Giacomo Carissimi, from 1628 to the time of his death choir-master of the _Appolinare_ Church in Rome, was already renowned as a teacher and composer in 1650. It was in this year that Athanasius Kirchner, in his celebrated _Musurgia universalis_, a quaint mixture of scientific knowledge and childish hearsay, introduced Carissimi, with an analysis of his _Jephta_, to a wider circle as the perfect oratorio-composer. Nor is it without reason that Carissimi has been termed the Handel of the seventeenth century. His oratorios _Jonas_, _Jephta_, _Job_, _Diluvium universalis_, etc., he called _historie_, and the Biblical text on which they were founded was liberally interspersed with poetic supplementary matter to allow for the introduction of little arias and martial, elegiac or popular incidental choruses. The text was still Latin, though after Carissimi’s time the _oratorio volgare_, so called because it was sung in Italian and was thus distinguished from the Latin oratorio, supplanted the latter in popular favor. _Jephta_ is, perhaps, Carissimi’s most characteristic work. It employs a Biblical subject, like all his other works of the kind, for Carissimi adhered strictly to this conception of oratorio, though many of his contemporaries shaped their cantatas and oratorios around the life of some saint. In _Jephta_, too, as in all the composer’s oratorios, the musical stress is laid on the choruses. These are not written in the style of the polyphonic madrigal, but in a simple chordal setting whose rhythm is conditioned by the word-accents. The fugue is absent, imitation and canon are suggested only in the duets. In nearly all cases the chorus serves to develop the dramatic idea. In the oratorio of the time, chorus is, in general, opposed to chorus, with the occasional relief of solo voices. Yet Carissimi secures considerable movement and variety by dividing more extended portions of his text into short sections, first sung by one or more solo voices and then taken up by the choruses _en masse_. Excellent examples of this procedure are to be found in his _Diluvium universalis_ and _Dives malus_.