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Introduction¹ This project began as part of a 2011 National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar, “Art, History, and Culture in Rome, 1527–1798,” led by Vernon Hyde Minor and held at the American Academy in Rome. I am grateful to Vernon and the other seminar participants, as well as to the NEH and the Academy, for their support. Thanks also go to the members of my research group at Loyola University, especially John T. Sebastian, and to T. Frank Kennedy, SJ, especially for his help in untangling the details of study at the Collegio Germanico-Ungarico. This study is dedicated to the memory of Gerald Fagin, SJ.

Jephthah’s daughter’s lament, as it appears at the end of Jacomo Carissimi’s Jephte (ca. 1648), is one of the most affecting moments in seventeenth-century music. Frequently excerpted in undergraduate anthologies today, this solo, along with the chorus that follows, is justly acclaimed for its emotional impact. Its potential spiritual effects, though, are less fully explored. Affective forms of spirituality are beginning to receive more attention in the study of seventeenth-century music, and a consideration of Carissimi’s most famous piece may serve a useful role in those conversations.² Examples of such work include Gosine and Oland, “Docere, delectare, movere: Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Jesuit Spirituality”; McCarthy, Liturgy and Contemplation in Byrd's Gradualia;  Dell’Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy; Getz, Mary, Music, and Meditation: Sacred Conversations in Post-Tridentine Milan; and Fisher, Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria.

Jacomo Carissimi served as maestro di capella of the Collegio Germanico-Ungarico in Rome from 1629 until his death in 1674.³ Carissimi’s life and career are outlined in Dixon, Carissimi, and the first chapter of Jones, The Motets of Carissimi;  much of this section relies on these two sources and Jones’s Grove article on Carissimi. According to documents translated in Culley, Jesuits and Music 1, 173–74, the rector of the Collegio actually brought Carissimi into service when the musician was twenty-three, which would have been in 1628, although he did not become maestro until December 1629. Jones notes in the Grove article on the composer that, while the form “Giacomo” was used by “some contemporaries and all publishers,” “Jacomo” appears in his baptismal record and “was the form used by Carissimi himself.” This decades-long tenure stands in marked contrast to that of his predecessors at the institution.⁴ The tenure of each maestro in turn is sketched in Culley, Jesuits. The longest continuous term before Carissimi was apparently that of Asprilio Pacelli, who was in service at the Collegio Germanico by 19 May 1595 and began work at the Capella Giulia on 2 March 1602 (Culley, 52), almost seven years later. Lorenzo Ratti served at the Collegio between 17 June 1619 and sometime before 6 November 1620, then again from sometime in 1623 until 15 December 1629, a total period of something over seven years (Culley, 128–30). His longevity at the Collegio was not due to a lack of prospects elsewhere: he is known to have been offered major positions elsewhere, perhaps most notably at San Marco in Venice. His reputation within Rome, demonstrated not only at the Collegio and S. Apollinare (its associated church), but also by his work for Christine, Queen of Sweden, and for the Archiconfraternità del Santissimo Crocifisso at the Oratory of S. Marcello, strongly suggests that he could have followed the example of his predecessors, who moved from the Collegio to other major ecclesiastical institutions within Rome, if he had wished.⁵ Annibale Stabile, for instance, became maestro di capella at S. Maria Maggiore in 1591 (Culley, Jesuits, 49), Lorenzo Ratti served at S. Luigi dei Francesi between his two stints at the Collegio (Culley, 129), and two of the Collegio’s maestri were later employed in a similar capacity at the Capella Giulia (Ruggiero Giovanelli in 1594, Asprilio Pacelli in 1602; Culley, 50 and 52); others left the Collegio for institutions outside Rome. Jones concludes that Carissimi’s reasons for staying in Rome included “a considerable debt of gratitude to his Jesuit employers” (Motets, 1:18). His extended tenure at the Collegio may therefore suggest a real sympathy with the Jesuit “way of proceeding.” This may be further confirmed by his deathbed gifts to the Collegio, which included an endowment for two chaplaincies, another for the employment by the church of two castrati, and all his compositions.⁶ See the testimony of Carissimi’s confessor, translated in Culley, Jesuits, 193–94. Culley observes that those manuscripts were later lost; he provides possible scenarios for their loss on p. 196. Jones, Motets, 1:41–43, also discusses the loss of Carissimi’s autographs, focusing on the nineteenth-century testimony of Pietro Alfieri. Smither, A History of the Oratorio, 221, notes that most of the surviving sources are copies made by French and English musicians, which may mask aspects of genre classification. It may therefore be useful to view Carissimi’s most famous composition through a lens of Jesuit spirituality.

 

Music and the Early Jesuits

The Society of Jesus is infamous for its early resistance to music—the popular phrase is Jesuita non cantat (“Jesuits don’t sing”). The fact that Jesuits—unlike most other orders­—do not come together to sing the Daily Office as a group has been part of the unique identity of the Society from its earliest days. Ignatius of Loyola was said to have enjoyed music himself, but he resisted every attempt to impose a “choir” upon his order. In fact, there is reason to believe that the early Jesuits considered music not only a practical difficulty but also unnecessary for their own spiritual development. On the other hand, from an early date, they used music extensively in their teaching and missionary work.⁷ This distinction is made by several, notably Kennedy, “Jesuits and Music: Reconsidering the Early Years.” Even here, a fundamental ambivalence toward the use of music by Jesuits themselves is apparent. Lorenzo Maggio, for instance, serving as visitor to the Jesuit College in Paris in 1587, allowed for the use of “song” in chapel for the students, but he emphasized that this was not an activity for Jesuits themselves to engage in if it could be avoided. Rather, he calls on lay musicians to be hired, and paid by the students themselves.⁸ Maggio’s statement is edited and translated by David Crook from Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 10989, in Crook, “‘A Certain Indulgence’: Music at the Jesuit College in Paris, 1575–1590,” 469. Indeed, Jesuits often employed in their schools and churches musicians of the first rank, including Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Tomás Luis de Victoria, and Marc-Antoine Charpentier—but none of these were themselves Jesuits. The situation was different in other disciplines: science teachers at Jesuit schools were overwhelmingly members of the order, and most school dramas were written by Jesuit teachers of rhetoric or poetry. The music for those dramas, however, was mostly composed by lay maestri di capella or other local musicians.⁹ On science faculties, see Harris, “Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge,” 225. On Jesuit drama, see Dyer, “The Emergence of the Independent Prologue and Chorus in Jesuit School Theatre, c. 1550–c. 1700,” 1:214. Dyer notes that most of the composers of music for Jesuit school plays were also either educated at Jesuit institutions or were members of Jesuit Marian confraternities. This raises an intriguing notion: perhaps Carissimi received his early education at the Jesuit college in Tivoli, where he also sang in the cathedral choir from the age of eighteen, or elsewhere in the region of Rome. Such a scenario might also make more comprehensible his extraordinary hiring into the position of maestro at the Collegio Germanico-Ungarico at the age of twenty-four, without extensive previous experience. In general, Jesuits had musical responsibilities only in the overseas missions, where they functioned in multiple roles and where qualified laity were generally not available.¹⁰ A good example of this type of Jesuit musician is Domenico Zipoli, who played the organ at S. Apollinare before becoming a Jesuit in 1716, but soon afterward left for Latin America. In Jesuit schools and churches in Europe, lay (or at least non-Jesuit) musicians were the rule.

This is certainly true at the Collegio Germanico in Rome. Established in 1552 to house students from German-speaking territories, it was refounded in 1573 by Gregory XIII, who shortly thereafter gave the college the church of S. Apollinare and its neighboring palazzo; in 1580 he merged the Collegio Germanico with the Collegium Hungaricum, which was associated with the church of S. Stefano Rotondo. As part of his endowment to the refounded college, Gregory required that the students celebrate the Office there at least twenty days each year.¹¹ Culley, Jesuits, 26–28, who emphasizes the influence of Michael Laurentano, rector of the college, on the liturgical plan imposed by Gregory XIII. These obligations were in fact increased in subsequent years, as Culley traces in the following pages. The kind of music to be sung during the Office is not specified in the early documents that Culley quotes, but it more than likely was mostly, if not entirely, chant. Victoria, who had been educated at Jesuit schools in his native Ávila and at the Collegio Germanico itself, and who had taught music privately there since 1571, was hired as maestro di capella, remaining at the post until 1577.¹² Kennedy, “Jesuits and Music: The European Tradition, 1547–1622,” 131, suggests that it is possible the Collegio Germanico shared a maestro di capella with the Seminario Romano until its refounding in 1573. He further argues (133n28, and 176) that Victoria taught students at both institutions between 1571 and 1573, although it is unclear whether he held the title maestro at either during those years; see also Culley, Jesuits, 44–46. Most of his successors, including Carissimi, had significant careers in Rome and elsewhere.

The importance of the music program at the Collegio and S. Apollinare did not begin with Carissimi, but it was apparently well maintained by him, as witnessed by both praise and occasional complaints.¹³ On the occasional complaints about the expense of the music program, both before and during Carissimi’s tenure, see Culley, Jesuits, 130–33 and 197–206. Carissimi’s job as maestro required him “to take care of all the music in the church and college, to compose all the necessary works, [and] to teach the students every day, and the putti soprani [boy sopranos] who were maintained in the college.”¹⁴ Translated in Culley, Jesuits, 175, who points out that detailed records about musical life at the Collegio and S. Apollinare during Carissimi’s tenure do not survive. This quote comes from an undated memorial for Carissimi. An undated complaint observes that Carissimi “does not teach the students [any] more” (p. 199), suggesting that too much of his attention was being given to the professional musicians, and to professionals in training at the Collegio. Culley traces the criticisms of this professionalization of musical practice in a number of documents, culminating in a 1657 decree by four cardinal protectors of the College, who limited the expenditures on music and made other prescriptions (translated pp. 203–4). Graham Dixon says that the cappella at the Collegio consisted of about ten professional singers during Carissimi’s tenure, and Thomas Culley, who provides exhaustive information about payments made to singers at the Collegio, notes that students were not involved in liturgical music at that time.¹⁵ Dixon, Carissimi, 2; and Culley, Jesuits, 261: “It appears that the principal performers of the liturgical music at the college during the period from 1630 to 1674 were either the professional musicians who lived there or those who were hired from outside.” It remains possible that students could have sung in devotional contexts at the Collegio, and Culley discusses a number of students cited as musically talented (206–7), but it seems unlikely that they would have performed either at S. Apollinare or at the Crocifisso, and it may be unrealistic to think they might have performed within the Collegio pieces that they would not perform outside. Dixon also notes that the Crocifisso employed no musicians directly, which may suggest that Carissimi used Collegio professionals in his work there. Some of Carissimi’s students themselves became notable musicians, including Johann Caspar Kerll, who was sent to Rome in his twenties, while in the service of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Brussels, and Vincenzo Albrici, who began his studies at the Collegio as a putto, served as organist during his later student days, and following his studies traveled widely in northern Europe, especially in the service of the elector of Saxony in Dresden.¹⁶ See the Grove articles on Johann Caspar Kerll (by Harris and Giebler) and Vincenzo Albrici (by Frandsen), as well as Culley, Jesuits, 176 and 216–18, who argues that “it does not seem to be an exaggeration to say that Carissimi himself was one of the principal causes of the musical hegemony which Italy maintained in Germany during the seventeenth century” (p. 176). Marc-Antoine Charpentier, who later served the French royal court and various other institutions in Paris, including the Jesuit college and the principal Jesuit church, may also have studied privately with Carissimi while in Rome in the late 1660s. Certainly, Charpentier made a copy of Jephte and owned copies of several of Carissimi’s works.¹⁷ See Hitchcock’s Grove article on Charpentier. The copy of Jephte, in Charpentier’s hand, is now at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de la Musique, MS VM1-1477.

 

Jephthah’s Daughter and Jesuit School Drama

The story of Jephthah, as transmitted in the Book of Judges (11:29–40), has two fundamental problems. First, Jephthah makes a deal with God: if God supports him on the battlefield, he will sacrifice whatever comes out of his house at Mizpah to greet him upon his return.¹⁸ Cathy Ann Elias reminds me that God does not in fact reply to Jephthah’s vow, which reinforces its fundamental wrongness. This is in vivid contrast to the story of Abraham and Isaac, which is set into motion by the voice of God. I am grateful to Dr. Elias for conversations on the story of Jephthah and its interpretation. Unfortunately, that turns out to be his daughter, which leads to the second problem: the tale ends with human sacrifice. Both of these make Jephthah’s story markedly different from that of Abraham and Isaac, where Abraham, obedient to God’s command, is freed from it in the end. When Jephthah discovers that he is duty-bound to sacrifice his daughter, he is given no divine alternative, and the daughter, after asking for two months to lament her fate, submits as well. The biblical narrator provides little or no commentary, neither criticizing Jephthah’s vow nor expressing any horror at the daughter’s sacrifice. Rather, after telling us that Jephthah “did with her according to his vow which he had made” (Judges 11:39, RSV), the narrator simply observes that the daughters of Israel came to devote four days each year to mourn her death.

Despite what has been called a lack of literary interest in the story before the mid-sixteenth century,¹⁹ Sypherd, Jephthah and His Daughter, gives an exhaustive study of available treatments. Aside from Pseudo-Philo, which will be discussed below, and a planctus by Peter Abelard, Sypherd’s few ancient and medieval examples consist mostly of cursory references in religious texts. it was discussed by a wide range of biblical commentators, who sometimes struggle to deal with the problems of the story.²⁰ The various interpretations are discussed comprehensively in chapter 2 of Thompson, Writing the Wrongs: Women of the Old Testament among Biblical Commentators from Philo through the Reformation. Particularly important here is the first-century writer known as Pseudo-Philo, who among other things substantially expands the daughter’s role, making the story more her tragedy than her father’s, and whose added lament shows marked similarities to Carissimi’s, as we will see.²¹In addition to Thompson, Writing the Wrongs, 108–11, see chap. 2 of Brown, No Longer Be Silent: First[-]Century Jewish Portraits of Biblical Women. Also notable is an exegetical tradition that argues that Jephthah’s daughter was not killed but rather dedicated to God, dying to the world, as it were. This interpretation begins with the thirteenth-century rabbinic commentator David Kimhi, whose work influenced the fourteenth-century Franciscan theologian Nicholas of Lyra and is later taken up by some Protestant writers;²² Described in Thompson, Writing the Wrongs, 150–52 (on Kimhi and Nicholas) and 154–69 (on their reception in the sixteenth century, including Buchanan’s play). a version of it is used in Handel’s 1751 oratorio Jephtha.

Dramatic treatments of the story begin in earnest only in the mid-sixteenth century, with George Buchanan’s play Jepthes sive votem tragoedia, performed at the Collège de Guyenne between 1540 and 1547.²³ Shuger, Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity, 134. It became very popular after its publication in 1554, with multiple editions and early translations into French, Italian, German, Hungarian, and Polish. Shuger characterizes Buchanan at this time as “still an Erasmian Catholic although probably inclining toward Protestantism”; she also discusses how Buchanan highlights and enhances similarities of the story to Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis. Jephthah here is portrayed as a pious man who makes his vow not in exchange for victory but afterwards, in gratitude for it.²⁴ Shuger, Renaissance Bible, chap. 4, “Iphigenia in Israel,” esp. 138–48. She further notes that the angel’s prologue, which tells of the vow long before Jephthah makes it, raises the notion that Jephthah did not freely choose to make the vow but was predestined to do it. Under these circumstances, it may not be as problematic that the daughter is, in the end, sacrificed, because it can be seen as God’s will. His heroic status is reinforced by his refusal to back out of his promise, even when both a priest and his wife try to dissuade him. The daughter, here named Iphis (in part underlining her assimilation here with Iphigenia), by voluntarily accepting her sacrificial duty becomes a type of Christ. Buchanan’s play was followed by some fifty dramatic treatments of the story between the middle of the sixteenth century and the end of the eighteenth.²⁵ Kellner, “‘Die große Frage’: zur Rezeption des alttestamentarischen Motivs Jephtha in Literatur und Musik,” 59–66, and Morelli, “La circolazione dell’oratorio italiano nel seicento.”

The subject proved especially popular in Jesuit school dramas. The earliest attested example, by the fifteen-year-old Jesuit scholastic José de Acosta, was produced at Medina del Gampo in 1555, not long after Buchanan’s play. Perhaps the most important Jesuit play on the subject was Jephtias by Jakob Balde, a Jesuit who taught rhetoric at the Jesuit school in Ingolstadt; the play was first performed there in 1637 and published in 1654. In the published state of the play, the daughter acquires a love interest, as well as the name Menulema, an anagram for “Emmanuel,” explicitly linking her sacrifice with that of Christ.²⁶ Discussed in Sypherd, Jephthah and His Daughter, 50–56. This typological interpretation has medieval roots, though the more common version, espoused by Isidore of Seville among others, sees the daughter as “a type of Christ’s humanity rather than simply of Christ himself”; see Thompson, Writing the Wrongs, 136. Valentin, Les Jésuites et le théâtre (1554–1680): Contribution à l’histoire culturelle du monde catholique dans le Saint-Empire romain germanique, 561–62, argues, on the basis of the program of the Ingolstadt production (the only remaining trace of the first version of the play), that this typological emphasis is part of a revision of the play between its initial performance and publication, not part of the 1637 Ingolstadt production. Evidence survives of at least sixteen plays or productions at Jesuit schools between 1555 and 1650, including two at Ingolstadt (1569 and 1637), one at Innsbruck (1588), and three at the Jesuit college in Vienna (1570, 1592, and 1610).²⁷ These figures combine the overlapping data presented in Sypherd, Jephthah and His Daughter; Valentin, Le Théâtre des Jésuites dans les pays de langue allemande: Répertoire chronologique des pièces représentées et des documents conservés (1555–1773); and Dyer, “Emergence.” Acosta’s play is also discussed in O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 223–25. According to Dyer, by the seventeenth century Jephthah had become the single most popular subject for Jesuit school plays (1:197); this popularity continued into the eighteenth century. In most cases the play does not survive, but programs are common. Jephthah was also the subject of one of the biblical episodes described by Ludwig Müller, member of the imperial court, as part of the Corpus Christi procession in Munich in a manuscript dating from the early 1590s; this representation was to include an instrumental performance by the students of St. Michael’s, the Jesuit school in Munich, possibly representing the virgin companions of Jephthah’s daughter. See Fisher, Music, Piety, and Propaganda, 262. None of these was produced in Rome, or even in Italy, and most of the plays themselves do not survive, so it is impossible to link any specifically with Carissimi’s work, but the popularity of the subject in Jesuit colleges, especially in Germany, makes it possible, even likely, that the staff at the Collegio Germanico-Ungarico knew about at least some of these plays through students or even faculty coming to Rome from the north.

A more geographically proximate use of the story comes from the Drammi musicali of Ottavio Tronsarelli, published in Rome in 1631/2.²⁸ Tronsarelli, Drammi musicali. A brief discussion of the text appears in Sypherd, Jephthah and His Daughter, 112. Smither’s Grove article “Oratorio” suggests that this and similar texts may have been “intended to be set to music for performances in oratories” that presented Italian oratorios, such as the Chiesa Nuova in Rome. Hammond cites a 1648 source as evidence that Tronsarelli “was educated by the Jesuits” in his Grove article on Tronsarelli. While composers of some of the texts in this collection are known, no musical setting has survived of La figlia di Iefte, a short lament for Jephthah’s daughter, with a refrain by a choir of virgins. Tronsarelli’s use of this subject may well reflect his own Jesuit education, and it is likely, given the interconnections between poets and composers in Rome, that Carissimi and/or his unknown librettist would have known of this text.

Jesuit theatre, according to the seventeenth-century Jesuit Tarquinio Galluzzi, served first and foremost the goal of edifying its audience. Whereas Aristotle used catharsis to purge passion, Galluzzi took a more Platonic stance, seeking “to instil courage in the spectator and reinforce his or her faith through the viewing of cruel and inhuman acts against the faithful.”²⁹ Filippi, “The Orator’s Performance: Gesture, Word, and Theatre at the Collegio Romano,” 519. This “projection of the spectator onto a hero of the faith” in a sense draws the spectator into the story through imagination, a process not unlike the use of visual images in Jesuit contemplation.

 

Jesuit Art and the Spiritual Exercises

Jesuit spirituality is drawn first and foremost from the Spiritual Exercises (1522–24) of Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556). The Exercises is not a text to be read, but a meditative practice to be developed under a spiritual director. Each Jesuit is obligated to do the Exercises on a regular basis, but lay people, such as the seventeenth-century artist Gianlorenzo Bernini, have also done them from a very early date.³⁰ A good summary of the issue of Bernini’s relationship with the Exercises can be found in Bailey, “‘Le style jésuite n’existe pas’: Jesuit Corporate Culture and the Visual Arts,” 75n23. There is no proof that Carissimi ever did the Exercises, but it would certainly have been reasonable for him to have done them and he would surely have understood their basic process. In the practice of the Exercises, Ignatius asks the retreatant over and over again to enter the biblical scene through “composition of place”: not only to understand intellectually or even envision from a safe distance, but also to imagine being present in the scene under reflection at the time. For example, the Fifth Exercise of the First Week includes a meditation on Hell that focuses on each sense in turn:³¹ Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, sections 65–69, pp. 46–47. This composition of place is followed with a colloquy with Christ. It should be noted that the “weeks” of the Exercises are not necessarily experienced within seven calendar days, even within the context of a thirty-day retreat; they are best seen as stages of varying lengths.

• The First Prelude, the composition of place. Here it will be to see in imagination the length, breadth, and depth of Hell....
• The First Point will be to see with the eyes of the imagination the huge fires and, so to speak, the souls within the bodies full of fire.
• The Second Point. In my imagination I will hear the wailing, the shrieking, the cries, and the blasphemies against our Lord and all his saints.
• The Third Point. By my sense of smell I will perceive the smoke, the sulphur, the filth, and the rotting things.
• The Fourth Point. By my sense of taste I will experience the bitter flavors of hell: tears, sadness and the worm of conscience.
• The Fifth Point. By my sense of touch, I will feel how the flames touch the souls and burn them. 

This composition of place can be fairly detailed: on the first day of the Third Week, which traces Jesus’ journey from Bethany to Jerusalem, the retreatant is called on “to see in imagination the road from Bethany to Jerusalem, whether it is broad, or narrow, or level, and so on. In similar manner, imagine the room of the Supper, whether it is large, or small, or arranged in one way or another.”³² Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, section 192, p. 81. Ignatius is careful not to specify how the road or the room should look, but to ask the retreatant to come to a personal experience.

Jerome Nadal, second general of the Society of Jesus, compiled a series of annotated engravings to illustrate scenes from the Gospels. The images contained in Evangelicae historiae imagines, first published in 1593 but planned and at least to some extent designed before Nadal’s death in 1580, were initially intended for Jesuit seminarians to use to facilitate composition of place, though their publication allowed them to circulate even more widely.³³ Buser, “Jerome Nadal and Early Jesuit Art in Rome.” A digitized form of this book can be found at https://books.google.com/books?id=-sZiAAAAcAAJ. The images and the ideas behind them also influenced a program of frescos created in the early 1580s at three churches connected to Jesuit colleges in Rome: S. Tommaso di Canterbury (associated with the English College), and S. Stefano Rotondo and S. Apollinare, both associated with the merged Collegio Germanico-Ungarico. Only the frescos of S. Stefano survive, and they are visibly worn—those of S. Apollinare were likely damaged when the church flooded in 1598, but they were probably still visible in Carissimi’s time and until the current church was begun in 1740—but engravings were made of all three by Giovanni Battista Cavalieri. All three groups of frescos focus on examples of martyrdom, and they have generally been characterized not only as promoting a triumphant Roman Catholicism in the face of Protestant criticisms but also specifically “to prepare Jesuit novitiates psychologically for imminent missionary work in hostile non-Catholic lands.”³⁴ Korrick, “On the Meaning of Style: Nicolò Circignani in Counter-Reformation Rome,” 170. See also Monssen, “Rex gloriose martyrum: A Contribution to Jesuit Iconography”; Monssen “The Martyrdom Cycle in Santo Stefano Rotondo, Part Two.”; and Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565–1610. A digitized version of Cavalieri’s engravings of the frescos at S. Apollinare can be found at https://books.google.com/books?id=_oxiAAAAcAAJ . Buser, “Nadal,” sees the frescos in these three churches in part as a response to John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which depicted Protestant martyrdoms. Here composition of place takes a particularly somber note, as the participatory practices of the Exercises encourage viewers to enter a scene of martyrdom akin to one they may themselves face in the not too distant future. Even viewers who might not have to die for their faith could find it strengthened as they link themselves to the martyrs of the past. This creates an effect similar to that of Jesuit plays about martyrs, such as those on the Jephthah story.

 

Carissimi’s Jephte

Jephte, composed before 1650 (and likely before 1648),³⁵ The 1650 date is based on the fact that the final chorus is printed in Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia universalis, published in that year; this was the only publication of any part of the work during Carissimi’s lifetime. Jones’s Grove article on Carissimi argues that the oratorio was actually written by 1648, because its censorship report (praepositus generalis) was dated 16 June 1648. Jones, “Carissimi Manuscripts in Paris and Bologna: Problems of Authenticity and Dating,” 179n10, notes that there are at least twenty-nine manuscript sources for Jephte, but Carissimi’s own manuscript has been lost. is generally considered to have been written for the meetings of the Arciconfraternità del Santissimo Crocifisso at the Oratory of S. Marcello, the only institution in Rome that consistently performed Latin oratorios in Carissimi’s day, though the evidence is circumstantial and indirect. Carissimi can be shown to have supervised the music for its Friday Lenten meetings for four different weeks between 1650 and 1660, but no mention is made of specific works created for those meetings, and no documentation survives for Carissimi’s employment at the Crocifisso before 1650.³⁶ Smither, A History of the Oratorio, chapter 5, discusses both the Crocifisso and Carissimi’s oratorios. Cannon, “Carissimi’s ‘Oratorios’ in Search of a Genre,” has questioned this generic classification, arguing that Jephte and similar works often called oratorios by modern scholars are rather examples of the dialogue motet, another genre to which Carissimi contributed, but his conclusions are not generally accepted. Smither, “Carissimi’s Latin Oratorios: Their Terminology, Functions, and Position in Oratorio History,” notes that the term “oratorio” is not consistently used to refer to a musical genre until the 1660s (pp. 63–64), and that Kircher called Jephte a dialogue in his Musurgia Universalis (p. 62), but he concludes that Jephte is among the “dramatic dialogues which Carissimi’s contemporaries would no doubt have termed oratorios in the dramatic genre sense” (pp. 70–71). Still, he writes that while “[t]here is a tendency in the Carissimi literature…to assume that his oratorios were intended primarily or exclusively” for the Crocifisso, “there are indications that church performances of these works, treating them as large motets, may have been more likely than has been assumed” (p. 72). Jones, Motets, chapter 4, approaches the question from the other direction; he too places Jephte among the oratorios.

Even if Jephte began life as an oratorio for the Crocifisso, though, there is no reason it could not have been subsequently performed at S. Apollinare, or within school plays or less formal contexts at the Collegio itself.³⁷ Dixon argues that “it is not inconceivable that some of [Carissimi’s] Lenten pieces on Latin texts were written for the German College itself…” (Carissimi, 3); he similarly suggests that oratorios intended for the Crocifisso “could also be performed at smaller devotional gatherings or services, perhaps at the German College” (p. 41). On the various uses of music within Jesuit school plays, see Dyer, “Emergence,” chap. 4. Smither also acknowledges the possibility of performing Carissimi’s oratorios at S. Apollinare, even at Mass, noting the use of dialogues by Lorenzo Ratti, Carissimi’s predecessor, in place of the offertory (Oratorio, 1:218). Culley writes that Christine of Sweden had oratorios performed for her each Wednesday during Lent; this would provide another opportunity for the performance of works such as Jephte (Jesuits, 180). Crook, “A Sixteenth-Century Catalog of Prohibited Music,” 17, also notes the recreational use of motets and other pieces of sacred music at the Jesuit college in Munich in the sixteenth century. Such reuse of music was common, and the fact that Carissimi left all his compositions to the Collegio suggests he expected them to be used. Moreover, the Jesuits and the Oratorians shared an interest in reaching a largely lay audience through an affective form of spirituality facilitated by the arts.³⁸ The two orders are often contrasted on the basis of organization, but most writers do not deny that both try to reach a broad, largely lay, audience through the use of a rhetorical, affective spirituality. Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565–1610, 17, argues that “in reality the two [orders] are more alike than different.” Dyer, “Emergence,” chaps. 6–11, further notes similarities in dramatic and musical practice. She further observes that the maestri of the Jesuit colleges and the Oratorians frequently worked together, and that “there is evidence during the period c. 1640–c. 1660 that works regarded as Latin oratorios by Smither, Johnson, Pasquetti, Alaleona, et al., were inserted as independent prologues and choruses in Jesuit school theatrical productions” (1:305). Morelli, “‘Il muovere’,” does draw distinctions between the two orders, not only in terms of organization but also spiritual approach, characterizing the Oratorians by “a familiar, immediate, spontaneous, open approach” opposed to the “austere, gloomy, rigid, rational style, almost detached from the world” of the Jesuits. While he may be correct about some aspects of Jesuit procedure, I believe his conclusion is belied by aspects of the Spiritual Exercises, as well as the use of art, drama, and music in educational and spiritual contexts, at least for lay audiences. That said, what he characterizes as the emotional response of music in Oratorian circles (at least in the early seventeenth century, after the shift from congregational to professional singing) is less about entering into the story than being moved to tears by it in a form of catharsis.   Carissimi’s Jepthte was praised by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher precisely for its ability to move the listener in this way:

Giacomo Carissimi, a very excellent and famous composer . . . through his genius and the felicity of his compositions, surpasses all others in moving the minds of listeners to whatever affection he wishes. His compositions are truly imbued with the essence and life of the spirit….³⁹ Translated in Palisca, Baroque Music, 126. Kircher’s text is followed by a musical example of the final chorus of Jephte consisting of one complete statement of the text. This discussion forms part of book 7, chapter 6, “Qua ratione instituenda melothesia, ut datum quemuis affectum moueat,” specifically the second section, “De Affectu doloris.”

Where dramatic versions of this story such as Balde’s add characters and make other changes, Carissimi’s work sticks largely to the events outlined in the Book of Judges, leading to the sacrifice but ending before it actually takes place. The unknown author of the text, who may have been a Jesuit teacher at the Collegio, paraphrases much of what is in Judges, but he also adds dialogue that not only expands the roles of Jephthah and his daughter but also lets the people speak, in the form of the chorus. Jephtha’s vow is put into his own voice, and it is underlined by the chorus, who as they fight tell the Ammonites that the Lord fights against them (Dominus…pugnat contra vos). The daughter’s song of joy upon her father’s return turns to sorrow as Jephtha explains his vow, after which the daughter offers herself as a burnt offering (holocaustum), a word that is used in Judges when Jephthah makes his vow but not when he explains it to his daughter. That it appears here emphasizes the nature of the sacrifice that the daughter takes upon herself, speaking in the first person (offero). The task of the narrator (or historicus) is spread among the six singers, sometimes individually, sometimes in a group. As a result, the shifting nature of this historicus, which speaks in the third person, makes it difficult to distinguish it from the chorus that represents the community (which speaks in the first and second persons). In consequence, the listener can easily imagine that the narration itself comes from the community rather than an omniscient outsider.⁴⁰ The historicus’s part is not explicitly labeled in Charpentier’s copy of Jephte, and editions are understandably inconsistent on this point. Smither notes that the divided distribution of the narrative role happens fairly often among Carissimi’s works but is rare elsewhere (A History of the Oratorio, 243). He further observes that the sources “do not always distinguish between choruses and ensembles of soloists” (p. 244). “Chorus” as used here may not refer to a group with several singers on each part, but simply the combination of all solo singers, as commonly occurs at the end of baroque operas, though Smither finds choral performance “appropriate” in at least several instances, including the final chorus. The effect is not so much as to just tell the story, but to make it come alive before us. Moreover, the last word is given not to the narrator, who in Judges informs us of the daughter’s return and subsequent sacrifice, nor to Jephthah, but to the daughter, and to the chorus whom she calls upon (as the children of Israel) to weep with and for her.

The final lament does not appear in Judges, but its opening shows the influence of the Biblical Antiquities of the first-century writer known as Pseudo-Philo, directly or through an intertext:

Pseudo-Philo:⁴¹Jacobson, A Commentary on Pseudo-Philo’s Liber antiquitatum biblicarum with Latin Text and English Translation, 60–61 (Latin) and 161 (English). Audite montes trenum meum, et intendite colles lacrimas oculorum meorum…. (Hear, you mountains, my lamentation, and behold, you hills, the tears of my eyes….)

Carissimi:⁴² Text from Choral Public Domain Library (CPDL), http://www2.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Historia_di_Jephte_(Giacomo_Carissimi), accessed 6 April 2018; translation slightly altered. Plorate, colles; dolete, montes, et in afflictione cordis mei ululate. (Cry out, hills; mourn, mountains; and in the affliction of my heart, wail.)

In the earlier lament the daughter (named Seila) simply asks the mountains and hills to witness her mourning (“hear,” “behold”), but in Carissimi’s text she calls upon them to cry out—and, in the form of the echoes, they do. This makes the natural world an active participant, setting the stage (as it were) for the final chorus, which similarly takes up the daughter’s lament. Seila does ask the trees and beasts of the field to mourn for her in the final section of Pseudo-Philo’s lament, but Carissimi’s version calls for active participation from the outset.

All of this may suggest a Jesuit author for the text, someone who is familiar with the participatory practices of the Spiritual Exercises and with the tools of school drama, and able to apply them to this unstaged genre. Since we do not know who wrote this text, or most of the other texts Carissimi set, this must remain a speculation.⁴³Jones, Motets, 1:142, suggests that some motet texts may have been written by Odoardo Ceccarelli, a singer at S. Apollinare. In further noting that Jesuits at the Collegio would have been capable of creating texts for the purpose, he observes that some motet texts “display a preference for scriptural subjects and images which were characteristic of (though not exclusive to) Jesuit spirituality.” Dyer, “Emergence,” argues that, as far as can be determined, given that many remain anonymous, most Jesuit school plays in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were written by Jesuits, especially the local professor of rhetoric or poetry (1:214). How Carissimi responded to this text is the next question: Can hints of Jesuit spiritual practices be seen in the music of the lament?

 

The Music of the Lament

The lament’s music uses, for the most part, a recitative style that is simple and syllabic. (See the appendix for a complete transcription of the lament and following chorus.) The listener’s focus is therefore more on the words than the skill of the singer. Only a few words receive even two pitches, providing emphasis for rhetorical effect: plorate (“cry out”), ululate (“wail”), lachrimate (“weep”), resonate (“resound”), doloris (“sad”). Only the first and last of these falls outside the refrain-like phrase that the Echoes repeat, and all save the last are imperatives calling for action and sound. Indeed, even doloris is associated with sound in its context: in carmine doloris (“in sad songs”). The only exception, a melisma on et (“and”), can be seen as part of the daughter’s breakdown, as we shall see.

The lament consists of four major sections, followed by a chorus. The first section (mm. 1–14) begins by presenting a pair of parallel phrases (Plorate colles and dolete montes) that outlines two tetrachords a fourth apart (A4–D5 and D5–G5, each including the half step below), followed by a second pair (both using the text et in afflictione cordis mei ululate) that extends the tonal space down to E4 before returning to the opening A4. This provides balance on the level of both phrase and tonality.⁴⁴ See Stein, “Carissimi’s Tonal System and the Function of Transposition in the Expansion of Tonality.” I find this notion of paired tonal areas to be more fruitful than the use of the modal system by Susan McClary in her postlude to Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music, 293–99; however, I do not believe these interpretations to be entirely contradictory in a repertory that, as Joel Lester and others have put it, operates between modes and keys. Smither discusses this type of repetition as a rhetorical device in A History of the Oratorio, 229–30.The final phrase is echoed by two unnamed companions, as the natural world responds to the daughter’s plea.⁴⁵ Jones, Motets, 1:227–30, notes that “ululate” uses a Neapolitan sixth chord, which Carissimi uses elsewhere in contexts “relating to death, suffering, sin and extremes of spiritual emotion.” The minor-mode emphasis on a D-A-(E) axis contrasts with the major-mode axis on G-C-(F) that dominates much of the earlier part of the piece, but the sadness implied by the use of the minor mode, as well as the words, is rather muted by the balanced phrases and tonal stability.⁴⁶ The shift to the minor took place only slightly earlier, at the moment the historicus tells us that Jephthah saw his daughter; most of the music to this point focused on the major-third axis of G-C.

The two sections that follow grow progressively longer and more intense, and the pattern of repetition that clearly defined harmonic space in the opening section begins to fall apart as the music explores more distant harmonic areas. All this suggests a movement from the opening calm toward more intense emotion.

The second section (mm. 15–31), where the daughter laments that she will die a virgin (ego moriar virgo), immediately shifts from the A-D-(E) axis to G minor, in a phrase that moves almost directly from Bb4 to F#4; the D5 escape tone that separates the two reinforces the disjunction by preventing any preparation for the dissonant F#4. Sharps dominate the next phrases, turning to flats as she calls for weeping (lachrimate). Where motives or phrases are repeated, they do not have the balanced fourth relationship seen in the opening section: the final phrase is repeated a single step higher (mm. 23–29), with an inserted repetition of the phrase fontes et flumina (“fountains and rivers”) that jumps up an octave before resuming the slow descent. After moving through this welter of diverse melodic motives and tonal areas, the daughter returns at last to the opening A minor, where the echoes meet her. The effect is a stable ending, but one reached through difficulty.

The third section (mm. 32–55), like the second, immediately moves away from A minor, this time to E major, with a G# in the bass, then A major. The two opening phrases are balanced in the manner of the opening, but the tonal axis thereby created has shifted to the parallel major, which feels out of place for the words Heu me dolentem (“Woe to me!”). The following words show the reason for the harmonic shift, and the rhetorical disjunction: her grief coexists with the joy of her people and her father’s glory. As the music alternates A minor and E major chords, she returns to the necessity of her death; it is here that the word et (“and”) receives a substantial melisma (m. 42) that rises to set up a cadence on E. The use of a melisma on such an unimportant word, when to this point Carissimi has been careful to break syllabic text setting only for rhetorical effect, suggests the daughter’s emotions are interfering with her coherence. Shorter repeated phrases moving through a variety of tonal areas create a disjointed effect that shows the daughter’s emotional distress and reflect the “horrible sounds” (sonitu horribili) she calls for, rising to a melisma on resonate (“resonate”) that seems almost out of control, soaring to the highest notes of the vocal line before returning abruptly to cadence on A on the fourth quarter note of the bar. Again, a stable cadence is achieved, but it feels a bit forced, given what leads to it.

The final section (mm. 56–70) returns to the opening command of the lament (plorate, “cry out”) and the balance of repeated phrases in both text and music. It remains basically in A minor, though the rising lines of the opening pair of phrases outline a fifth-related axis (A-E-[B]), requiring frequent sharps. Though the return to minor-third sonorities maintains a feeling of sorrow, the balanced phrases and syllabic text setting suggest a return to calm after her earlier emotional outbursts, and the music moves logically toward its final on A.⁴⁷Jones’s Grove article on Carissimi argues that the melodic and rhythmic “restraint” of the daughter’s lines stands in contrast to the expressive dissonances of the chorus. While this may be true of the final section of her lament, I believe this restraint is hard won, and the inner sections betray an extreme emotionality that leads from her public, outward acceptance to her final inward acceptance. The only sign of intense emotion left falls at the word doloris, which is marked by an appoggiatura each time it appears (m. 63 and m. 68), moving from the minor sixth to the fifth above the bass as the daughter calls for sad songs (carmine doloris). The second statement (mm. 67–68) is rhetorically stronger: the voice drops an octave on a note dissonant above the bass before rising to Bb4 (following a C# in the bass), then circling down to G#4 before resolving to an A4. We feel not only her current calm, but the more violent emotions that brought her here; having reconciled both, she seems ready for what will come. The echoes that have joined her at the end of each section so far are gone, and for a moment it may appear that she has been abandoned, left alone at the very moment she calls on the children of Israel to mourn with her. This seeming solitude, however, turns out to be only fleeting, because the echoes have been replaced by the choir, expanding the lament from the natural world to the human community, who turn away from their former celebrations to join with her in sad songs, as she has asked them to do.

As affecting as the daughter’s solo lament is, this chorus may have had an even greater impact, and it is worth remembering that this is the excerpt that Kircher publishes. This chorus does not moralize or comment in the manner of a Greek chorus, or for that matter the chorus of Handel’s later version of this story, which calls for a blind obedience that proclaims, “Whatever is, is right.”⁴⁸ Smith, “Why Does Jephtha Misunderstand His Own Vow?,” 79–80, argues that at this moment the chorus in fact is short-sighted in its dark interpretation of God’s will, unaware of the “miracle of deliverance” that ends Handel’s oratorio, when an angel saves Jephthah’s daughter.In Carissimi’s hands, the members of the chorus are actual participants: they take up the daughter’s words in music that grow from her own, extending her chromaticism and dissonance. They begin with a repeated phrase of music (mm. 71–77), not the fourth-related pairs found elsewhere, but remaining at the same pitch level, as if to emphasize their stability. The imitation that follows on in carmine doloris (mm. 81–89) uses a descending line of a sort that had already become a musical sign of lament in opera,⁴⁹ On the use of descending lines as a sign of lament, see Rosand, “The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament.” This chorus does not use an ostinato, as Rosand’s examples do, but it does begin with two identical statements of a descending-tetrachordal bass, before the motive is taken up as a melodic line at in carmine doloris. Since Rosand’s examples are arias, it is not surprising that the musical emblem is treated differently here. but this section too is tonally stable. As the voices first state the final word, lamentamini, together, then engage in repetition in small groups, suspensions are multiplied until as many as three suspensions are held simultaneously above the bass (m. 95), before a slow resolution to a major-third sonority on G. The resolution creates a feeling of peace that is all the stronger for the complexity of the suspensions that create it. The chorus is repeated in full, with a coda that extends the final cadence.

 

Jephte and the Spiritual Exercises

The lament, then, traverses a journey from sorrowful calm through more intense grief, then back to calm. Though the daughter had accepted her fate from the beginning, the emotional intensity evoked by the middle sections of the lament suggest that she had work to do in order to prepare to for her fate. The final section seems to represent this fully-prepared acceptance, incorporating the earlier sorrow suggested by suspensions, but recovering the calm and balance of the opening. The chorus then joins her, taking up her music and words (and it is worth noting that the singer playing the daughter’s role joins the chorus for that final section) and extending them beautifully, in the end resolving the music to the major triad that appeared at the beginning of the oratorio.

By couching this music in terms of first-person statements and especially second-person imperatives, the listener is invited to become part of the story, in a manner similar to that of Jesuit drama and visual art, reflecting the precepts of the Spiritual Exercises. The shifts in rhythmic activity and especially in dissonance, and the movement away from and back to balanced phrases, suggest an emotional movement from calm through horror and back, affecting the listener as Kircher says: as dissonance is resolved to consonance, the listener too feels the daughter’s and the community’s acceptance. This is a different effect from that of Handel’s oratorio on the same topic: as Ruth Smith puts it, Handel’s oratorios were calculated “to excite pity...[, which] permitted the spectator to be conscious both of his own security and of his own refined moral and emotional sensibility.”⁵⁰ Smith, “Intellectual Contexts of Handel’s English Oratorios,” 122. This distinction drawn between the observer and the stage is in fact the opposite of the Jesuit “composition of place.” This kind of distant superiority is not Carissimi’s goal here.

To use music in this way should not surprise us. Andrew Dell’Antonio emphasizes the role of active listening in the experience of the Exercises: the exercitant should not have the text but rather be guided by a spiritual director, “whose deployment of rhetorical imagery should aim to surprise (unbalance?) the ear and the imagination.”⁵¹ Dell’Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice, 32. Where images were used to activate the inner eye and facilitate composition of place through imagination, music could serve to activate the heart through the ear, using the tools of musical rhetoric not only to enhance understanding, but also to create emotion that can facilitate the affective aspects of Jesuit devotion. Although Jesuits were not the only ones to use emotion in the service of spiritual goals, what happens here is consistent with Jesuit practice.

The association of music with martyrdom is also not limited to Jesuit spirituality, though we have already seen a special concern for martyrs in Jesuit art and drama. Robert Kendrick has shown that stories of martyrs, especially female martyrs, were popular in seventeenth-century Italian music.⁵² Kendrick, “Martyrdom in Seventeenth-Century Italian Music.” He does not give a definitive reason for the relatively high use of female martyrs, observing (p. 125) that, because little is known about the audience for oratorios outside Rome and Bologna, “it is thus not clear if the presence of women martyrs in this sample is due to…a disproportionately female public for these works, the importance of aristocratic women as their patronesses, or (perhaps more tellingly) a wider phenomenon: the overall feminization of female piety in the later part of the century.” On the use of virgin martyr stories in drama, see also Shuger, Renaissance Bible, chap. 4. He points to executions of Jesuits and other Christians in Japan in 1598 and 1622–28 as one impetus for renewed attention to early Christian martyrs, as well as a shift toward local civic concerns, including the need for saintly protection, as the oratorio moves from its Roman, Latin, origin to spread through Italy in the vernacular. Like the earlier visual representations in the Jesuit churches of S. Apollinare and S. Stefano Rotondo, the pieces Kendrick examines focus specifically on early Christian martyrs, but the kinship with Jephthah’s daughter is clear, as we have seen in the popularity of the story in Jesuit school drama, where she may appear as a type of Christ. Such figures, according to Kendrick, provide both communal experiences and individual models of sanctity, especially that when the martyr’s voice is expressed in the first person. In particular, he focuses especially on motets and similar works for solo voice and basso continuo that could be performed in a variety of settings, from church to oratory or confraternity, or for domestic devotion. While Kendrick does not make an explicit connection to the Jesuits or their participatory spirituality, among his examples is a solo motet by Bonifazio Graziani, maestro di capella at the Gesù and the Seminario Romano between 1646 and 1664, whose works were surely known by his close colleague Carissimi.

As Kendrick discusses, musical representations of martyrdom could serve as a model for a sort of interior suffering that could lead to a closer relationship with God.⁵³ He notes that nuns are frequent creators and consumers of the pieces he studies, and that nuns are also often associated with forms of devotion that include physical suffering that “substitute for the tortures of martyrdom” (Kendrick, “Martyrdom,” 128). The flourishing of such pieces that he traces in the seventeenth century, particularly in the last third of the century, comes at a time when, as he puts it, “the real possibilities for martyrdom waned,”⁵⁴ Kendrick, “Martyrdom,” 132–33. leading to an increased interest in mystical theology and affective spiritual practices. Carissimi’s Jephte, especially its final lament, could have similar effects among the parishioners at S. Apollinare, or those attending meetings at the Crocifisso or other public devotional gatherings. Memory of Jesuit and other Christian martyrs, however, would likely have still been strong among the students at the Collegio Germanico-Ungarico during and immediately following the Thirty Years’ War, thus Jephte could have had a more direct resonance there. Entering into the martyrdoms of the past, through images, drama, or music, could be a way for these students to work out their own potential martyrdom in the future, modeling the obedience shown by their antecedents.

But it is not necessary to regard Jephte solely as preparation for martyrdom: its affective power would be equally effective among properly prepared lay listeners who were not faced with the prospect of dying for their faith. Dell’Antonio traces the development of a sophisticated practice of active listening in Rome at this time, which was linked to the growing professionalization of singing we have seen at S. Apollinare and elsewhere, giving (or returning) agency to the “cardinal class” and those virtuosi of taste that surrounded them, who “continue[d] to claim ownership of the meaning of that music even if they are not creating the sounds.”⁵⁵ Dell’Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice, 7. The members of the Archiconfraternità del Santissimo Crocifisso were of this class, and they were often educated in Jesuit schools and formed by the practice of the Spiritual Exercises. The kind of “participation as a receptive activity”⁵⁶ Ibid., 34, emphasis original. (that is, through properly disposed active listening) that they cultivated is precisely the skill necessary to enter into the world of a piece like Jephte and join in the daughter’s lament.

None of this requires a Jesuit association for Jephte, nor can it overturn the likelihood that the piece was initially created for use at the Crocifisso, but it shows that the piece could also be used effectively in a Jesuit context. At this point it is worth remembering Carissimi’s clear loyalty to the Collegio Germanico-Ungarico, the possibility that a Jesuit wrote the text, and the fact that Carissimi left his compositions to the College, presumably expecting that they would be used there.

A final hint at this potential connection may come from the ending: after the community, in the form of the choir, joins in the daughter’s lament, Carissimi’s Jephte ends. It would admittedly be difficult to enact the following sacrifice, but most versions of this story at least contain a narration of the next stages. The author of Judges tells us that the daughter returned to Jephthah, “and he did to her as he had vowed” (11:39); after this the daughters of Israel gathered annually to mourn the sacrifice for four days. In plays such as Buchanan’s and Balde’s, a messenger or other character relates the news of her sacrifice. In versions that use the alternate ending where the daughter is not killed but devoted to God, such as Handel’s oratorio, the setup for the sacrifice might be enacted, so that it can be stopped by an angelic appearance. The abrupt ending used by Carissimi seems to be unusual and may therefore be significant.⁵⁷ Here I do not include Tronsarelli’s free-standing lament, or the medieval lament of Abelard, since they do not narrate or enact the story.

The goal of the Spiritual Exercises is what Jesuits call indifference. This is not blind obedience, as Handel’s oratorio calls for (“Whatever is, is right”), nor is it relativistic apathy, but rather a kind of interior freedom from attachment, active openness to whatever may come, as stated in the Principle and Foundation that opens the Exercises:

…it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things, in regard to everything which is left to our free will and is not forbidden. Consequently, on our own part we ought not to seek health rather than sickness, wealth rather than poverty, honor rather than dishonor, a long life rather than a short one, and so in all other matters. Rather, we ought to desire and choose only that which is most conducive to the end for which we are created.⁵⁸ Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, section 23, p. 32.

The daughter’s lament and subsequent chorus can be heard as enacting a movement from attachment to indifference. Though the daughter’s words tell us that she accepted her fate from the beginning, her music in the middle of the lament suggests otherwise, but by the end both the daughter and the broader community are fully prepared for her sacrifice—but the piece ends before it happens. In Ignatian terms, however, it does not really matter whether or not the sacrifice takes place, if true indifference is achieved. By becoming participants in the scene, the listeners lament with the daughter and are likewise brought to a form of acceptance that is not blind but open to possibility. The ending therefore may bring us to a more uniquely Jesuit interpretation. Although the piece can be perfectly effective without this final key, it may suggest that Carissimi’s ties to the Jesuits went deeper than mere employment, and it may give modern listeners deeper insight into early modern participatory spirituality as embodied in music.

 

Notes

¹ This project began as part of a 2011 National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar, “Art, History, and Culture in Rome, 1527–1798,” led by Vernon Hyde Minor and held at the American Academy in Rome. I am grateful to Vernon and the other seminar participants, as well as to the NEH and the Academy, for their support. Thanks also go to the members of my research group at Loyola University, especially John T. Sebastian, and to T. Frank Kennedy, SJ, especially for his help in untangling the details of study at the Collegio Germanico-Ungarico. This study is dedicated to the memory of Gerald Fagin, SJ.

² Examples of such work include Gosine and Oland, “Docere, delectare, movere: Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Jesuit Spirituality”; McCarthy, Liturgy and Contemplation in Byrd's Gradualia;  Dell’Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy; Getz, Mary, Music, and Meditation: Sacred Conversations in Post-Tridentine Milan; and Fisher, Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria.

³ Carissimi’s life and career are outlined in Dixon, Carissimi, and the first chapter of Jones, The Motets of Carissimi;  much of this section relies on these two sources and Jones’s Grove article on Carissimi. According to documents translated in Culley, Jesuits and Music 1, 173–74, the rector of the Collegio actually brought Carissimi into service when the musician was twenty-three, which would have been in 1628, although he did not become maestro until December 1629. Jones notes in the Grove article on the composer that, while the form “Giacomo” was used by “some contemporaries and all publishers,” “Jacomo” appears in his baptismal record and “was the form used by Carissimi himself.”

⁴ The tenure of each maestro in turn is sketched in Culley, Jesuits. The longest continuous term before Carissimi was apparently that of Asprilio Pacelli, who was in service at the Collegio Germanico by 19 May 1595 and began work at the Capella Giulia on 2 March 1602 (Culley, 52), almost seven years later. Lorenzo Ratti served at the Collegio between 17 June 1619 and sometime before 6 November 1620, then again from sometime in 1623 until 15 December 1629, a total period of something over seven years (Culley, 128–30).

⁵ Annibale Stabile, for instance, became maestro di capella at S. Maria Maggiore in 1591 (Culley, Jesuits, 49), Lorenzo Ratti served at S. Luigi dei Francesi between his two stints at the Collegio (Culley, 129), and two of the Collegio’s maestri were later employed in a similar capacity at the Capella Giulia (Ruggiero Giovanelli in 1594, Asprilio Pacelli in 1602; Culley, 50 and 52); others left the Collegio for institutions outside Rome. Jones concludes that Carissimi’s reasons for staying in Rome included “a considerable debt of gratitude to his Jesuit employers” (Motets, 1:18).

⁶ See the testimony of Carissimi’s confessor, translated in Culley, Jesuits, 193–94. Culley observes that those manuscripts were later lost; he provides possible scenarios for their loss on p. 196. Jones, Motets, 1:41–43, also discusses the loss of Carissimi’s autographs, focusing on the nineteenth-century testimony of Pietro Alfieri. Smither, A History of the Oratorio, 221, notes that most of the surviving sources are copies made by French and English musicians, which may mask aspects of genre classification.

⁷ This distinction is made by several, notably Kennedy, “Jesuits and Music: Reconsidering the Early Years.”

⁸ Maggio’s statement is edited and translated by David Crook from Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 10989, in Crook, “‘A Certain Indulgence’: Music at the Jesuit College in Paris, 1575–1590,” 469.

⁹ On science faculties, see Harris, “Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge,” 225. On Jesuit drama, see Dyer, “The Emergence of the Independent Prologue and Chorus in Jesuit School Theatre, c. 1550–c. 1700,” 1:214. Dyer notes that most of the composers of music for Jesuit school plays were also either educated at Jesuit institutions or were members of Jesuit Marian confraternities. This raises an intriguing notion: perhaps Carissimi received his early education at the Jesuit college in Tivoli, where he also sang in the cathedral choir from the age of eighteen, or elsewhere in the region of Rome. Such a scenario might also make more comprehensible his extraordinary hiring into the position of maestro at the Collegio Germanico-Ungarico at the age of twenty-four, without extensive previous experience.

¹⁰ A good example of this type of Jesuit musician is Domenico Zipoli, who played the organ at S. Apollinare before becoming a Jesuit in 1716, but soon afterward left for Latin America.

¹¹ Culley, Jesuits, 26–28, who emphasizes the influence of Michael Laurentano, rector of the college, on the liturgical plan imposed by Gregory XIII. These obligations were in fact increased in subsequent years, as Culley traces in the following pages. The kind of music to be sung during the Office is not specified in the early documents that Culley quotes, but it more than likely was mostly, if not entirely, chant.

¹² Kennedy, “Jesuits and Music: The European Tradition, 1547–1622,” 131, suggests that it is possible the Collegio Germanico shared a maestro di capella with the Seminario Romano until its refounding in 1573. He further argues (133n28, and 176) that Victoria taught students at both institutions between 1571 and 1573, although it is unclear whether he held the title maestro at either during those years; see also Culley, Jesuits, 44–46.

¹³ On the occasional complaints about the expense of the music program, both before and during Carissimi’s tenure, see Culley, Jesuits, 130–33 and 197–206.

¹⁴ Translated in Culley, Jesuits, 175, who points out that detailed records about musical life at the Collegio and S. Apollinare during Carissimi’s tenure do not survive. This quote comes from an undated memorial for Carissimi. An undated complaint observes that Carissimi “does not teach the students [any] more” (p. 199), suggesting that too much of his attention was being given to the professional musicians, and to professionals in training at the Collegio. Culley traces the criticisms of this professionalization of musical practice in a number of documents, culminating in a 1657 decree by four cardinal protectors of the College, who limited the expenditures on music and made other prescriptions (translated pp. 203–4).

¹⁵ Dixon, Carissimi, 2; and Culley, Jesuits, 261: “It appears that the principal performers of the liturgical music at the college during the period from 1630 to 1674 were either the professional musicians who lived there or those who were hired from outside.” It remains possible that students could have sung in devotional contexts at the Collegio, and Culley discusses a number of students cited as musically talented (206–7), but it seems unlikely that they would have performed either at S. Apollinare or at the Crocifisso, and it may be unrealistic to think they might have performed within the Collegio pieces that they would not perform outside. Dixon also notes that the Crocifisso employed no musicians directly, which may suggest that Carissimi used Collegio professionals in his work there.

¹⁶ See the Grove articles on Johann Caspar Kerll (by Harris and Giebler) and Vincenzo Albrici (by Frandsen), as well as Culley, Jesuits, 176 and 216–18, who argues that “it does not seem to be an exaggeration to say that Carissimi himself was one of the principal causes of the musical hegemony which Italy maintained in Germany during the seventeenth century” (p. 176).

¹⁷ See Hitchcock’s Grove article on Charpentier. The copy of Jephte, in Charpentier’s hand, is now at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de la Musique, MS VM1-1477.

¹⁸Cathy Ann Elias reminds me that God does not in fact reply to Jephthah’s vow, which reinforces its fundamental wrongness. This is in vivid contrast to the story of Abraham and Isaac, which is set into motion by the voice of God. I am grateful to Dr. Elias for conversations on the story of Jephthah and its interpretation.

¹⁹ Sypherd, Jephthah and His Daughter, gives an exhaustive study of available treatments. Aside from Pseudo-Philo, which will be discussed below, and a planctus by Peter Abelard, Sypherd’s few ancient and medieval examples consist mostly of cursory references in religious texts.

²⁰ The various interpretations are discussed comprehensively in chapter 2 of Thompson, Writing the Wrongs: Women of the Old Testament among Biblical Commentators from Philo through the Reformation.

²¹ In addition to Thompson, Writing the Wrongs, 108–11, see chap. 2 of Brown, No Longer Be Silent: First[-]Century Jewish Portraits of Biblical Women.  

²² Described in Thompson, Writing the Wrongs, 150–52 (on Kimhi and Nicholas) and 154–69 (on their reception in the sixteenth century, including Buchanan’s play).

²³ Shuger, Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity, 134. It became very popular after its publication in 1554, with multiple editions and early translations into French, Italian, German, Hungarian, and Polish. Shuger characterizes Buchanan at this time as “still an Erasmian Catholic although probably inclining toward Protestantism”; she also discusses how Buchanan highlights and enhances similarities of the story to Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis.

²⁴ Shuger, Renaissance Bible, chap. 4, “Iphigenia in Israel,” esp. 138–48. She further notes that the angel’s prologue, which tells of the vow long before Jephthah makes it, raises the notion that Jephthah did not freely choose to make the vow but was predestined to do it. Under these circumstances, it may not be as problematic that the daughter is, in the end, sacrificed, because it can be seen as God’s will.

²⁵ Kellner, “‘Die große Frage’: zur Rezeption des alttestamentarischen Motivs Jephtha in Literatur und Musik,” 59–66, and Morelli, “La circolazione dell’oratorio italiano nel seicento.”

²⁶ Discussed in Sypherd, Jephthah and His Daughter, 50–56. This typological interpretation has medieval roots, though the more common version, espoused by Isidore of Seville among others, sees the daughter as “a type of Christ’s humanity rather than simply of Christ himself”; see Thompson, Writing the Wrongs, 136. Valentin, Les Jésuites et le théâtre (1554–1680): Contribution à l’histoire culturelle du monde catholique dans le Saint-Empire romain germanique, 561–62, argues, on the basis of the program of the Ingolstadt production (the only remaining trace of the first version of the play), that this typological emphasis is part of a revision of the play between its initial performance and publication, not part of the 1637 Ingolstadt production.

²⁷ These figures combine the overlapping data presented in Sypherd, Jephthah and His Daughter; Valentin, Le Théâtre des Jésuites dans les pays de langue allemande: Répertoire chronologique des pièces représentées et des documents conservés (1555–1773); and Dyer, “Emergence.” Acosta’s play is also discussed in O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 223–25. According to Dyer, by the seventeenth century Jephthah had become the single most popular subject for Jesuit school plays (1:197); this popularity continued into the eighteenth century. In most cases the play does not survive, but programs are common. Jephthah was also the subject of one of the biblical episodes described by Ludwig Müller, member of the imperial court, as part of the Corpus Christi procession in Munich in a manuscript dating from the early 1590s; this representation was to include an instrumental performance by the students of St. Michael’s, the Jesuit school in Munich, possibly representing the virgin companions of Jephthah’s daughter. See Fisher, Music, Piety, and Propaganda, 262.

²⁸ Tronsarelli, Drammi musicali. A brief discussion of the text appears in Sypherd, Jephthah and His Daughter, 112. Smither’s Grove article “Oratorio” suggests that this and similar texts may have been “intended to be set to music for performances in oratories” that presented Italian oratorios, such as the Chiesa Nuova in Rome. Hammond cites a 1648 source as evidence that Tronsarelli “was educated by the Jesuits” in his Grove article on Tronsarelli.

²⁹ Filippi, “The Orator’s Performance: Gesture, Word, and Theatre at the Collegio Romano,” 519.

³⁰ A good summary of the issue of Bernini’s relationship with the Exercises can be found in Bailey, “‘Le style jésuite n’existe pas’: Jesuit Corporate Culture and the Visual Arts,” 75n23.

³¹ Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, sections 65–69, pp. 46–47. This composition of place is followed with a colloquy with Christ. It should be noted that the “weeks” of the Exercises are not necessarily experienced within seven calendar days, even within the context of a thirty-day retreat; they are best seen as stages of varying lengths.

³² Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, section 192, p. 81.

³³ Buser, “Jerome Nadal and Early Jesuit Art in Rome.” A digitized form of this book can be found at https://books.google.com/books?id=-sZiAAAAcAAJ.

³⁴ Korrick, “On the Meaning of Style: Nicolò Circignani in Counter-Reformation Rome,” 170.

See also Monssen, “Rex gloriose martyrum: A Contribution to Jesuit Iconography”; Monssen “The Martyrdom Cycle in Santo Stefano Rotondo, Part Two.”; and Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565–1610. A digitized version of Cavalieri’s engravings of the frescos at S. Apollinare can be found at https://books.google.com/books?id=_oxiAAAAcAAJ. Buser, “Nadal,” sees the frescos in these three churches in part as a response to John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which depicted Protestant martyrdoms.

³⁵ The 1650 date is based on the fact that the final chorus is printed in Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia universalis, published in that year; this was the only publication of any part of the work during Carissimi’s lifetime. Jones’s Grove article on Carissimi argues that the oratorio was actually written by 1648, because its censorship report (praepositus generalis) was dated 16 June 1648. Jones, “Carissimi Manuscripts in Paris and Bologna: Problems of Authenticity and Dating,” 179n10, notes that there are at least twenty-nine manuscript sources for Jephte, but Carissimi’s own manuscript has been lost.

³⁶ Smither, A History of the Oratorio, chapter 5, discusses both the Crocifisso and Carissimi’s oratorios. Cannon, “Carissimi’s ‘Oratorios’ in Search of a Genre,” has questioned this generic classification, arguing that Jephte and similar works often called oratorios by modern scholars are rather examples of the dialogue motet, another genre to which Carissimi contributed, but his conclusions are not generally accepted. Smither, “Carissimi’s Latin Oratorios: Their Terminology, Functions, and Position in Oratorio History,” notes that the term “oratorio” is not consistently used to refer to a musical genre until the 1660s (pp. 63–64), and that Kircher called Jephte a dialogue in his Musurgia Universalis (p. 62), but he concludes that Jephte is among the “dramatic dialogues which Carissimi’s contemporaries would no doubt have termed oratorios in the dramatic genre sense” (pp. 70–71). Still, he writes that while “[t]here is a tendency in the Carissimi literature…to assume that his oratorios were intended primarily or exclusively” for the Crocifisso, “there are indications that church performances of these works, treating them as large motets, may have been more likely than has been assumed” (p. 72). Jones, Motets, chapter 4, approaches the question from the other direction; he too places Jephte among the oratorios.

³⁷ Dixon argues that “it is not inconceivable that some of [Carissimi’s] Lenten pieces on Latin texts were written for the German College itself…” (Carissimi, 3); he similarly suggests that oratorios intended for the Crocifisso “could also be performed at smaller devotional gatherings or services, perhaps at the German College” (p. 41). On the various uses of music within Jesuit school plays, see Dyer, “Emergence,” chap. 4. Smither also acknowledges the possibility of performing Carissimi’s oratorios at S. Apollinare, even at Mass, noting the use of dialogues by Lorenzo Ratti, Carissimi’s predecessor, in place of the offertory (Oratorio, 1:218). Culley writes that Christine of Sweden had oratorios performed for her each Wednesday during Lent; this would provide another opportunity for the performance of works such as Jephte (Jesuits, 180). Crook, “A Sixteenth-Century Catalog of Prohibited Music,” 17, also notes the recreational use of motets and other pieces of sacred music at the Jesuit college in Munich in the sixteenth century.

³⁸ The two orders are often contrasted on the basis of organization, but most writers do not deny that both try to reach a broad, largely lay, audience through the use of a rhetorical, affective spirituality. Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565–1610, 17, argues that “in reality the two [orders] are more alike than different.” Dyer, “Emergence,” chaps. 6–11, further notes similarities in dramatic and musical practice. She further observes that the maestri of the Jesuit colleges and the Oratorians frequently worked together, and that “there is evidence during the period c. 1640–c. 1660 that works regarded as Latin oratorios by Smither, Johnson, Pasquetti, Alaleona, et al., were inserted as independent prologues and choruses in Jesuit school theatrical productions” (1:305). Morelli, “‘Il muovere’,” does draw distinctions between the two orders, not only in terms of organization but also spiritual approach, characterizing the Oratorians by “a familiar, immediate, spontaneous, open approach” opposed to the “austere, gloomy, rigid, rational style, almost detached from the world” of the Jesuits. While he may be correct about some aspects of Jesuit procedure, I believe his conclusion is belied by aspects of the Spiritual Exercises, as well as the use of art, drama, and music in educational and spiritual contexts, at least for lay audiences. That said, what he characterizes as the emotional response of music in Oratorian circles (at least in the early seventeenth century, after the shift from congregational to professional singing) is less about entering into the story than being moved to tears by it in a form of catharsis.  

³⁹ Translated in Palisca, Baroque Music, 126. Kircher’s text is followed by a musical example of the final chorus of Jephte consisting of one complete statement of the text. This discussion forms part of book 7, chapter 6, “Qua ratione instituenda melothesia, ut datum quemuis affectum moueat,” specifically the second section, “De Affectu doloris.”

⁴⁰ The historicus’s part is not explicitly labeled in Charpentier’s copy of Jephte, and editions are understandably inconsistent on this point. Smither notes that the divided distribution of the narrative role happens fairly often among Carissimi’s works but is rare elsewhere (A History of the Oratorio, 243). He further observes that the sources “do not always distinguish between choruses and ensembles of soloists” (p. 244). “Chorus” as used here may not refer to a group with several singers on each part, but simply the combination of all solo singers, as commonly occurs at the end of baroque operas, though Smither finds choral performance “appropriate” in at least several instances, including the final chorus.

⁴¹Jacobson, A Commentary on Pseudo-Philo’s Liber antiquitatum biblicarum with Latin Text and English Translation, 60–61 (Latin) and 161 (English).

⁴² Text from Choral Public Domain Library (CPDL), http://www2.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Historia_di_Jephte_(Giacomo_Carissimi), accessed 6 April 2018; translation slightly altered.

⁴³ Jones, Motets, 1:142, suggests that some motet texts may have been written by Odoardo Ceccarelli, a singer at S. Apollinare. In further noting that Jesuits at the Collegio would have been capable of creating texts for the purpose, he observes that some motet texts “display a preference for scriptural subjects and images which were characteristic of (though not exclusive to) Jesuit spirituality.” Dyer, “Emergence,” argues that, as far as can be determined, given that many remain anonymous, most Jesuit school plays in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were written by Jesuits, especially the local professor of rhetoric or poetry (1:214).

⁴⁴ See Stein, “Carissimi’s Tonal System and the Function of Transposition in the Expansion of Tonality.” I find this notion of paired tonal areas to be more fruitful than the use of the modal system by Susan McClary in her postlude to Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music, 293–99; however, I do not believe these interpretations to be entirely contradictory in a repertory that, as Joel Lester and others have put it, operates between modes and keys. Smither discusses this type of repetition as a rhetorical device in A History of the Oratorio, 229–30.

⁴⁵Jones, Motets, 1:227–30, notes that “ululate” uses a Neapolitan sixth chord, which Carissimi uses elsewhere in contexts “relating to death, suffering, sin and extremes of spiritual emotion.”

⁴⁶The shift to the minor took place only slightly earlier, at the moment the historicus tells us that Jephthah saw his daughter; most of the music to this point focused on the major-third axis of G-C.

⁴⁷Jones’s Grove article on Carissimi argues that the melodic and rhythmic “restraint” of the daughter’s lines stands in contrast to the expressive dissonances of the chorus. While this may be true of the final section of her lament, I believe this restraint is hard won, and the inner sections betray an extreme emotionality that leads from her public, outward acceptance to her final inward acceptance.

⁴⁸ Smith, “Why Does Jephtha Misunderstand His Own Vow?,” 79–80, argues that at this moment the chorus in fact is short-sighted in its dark interpretation of God’s will, unaware of the “miracle of deliverance” that ends Handel’s oratorio, when an angel saves Jephthah’s daughter.

⁴⁹ On the use of descending lines as a sign of lament, see Rosand, “The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament.” This chorus does not use an ostinato, as Rosand’s examples do, but it does begin with two identical statements of a descending-tetrachordal bass, before the motive is taken up as a melodic line at in carmine doloris. Since Rosand’s examples are arias, it is not surprising that the musical emblem is treated differently here.

⁵⁰ Smith, “Intellectual Contexts of Handel’s English Oratorios,” 122. This distinction drawn between the observer and the stage is in fact the opposite of the Jesuit “composition of place.”

⁵¹ Dell’Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice, 32.

⁵² Kendrick, “Martyrdom in Seventeenth-Century Italian Music.” He does not give a definitive reason for the relatively high use of female martyrs, observing (p. 125) that, because little is known about the audience for oratorios outside Rome and Bologna, “it is thus not clear if the presence of women martyrs in this sample is due to…a disproportionately female public for these works, the importance of aristocratic women as their patronesses, or (perhaps more tellingly) a wider phenomenon: the overall feminization of female piety in the later part of the century.” On the use of virgin martyr stories in drama, see also Shuger, Renaissance Bible, chap. 4.

⁵³ He notes that nuns are frequent creators and consumers of the pieces he studies, and that nuns are also often associated with forms of devotion that include physical suffering that “substitute for the tortures of martyrdom” (Kendrick, “Martyrdom,” 128).

⁵⁴ Kendrick, “Martyrdom,” 132–33.

⁵⁵ Dell’Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice, 7.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 34, emphasis original.

⁵⁷ Here I do not include Tronsarelli’s free-standing lament, or the medieval lament of Abelard, since they do not narrate or enact the story.

⁵⁸ Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, section 23, p. 32.

 

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Appendix

Transcription of final lament and chorus. Newly edited from Charpentier’s copy of Carissimi’s Jephte (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de la Musique, MS VM1-1477, accessed from Gallica Intra Muros, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b52000186b.r=carissimi%20jephte?rk=42918;4, 6 May 2018. The hastily-made manuscript is not foliated or paginated, and some pages are cut off at the bottom, making figures difficult to read. In addition, the final two bifolios are reversed, and the last chord is missing. While the text has no punctuation, I have added some but kept it to a minimum. In the figures, I have maintained Charpentier’s use of sharps and flats in the sense of “mi” and “fa,” so an A minor chord uses a flat for C natural.