In seventeenth-century Italy the term ‘oratorio’ was applied to certain vocal musical works having characteristics in common but often quite different in scale and style. The fact that the word did not appear in the title of a work did not necessarily debar it from being considered a member of the genre. Almost any vocal work having a non-liturgical religious text, written for more than one singer and of greater extent than a single aria or chorus, could be considered an oratorio. Since the form was largely confined to Catholic Italy, the texts were invariably in Italian or Latin, and generally there was an implication that the work was dramatic – that is, the singers, at least when performing solo, represented named characters, whether historical, mythical, supernatural or allegorical. The text might include narration, sung either by a single voice or shared among a number of singers, thus setting the work at a distance from pure theatrical drama, while by no means precluding highly personalised emotion. The best-known example of an oratorio of the mid-seventeenth century, Giacomo Carissimi's Historia de Jepthes, has several narrative solos, but the main characters of Jephtha and his daughter are impersonated consistently by a tenor and a soprano, and the Israelites by the chorus. Their music is powerfully expressive, and clearly designed to involve the listener in the events of the tragic story and its effects on the participants.