The five-section work, less a symphony than a dramatic cantata or oratorio, foreshadowed with uncanny accuracy the changes that were about to shake Soviet society.

Described as an "antebellum landmark" in dramatic cantatas, according to Blumhofer it "featured the contemporary evangelical reading of American history".

It is often referred to not as an opera, but as a serenata, a type of dramatic cantata.

During his time at Halle he became particularly renowned as a composer of dramatic cantatas.

He first came to prominence in 1968 with his dramatic cantata The Whale, based on the Old Testament story of Jonah.

The Gate of Life: a dramatic cantata, music by Franco Leoni (1898)

Britten was still drawing on his own vast reserves of humanity in the dramatic cantata "Phaedra," written in 1975, a year before his death.

The Whale is a "dramatic cantata" written by the English composer John Tavener in 1966.

But it also resembles a dramatic cantata that in places, especially the extended finale, becomes explicitly operatic.

It Happens Like This, a dramatic cantata on poems of James Tate (2010)