other · 518–556 · Constantinople
The kontakion as Romanos made it is a long metrical homily in stanzas with a refrain the congregation sings back, and it is mostly dialogue — Mary arguing with Joseph, the Devil with Death, Peter with Christ, the whole scene played out in character. He was a Syrian from Emesa, a deacon at Berytus and then at Constantinople under Anastasius, and the tradition says he could not sing and was humiliated for it, and that the Theotokos appeared to him on Christmas eve, handed him a scroll and told him to eat it, after which he went up and sang the Nativity kontakion — the one beginning with the Virgin bringing forth him who is above all being. That kontakion was sung at the imperial banquet at Christmas for centuries. About sixty survive of the thousand attributed to him. The form did not last in full: by the eighth century the canon had displaced it, and what is called a kontakion in the service books now is just its first stanza. But the Akathist hymn, which is the one long specimen the Byzantine rite still sings entire, belongs to this world, and Romanos is why it exists.
Can a sermon be sung, and can it be a drama?
Both, and he wrote about a thousand of them.