century or more by the authors of sacra azione, written to take the
place of secular operas in Lent. The stories of Jephtha and his
daughter, Hezekiah, Belshazzar, Abraham and Isaac, Jonah, Job, the
Judgment of Solomon, and the Last Judgment became the staple of
opera composers in Italy and Germany for more than a century.
Alessandro Scarlatti, whose name looms large in the history of
opera, also composed oratorios; and Mr. E. J. Dent, his biographer,
has pointed out that "except that the operas are in three acts and
the oratorios in two, the only difference is in the absence of
professedly comic characters and of the formal statement in which
the author protests that the words fata, dio, dieta, etc., are only
scherzi poetici and imply nothing contrary to the Catholic faith."
Zeno and Metastasio wrote texts for sacred operas as well as
profane, with Tobias, Absalom, Joseph, David, Daniel, and Sisera as
subjects.

Presently I shall attempt a discussion of the gigantic attempt made
by Rubinstein to enrich the stage with an art-form to which he gave
a distinctive name, but which was little else than, an inflated
type of the old sacra azione, employing the larger apparatus which
modern invention and enterprise have placed at the command of the
playwright, stage manager, and composer. I am compelled to see in
his project chiefly a jealous ambition to rival the great and
triumphant accomplishment of Richard Wagner, but it is possible
that he had a prescient eye on a coming time. The desire to combine
pictures with oratorio has survived the practice which prevailed
down to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Handel used scenes
and costumes when he produced his "Esther," as well as his "Acis
and Galatea," in London. Dittersdorf has left for us a description
of the stage decorations prepared for his oratorios when they were