When delving into the realm of Carissimi's longer pieces, the true oratorios, it's practically impossible not to compare them unfavorably with Jephte, his enduring masterpiece of the form. But the much briefer works, including motets like Damnatorum lamentatio, escape that crushing comparison and have another kind of charm. More like madrigals or songs, the motets are easily digestible, less literary in tone, less "art" in their effect; they can be enjoyed as pure entertainment. This is largely because the scale of musical time they operate within is so tidily compressed. The text of Damnatorum lamentatio is extremely long for a piece of its length (about eight minutes), and there's a slight sense of haste throughout, as if the composer is struggling to get it all out. The title translates as Lamentation of the Damned and the poem is a spicy morsel of Jesuit propaganda. It dwells on mostly first-person descriptions of the horrors that befall the wicked in Hell. The tone it begins in is the same that it ends in, preaching: "The impious shall be tormented with tremendous fear!" With such a colorful text, Carissimi naturally has a good time with the word painting. Immediately noticeable are his settings of the cries of the damned, where he has all the voices blend in a chromatic, staggered layering of a short motif as they howl: "Woe is us the wretched ones! How we suffer!" Twenty first century sensibility and Carissimi's collide a moment later when, after the damned have so achingly cried out, the music shifts into a cheerful, dance-like refrain on the not-very-cheerful words: "Perish the day we were born!" The shift of mood makes the listener feel a bit like a dried bean rattled around in a bottle, but it's brief enough to be ironically enjoyable. Carissimi uses fairly little counterpoint throughout Damnatorum so that cleverly varied repetition and overlapping of melodic phrases at their tail ends become the principal engines of the music. It's a scheme that fits very comfortably into the oiled grooves of a modern mind. Damnatorum lamentatio has a companion piece, the oratorio/motet Felicitas beatorum, which deals with exactly the opposite subject matter: it is a thankful first-person account of the rewards granted to the righteous in Heaven. It perhaps tells of something significant about Carissimi's personal character that the song of damnation is only half as long as the song of joyful thanks.

© All Music Guide

Portions of Content Provided by All Music Guide.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.