because of his great gifts as singer and composer, and his manly beauty.  A jubilant multitude surrounded him in life, and loud lamentation arose, when, at length, he fell a victim to envy and malice.  Thus the graceful legend runs.  Recent writers are trying to make us believe that the famous “Pieta Signore” was a later interpolation in “San Giovanni Battista,” and that it may be attributed to this or that composer, a century or more after the death of Stradella, in 1681.  Unless absolute proof be afforded us, let us forbear from plucking this gem from his crown.