WHEN Jephte's daughter beautifully laments by relentlessly exploiting a chromatic inflection of the Neapolitan sixth chord in Giacomo Carissimi's oratorio Jephte (c.1650), it becomes clear that this piece is actually about her and not about her father as the title suggests, for she is the one who sings the most memorable music. This nameless, obedient creature from the Old Testament is in Carissimi's oratorio depicted in a rather different light: the musical representation of her acceptance of the destiny forced upon her is of a truly dramatic diva whose inner struggle moves from grieving to rage and despair, and from bitter memory to final acceptance. Carissimi even makes her cries resound in echo, thus giving her the power to reflect through music. ‘Lament, ye valleys, bewail, ye mountains and in the affliction of my heart be afflicted’: the first soprano repeats the daughter's phrase, and the second soprano imitates it at the upper third, simulating the reverberations of the voice through the mountains. The combination of various rhetoric devices – the deflection to the Neapolitan harmonic sphere, the use of echo and its elevated repetition – create the powerful effect in this lamenting scene. Jephte displays many of the expressive potentials of seventeenth-century music, but the echoing voice brings them all together. The echoing voice is a rhetorical reinforcement of the personal outburst of sorrow and the musical representation of a reflective early modern self, which, although aware of personal potentials and limits, is still deeply conflicted about the same: what are the potentials, and where do the limits begin? Jephte's daughter accepts her destiny, not with an easy acceptance, but with a questioning one.

Around the time of the creation of Carissimi's oratorio, Athanasius Kircher (c.1602–80) – ‘the last man who knew everything’ – writes about the phenomenon of echoing and its connection to the ancient classical myth of a runaway nymph, Echo: