Church music this is, but how so? Only a very generous reading of the text could yield a religious interpretation of it. It runs through a slew of conventional images of love poetry, expressing profound world-weariness and the tyrannic preeminence of the "one drop," the only one that satisfies, despite all. This one drop may be God, or the holy spirit, and the implied unimportance of the world and its ephemeral pleasures may imply the ultimate superiority of religion and heaven. But on has to read through a glade of rather secular images to get to that spiritual nut. What Qui tandem sunt says instead is that Carissimi was choosing texts not for the opportunities of religious edification they provided, but for the opportunities to write dazzling vocal music through vivid word-painting. In fact, so many of the texts require such imagination to think of as spiritually valuable that it is realized that San Apollinaire, the church in Rome where he worked, was for him, above all else, a glorious concert hall. A man of his time, if not ahead of it, his first loyalty was to the sweetnesses of music and his favored delights were in the honeyed rays of the virtuosic human voice. Qui tandem sunt is an impressively rich expression of that sensibility. It is fairly brief (under five minutes), but also has for this reason a beautiful compactness and surface polish. Not a measure is wasted: the alto opens, soon moving on to a difficult scurry of melisma on the word "delights." From then on, the piece feels like a friendly competition (like a beauty pageant) between the voices who only multiply each others' beauty when they sing together and push each other aside to take their own moments, voices dancing in the air through "oceans of sweetness," "spring flowers," intoxicating perfumes, and the "lovable tyrant..." of the world whose tricking honey "completely bathes the lips." The first point in the Papal edict was approximately that "the style of all church music should be serious and devout." Either Carissimi, himself a man of the cloth, had his own idea of what those words meant, or he was cheating outright. Either way, thank God.

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