The cantata of the seventeenth century was evidently as diverse in style and character as were its descendants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It dealt with subjects that were sacred, profane, heroic, comic, and sometimes ludicrous. The wider range of subjects available for the secular or chamber cantata made this form especially appealing to composers. Then, too, the voice was the most perfectly developed medium of musical expression that the age provided--the heritage of centuries of training in the service of the church. While the violins of the last half of the century approached the most perfect specimens that the great Cremona violin-makers produced, this instrument was at a disadvantage as compared with the voice, because instrumental forms were still very crude and in the making, and the instruments on which the violin depends for accompanying harmonic background (the harpsichord and the clavichord) were inadequate, unsatisfactory, and very limited in their range of musical expression. Avoidance of a set or arbitrary form was one of the characteristics of the seventeenth-century chamber cantata as a whole. This freedom in form (that is, in the order and kind of arias, etc.) offered greatest scope for the imagination and intellectual capacities of the composer. The period of vocal virtuosity and degeneracy had not yet set in and the singers themselves were not only the best trained in everything pertaining to musical science, but were the most intellectual of musicians and represented the best phases of musical art and culture. The intimacy of the chamber and the absence of scenery and action in performance gave the highest incentive and best opportunity to both composer and singer to subordinate everything to the higher demands of artistic expression. Hence the composers of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries regarded the chamber cantata much in the same light that Beethoven and Brahms in the nineteenth century regarded the pianoforte sonata and the violin sonata--the most intimate and intellectual form of music that the age could produce. All the great composers up to and including Handel practised in this form as Bach did in fugue, and in its exploitation they worked out many a problem of thematic development, of contrast in melodic forms, and of interesting harmonic structure and key-relationships, thereby enriching the vocabulary of the art for succeeding generations. Mention will here be made of the more important of Carissimi’s contemporaries and immediate successors who gained distinction as writers of cantata and who aided in its further development.