The cantata as a distinct musical form was assiduously cultivated by nearly all of the important Italian composers during the seventeenth century and its form soon began to crystallize along the lines which, for the following century, characterized it. In this work of definition and crystallization, Giacomo Carissimi (born probably 1604, died 1674) had a most distinguished part. He also transferred the cantata from the chamber to the church and wrote prolifically in both secular and sacred forms. A more detailed analysis of Carissimi’s influence on choral writing will be reserved for the discussion of early oratorio, but it may be said here that, though he cannot be credited with the invention of the sacred cantata, he was the first musician of large calibre to adopt this form and to lavish on it his best thought and most profound skill. He is generally admitted to have exerted more influence on the perfecting of the recitative than any of his contemporaries and he firmly established in sacred music those elements of pathos and dramatic fervor which had proved to be so effective in the opera and for which the public had acquired so keen an appetite. This enrichment of the purely musical means of expression in church music in the interest of greater dramatic realism was by no means a healthy accretion from the standpoint of pure ecclesiastical music, for, with the introduction of the dramatic element and the employment of the solo voice with all the possibilities for virtuosity and the temptations for display, the period of decadence in the music of the Roman Church began. All of Carissimi’s cantatas were for one voice or at most for two and all were written with accompaniment for a single instrument--lute, harpsichord, ‘cello, etc. His accompaniments were simple, but displayed unusual lightness and variety for his period. He left a vast amount of completed work behind him, but little of it is now available. Dr. Charles Burney,[51] writing near the close of the eighteenth century, when actual performances of Carissimi’s works were not such a matter of ancient history as now, gives warm praise to the beauty and musical effectiveness of his cantatas and liberally reproduces musical extracts. In speaking of a collection of twenty-two of his cantatas, preserved in Christ Church, Oxford, Burney says: ‘There is not one which does not offer something that is still new, curious, and pleasing; but most particularly in the recitatives, many of which seem the most expressive, affecting, and perfect that I have seen. In the airs there are frequently sweet and graceful passages, which more than a hundred years have not impaired.’ His secular cantatas were both lyric and dramatic. Only one was suggested by a special event, the death of Mary Queen of Scots.