A term used in the 15th and 16th centuries to designate a kind of religious play with music in the Italian language, cultivated chiefly in Florence. The texts, written mostly in ottava rima, were drawn mainly from the Bible or hagiography, but also include secular scenes and even comic elements. Among the best-known authors of the approximately 100 surviving texts were Feo Belcari, Castellano Castellani, Lorenzo de' Medici, Antonia Pulci and Bernardo Pulci. Boys in costume performed the rappresentazioni sacre on a stage with sets and in some cases elaborate machinery. Melodic formulae seem to have been used to intone most of the lines (Becherini, 1951), interspersed with laudi, frottolas, canzoni and (in the 16th century) madrigals. Most of the musical numbers in 16th-century rappresentazioni sacre belonged to the intermedi, dramatic interludes with music performed between scenes of a play for the sake of variety and to enlarge upon the events of the drama. The rappresentazione sacra is a significant forerunner of both opera and oratorio. Emilio de' Cavalieri's Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo (1600) forms part of the tradition at the Roman Congregazione dell'Oratorio, extending from the late 16th century to the late 17th, of using young boys as actors in spiritual plays, which were usually given during Carnival (see Morelli, 82–7). Some such plays included musical insertions, others intermedi, and still others (like Cavalieri's) were sung throughout. One study argues that Cavalieri's Rappresentatione was the earliest ‘moral opera’ (Gianturco, 175–7).
During the second half of the 17th century in Vienna the term ‘rappresentazione sacra’ was often applied to the sepolcro.
See also Medieval drama, §III, 3(iv), and Oratorio.
A. d'Ancona: Sacre rappresentazioni dei secoli XIV, XV, e XVI (Florence, 1872)
A. d'Ancona: Le origini del teatro italiano (Turin, 2/1891)
A. Bonfantini: Le sacre rappresentazioni italiane (Milan, 1942)
V. de Bartholomaeis, ed.: Laude drammatiche e rappresentazioni sacre (Florence, 1943/R)
B. Becherini: ‘La Rappresentazione di Anima e Corpo di Emilio de' Cavalieri’, RaM, viii (1943), 1–34
B. Becherini: ‘La musica nelle “sacre rappresentazioni” fiorentine’, RMI, liii (1951), 193–241
G. Distaso: De l'altre meraviglie: teatro religioso in Puglia (secoli XVI–XVIII) (Milan, 1987)
A. Morelli: Il tempio armonico: musica nell'Oratorio dei Filippini in Roma (1575–1705), AnMc, no.27 (1991)
C. Gianturco: ‘Opera sacra e opera morale: due “altri” tipi di dramma musicale’, Il melodramma italiano in Italia e in Germania nell'età Barocca: Como 1993, 169–77
HOWARD E. SMITHER