The sacra rappresentazione or sacred play with music had a long history, even if we do not attempt
to trace it all the way back to the medieval liturgical dramas described in chapter 3. In the fifteenth
century it had developed out of the singing of laude that embodied dialogues. Most of the fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century rappresentazioni were declaimed, aria-style, to melodic formulas or over ground
basses, with frottolas, madrigals, and instrumental pieces interspersed. Some surviving instrumental
works by Henricus Isaac, including a wild Moorish dance and a battaglia, are thought to be remnants
from such plays, possibly from Lorenzo de’ Medici’s own SS. Giovanni e Paolo.
Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione was very much in the existing tradition, since it was basically an
expansion of an old lauda, Anima mia che pensi, that took the form of a dialogue between body and soul.
It was, however, the first such play to sport continuous music, some of it in the new dramatic style that the
composer had pioneered in his pastorals. The first dialogue between the title characters (some of it shown
in Fig. 19-4) is actually a setting of the old lauda, of which a polyphonic version had been published in
1577 (Ex. 19-10a). What had merely been two successive strophes in the lauda now becomes a highly
contrasted colloquy (Ex. 19-10b): the question, posed by the body in recitative style, is answered by the
soul in a dancelike aria.
At its first performance it was a play in the full sense of the word, but since it was performed
immediately before Lent in the assembly hall of an Oratory, it prefigures the specifically Lenten genre of
Biblical favole in musica, scriptural musical tales in dramatic “recitar cantando” form but nonstaged.
That genre, which came to be called oratorio after its performance venue, arose a few decades later in
response to the institution of public musical theaters, which had to close during Lent. It had a