classic tragedy of Hellas as the progenitor of the opera. It
can also be taken as the prototype of the Festival of the Ass, which
was celebrated as long ago as the twelfth century in France; of the
miracle plays which were performed in England at the same time; the
Commedia spiritiuale of thirteenth-century Italy and the Geistliche
Schauspiele of fourteenth-century Germany. These mummeries with their
admixture of church song, pointed the way as media of edification to
the dramatic representations of Biblical scenes which Saint Philip Neri
used to attract audiences to hear his sermons in the Church of St. Mary
in Vallicella, in Rome, and the sacred musical dramas came to be called
oratorios. While the camerata were seeking to revive the classic drama
in Florence, Carissimi was experimenting with sacred material in Rome,
and his epoch-making allegory, "La Rappresentazione dell' Anima e del
Corpo," was brought out, almost simultaneously with Peri's "Euridice,"
in 1600. Putting off the fetters of plainsong, music became beautiful
for its own sake, and as an agent of dramatic expression. His
excursions into Biblical story were followed for a century or more by
the authors of sacra azione, written to take the place of secular
operas in Lent. The stories of Jephtha and his daughter, Hezekiah,
Belshazzar, Abraham and Isaac, Jonah, Job, the Judgment of Solomon, and
the Last Judgment became the staple of opera composers in Italy and
Germany for more than a century. Alessandro Scarlatti, whose name looms
large in the history of opera, also composed oratorios; and Mr. E. J.
Dent, his biographer, has pointed out that "except that the operas are
in three acts and the oratorios in two, the only difference is in the
absence of professedly comic characters and of the formal statement in
which the author protests that the words fata, dio, dieta, etc., are
only scherzi poetici and imply nothing contrary to the Catholic faith."
Zeno and Metastasio wrote texts for sacred operas as well as profane,
with Tobias, Absalom, Joseph, David, Daniel, and Sisera as subjects.

Presently I shall attempt a discussion of the gigantic attempt made by
Rubinstein to enrich the stage with an art-form to which he gave a
distinctive name, but which was little else than, an inflated type of
the old sacra azione, employing the larger apparatus which modern
invention and enterprise have placed at the command of the playwright,
stage manager, and composer. I am com