The motet Lucifer sets a dramatic narrative text describing the fall of Lucifer from grace; most of it is either quotation of Lucifer bragging before his fall or quotation of God condemning him. Like a number of Monteverdi's later madrigals (books five and six), Lucifer is a tiny, five-minute compression of a drama; pieces like these have created scholarly confusion over the true distinctions between the genres motet and oratorio. The humorous typecasting of a bass voice as Lucifer goes back at least as far as Hildegard of Bingen and her oratorio Ordo Virtutum, where a bass Devil, not allowed to sing, barks out his evil Latin lines. In Carissimi's motet, in sharp contrast, the rebel angel Lucifer is not only allowed to sing beautifully, but his music isn't stylistically any different from God's. Musical times had indeed changed since the eleventh century. Lucifer's ironically fateful proclamations of his equality to God are of course set in the virtuosic coloratura, as are God's vicious commands. The climax of the piece is at ad flammas, when it's overtaken with a mood of morbid witch-burning glee. The line in question translates: "Condemn the proud rebels to the fires of hell." After a relatively soft setting of a line about exterminating the multitude, the meter then switches to triple and the red passion is drummed up before the "flammas" is repeated several times with growing lustful intensity, climaxing with a fiery roll of melisma. Perhaps Lucifer is a kind of advertisement for Carissimi's full-fledged oratorios. The fairly virtuosic nature of the vocal writing in it is slightly surprising. Carissimi's other solo bass motet, O vulnera doloris, makes no heavy demands on the singer. Compared to the abundance of highly skilled sopranos, the supply of virtuoso basses was probably slight, so writing difficult music for them would have been mostly wasted effort. The very flowery Lucifer, with some very tricky passages and ornaments, is, however, still fairly muted in comparison to the solo soprano motets. There is a clear sense throughout the push and pull of Carissimi's creative imagination against the realities of performance conditions. A lot of melodic mileage is made in this piece by sequencing phrases, also making Lucifer, oddly enough, something to hum along with.

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