Fruits of the Cross: Passiontide Music Theater in Habsburg Vienna 9780520969872

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Fruits of the Cross

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Margarita M. Hanson Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Constance and William Withey Endowment Fund in History and Music.

Fruits of the Cross Passiontide Music Theater in Habsburg Vienna

Robert L. Kendrick

university of california press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2019 by Robert L. Kendrick Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kendrick, Robert L., author. Title: Fruits of the cross : Passiontide music theater in Habsburg Vienna / Robert L. Kendrick. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: lccn 2018023733 (print) | lccn 2018027723 (ebook) | isbn 9780520969872 (E-book) | isbn 9780520297579 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Sepolcri—Austria—Vienna—17th century—History and criticism. | Habsburg, House of—History—17th century. | Dramatic music— Europe, Central—17th century—History and criticism. Classification: lcc ml3222.2 (ebook) | lcc ml3222.2 . k46 2019 (print) | ddc 782.2/4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023733 Manufactured in the United States of America 27 10

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The design here [the lament of the Three Marys at Christ’s Tomb in medieval English plays] is a kind of dramatic action which some modern definitions of action would altogether exclude: the action of a structure of feeling, expressed in a rhythmic pattern, of dramatic speech at a gained point of stillness and intensity. —Raymond Williams, Drama in Performance

Contents

List of Illustrations List of Music Examples Acknowledgments Abbreviations and Notes on Sources

1. 2. 3. 4.

Introduction Passion and Theater Devotional Strategies Social Others and Selves Music and Its Affects Epilogue: The Power of the Cross

Appendix 1. Checklist of Sepolcri, 1660–1711 Appendix 2. The Preserved Repertory, 1660–1705, and Its Possible Tonalities Appendix 3. Possible Burnacini Drawings for Sepolcri Notes Bibliography General Index Index of Sepolcri by Short Title

ix xi xiii xv

1 10 45 78 119 152

163 168 170 171 203 213 218

Illustrations

1. Frans Luycx, Crucifixion with Habsburg Mourners (c. 1662) / 8 2. J. A. Pfeffel and C. Engelbrecht (after J. C. Hackhofer), 1705 view of the Hofburgkapelle / 15 3. Photomontage: Hofburgkapelle in 1705; Burnacini’s 1692 set design “The Sacrifice of Isaac”; eighteenth-century Tomb / 16 4. Plan: The Alte Burg complex in the late seventeenth century / 18 5. L. O. Burnacini, Moses and the Burning Bush / 29 6. L. O. Burnacini, Jonah Cast Overboard / 32 7. L. O. Burnacini, Punishment of Core and Followers / 80 8. L. O. Burnacini, Tempest with Shipwreck / 87 9. L. O. Burnacini, The Sacrifice of Isaac / 128

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Music Examples

1.1. 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 3.1. 3.2.

G. Tricarico, La Gara della Misericordia e Giustizia (1661; A-Wn 18716), “Uccidetemi omai,” f. 8v / 41 J. H. Schmelzer, Stärcke der Lieb (1677; A-Wn 16883), “Uebe dich forthin,” f. 16 / 57 Leopold I, Il Lutto dell’universo (1668; A-Wn 16899), “Ha l’ocaso nell’orto,” f. 39v / 71 Leopold I, Il Lutto dell’universo, “O voi che n’andate,” f. 26v / 73 M. A. Ziani, Il Sepolcro nell’orto (1711; A-Wn 19131), “Cieca Gierusalemme,” f. 36 / 93 A. Draghi, Il Sole eclissato (1676; A-Wn 16878), Sinfonia, f. 5 / 98

3.3.

G. F. Sances, Sette consolationi di Maria (1670; A-Wn 16912), “Si, consolati,” f. 11 / 111 3.4a–b. G. F. Sances, Sette consolationi di Maria, “E si rende soggetto,” f. 13 / 112 4.1. J. H. Schmelzer, Le Memorie dolorose (1678; A-Wn 16915), recitative by Leopold I, “O quali mi destate, memorie dolorose,” f.10v / 130 4.2a–b. A. Draghi, Il Libro con sette sigilli (1694; A-Wn 18943), “Divino libro (è ver) . . . Dato in luce a mezza notte,” f. 48v / 136

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4.3. 4.4. 4.5. 4.6. 5.1. 5.2.

Music Examples

A. Draghi, Il Libro con sette sigilli, accompanied recitative “Si spezza’l suolo,” f. 69v / 139 G. F. Sances, Sette consolationi di Maria, “Maria vive, e morto è Christo,” f. 4v / 141 A. Draghi, Il Segno della humana salute (1684; A-Wn 18914), “Altro non posso far io,” opening, f. 39v / 149 A. Draghi, Il Segno della humana salute (1684; A-Wn 18914), “Altro non posso far io,” ending, f. 43v / 150 A. Draghi, La Virtù della Croce (1697; A-Wn 18886), “Huom felice, se’l fai tu,” f. 87 / 160 A. Draghi, La Virtù della Croce, ending, f. 91v / 161

Acknowledgments

My first debt is to the staff of the Austrian National Library, especially that of the Musiksammlung, and that of the Wien-Bibliothek, along with the Österreichische Staatsarchiv at its two branches, including the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv. I am also grateful to Dr. Rudi Risatti and Dr. Thomas Trabitsch at the Österreichisches Theatermuseum, and to Dr. Andreas Gamerith at the library of Stift Zwettl. Further thanks are due to Franco Colussi, Rubens Bertini, and Tommaso Sabbatini for checking on various matters in Italy. But this book could not have been finished without the aid of Austrian colleagues: Martin Eybl, Gernot Mayer, and Franz Eybl. The previous work on the overall Viennese repertory by Herbert Seifert, Steven Saunders, Alfred Noe, Andrea Sommer-Mathis, Harry White, Marko Deisinger, Çiğdem Özel, and Janet Page has been of enormous aid, and I strongly recommend reading their works in conjunction with the present study. For art-historical advice, I am indebted to Alice Jarrard and Walter Melion; for expert wisdom in historical acoustics, to Dorothea Baumann; and for guidance in political history, to Georg Michels and Gianvittorio Signorotto. My thoughts about tonal constructs in this repertory are predicated on the fundamental work of Gregory Barnett and Michael Dodds. Helpful critiques of chapters were provided by my 2016–17 colleagues at the Franke Institute for the Humanities, not least its director, James Chandler, and by the readers for the University of California Press. Just as the final version went in, the performance of Le Memorie dolorose by New xiii

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Acknowledgments

York City’s Tenet and Acronym ensembles gave me the privilege of hearing one of these rare works come to life, for which I am grateful to Kivie Cahn-Lipman and Jolle Greenleaf. For counsel in literary matters, I thank Armando Maggi, Erminia Ardissino, and Eugenio Refini. At a key point, Jonathan Glixon encouraged me to tackle prejudice in the texts head-on. I remember Ray Gadke, who, alas, passed away just as the manuscript was completed, for his unending help with microfilms and many other library moments. Other individuals and institutions were also vital sources of information: the Biblioteca Federiciana of Fano; Dr. Angela De Benedictis at the Paul-Sacher-Stiftung; Michele Chiappini; the Archivio Segreto Vaticano; Nicoletta Pisu in Trent; and, for special help in Mantua, Licia Mari at the Archivio Storico Diocesano. I am grateful to Andrew McManus for running the music examples, and to Clare Snarski for Photoshop expertise. As always, Lucia Marchi has aided the book’s gestation in many ways. One other scholar, from the past, deserves commemoration here. It must not have been easy for Flora Biach-Schiffmann, older than the other students and from a Jewish family, to complete her dissertation in art history at the University of Vienna in the 1920s on Giovanni and Ludovico Burnacini’s set designs for operas, oratorios, and sepolcri, given that the faculty members Professor Josef Stryzgowski and his Assistent Karl Ginhart espoused racist theories or were even Nazi Party members. Still, she published her work in 1931, and it remains the starting point for work on theater design in this repertory. Along with her husband, she was deported from the temporary mass housing for Jews in Vienna’s Second District, via the Aspergbahnhof, to Theresienstadt on 22 July 1942 and was murdered on 13 October of that year. At a moment when many phantoms of hate have come back to haunt Europe and North America, remembering past wrongs becomes more important than ever.

Abbreviations and Notes on Sources

ASDMant ASMant ASMod ASV, Germania A-Wn DBI HHStA

ÖStA

Archivio Storico Diocesano, Mantua Archivio di Stato, Mantua, Archivio Gonzaga Archivio di Stato, Modena Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Segreteria di Stato, Germania Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (standard siglum from RISM; for other sigla see below) Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome, 1960–; online at www.treccani.it) Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna (Minoritenplatz); ÄZA=Ältere Zeremonialakten; AZP=Alte Zeremoniellprotokolle; HK=Hofkorrespondenz Österreichische Staatsarchiv, Vienna (Erdberg); FHKA= Finanz- und Hofkammeramt (therein: HZAB=Hofzahlamtsbücher; available at www.oesta .gv.at/site/6662/default.aspx)

All the musical scores of Leopold’s Schlafkammerbibliothek in A-Wn have been digitized and are available at www.onb.ac.at, also the site for Minato’s 1700 collection of sacred libretti, Tutte le rappresentazioni sacre (Vienna, 1700; A-Wn, *38.J.133, here abbreviated as RS), an edition typographically but not textually different from the first editions of his libretti. The pre-1670 and post-1698 libretti, along with the xv

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Abbreviations and Notes on Sources

post-1705 scores, in A-Wn have not yet been made available on the Internet. Italian poetic meters are indicated either by the technical term or by numerals and the abbreviations: p=piano; t=tronco; s=sdrucciolo. For indications of local pitch centers within pieces, I have used pitchclass names and an indication of either durus/mollis signatures (natural or 1 flat) or of seventeenth-century transpositions (e.g., “2 flats” indicating a “church-key” down a major second). Appendix 2 lists the home tonal centers of the surviving repertory according to this terminology, a practice used also in the text. Libraries bear the standard RISM sigla, available at www.rism.info/en /sigla. Historical information on Vienna in and out of the Hofburg, if not cited specifically, has been taken from F. Czeike’s Historisches Lexikon Wien (Vienna, 1992–97), online at http://www.digital.wienbibliothek.at /wbrobv/content/titleinfo/1112764. In order not to confuse readers, I have employed the forms “Eleonora Gonzaga” (II, of Mantua/Nevers, 1630– 86) and “Eleonore Magdalene” (of the Palatinate/Neuburg, 1655–1720) for Leopold I’s stepmother and third wife, respectively. All translations are mine.

Introduction

The Holy Sepulcher is unveiled; onstage there is an image of Job surrounded by his afflictions; above him, in the air, a Crucifix, with the motto “In hoc signo vinces”; and above this, a partial image of heavenly Glory with a choir of angels. First there is a sweet, not sad, instrumental introduction; then “Love of God” and “Faith in Christ” appear. Love of God: Whoever does not love You is indeed ungrateful, / Anyone is impious who does not adore You, / God, You Who have given essence to nothingness, / Eternal Creator. Faith in Christ: Anyone must be made of stone, or have a serpent’s heart, / who has no faith in these Wounds / whence the incarnate Redeemer / poured forth all His blood. a2: Infinite/incarnate all-powerful One, Love: Without You, Who created it, / Just as before [creation] it was naught / the world still would be just nothing. Faith: Without You, Who redeemed them, / souls would still be slaves / of the devil and of sin. a2: Whoever does not love You is indeed ungrateful, / Anyone is impious who does not adore You, / God, You Who have given essence to nothingness, / Eternal Creator. This scene of wonder, with its three-plane set design by Lodovico Ottavio Burnacini, its theatrical text in Italian by Nicolò Minato, and 1

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Introduction

its music by Antonio Draghi, was the opening of a central devotional moment for the Habsburg court in Vienna on Good Friday afternoon in 1697. Its emphasis on divine goodness seems at odds with both its set design—the Cross and the afflicted Job—and its ritual context, the aftermath of the morning’s ceremonies for the Adoration of the Cross and the Deposition of Christ. At the same time, the most important audience—and musical contributor of five arias—for the piece, La Virtù della Croce, was represented onstage by the biblical sufferer: Emperor Leopold I (1640–1705). He had already reigned for almost forty years, and in the preceding months had lost his sister Mariana of Austria and his second-youngest daughter to death, having previously witnessed his brother, his first two wives, three fathers-in-law, and some nine other children suffer the same fate. With its “sweet” opening sinfonia, such a rounded and duetting moment of meditation on divine infinity, material nihility, and redemption— without any explicit mention of Christ—would also seem an unusual start to Holy Week music theater titled on the power of the Cross. What could have generated this optimism at this most somber moment of the ritual year? Still, the binary patterns of Minato’s text and the hypnotic repetition of the seven-syllable Italian poetic lines confer a communicative stasis suited to the contemplation of God’s nature. In addition, the entire section is musically unified by being pitched on C with two flats, a representation of what for Draghi would have been “church-key [tuono] 1” (here transposed down a major second). The piece is one of about seventy—most but not all in Italian— written for court performance on Holy Thursday and Good Friday between 1660 and 1711. Although many libretti are titled rappresentazione sacra (sacred play), music—both vocal and instrumental, as this opening suggests—was essential to all of them. The genre is best known today by the name of its prop unveiled to begin the action, a constructed replica of Christ’s Tomb with a figure of the dead Savior inside, and thus as a sepolcro, a term used in a single libretto but otherwise typical only of the modern literature (for convenience’s sake alone, I use this anachronistic term). About forty-seven of the musical scores survive (appendixes 1 and 2), all in manuscript, while the libretti are transmitted largely in print. This kind of piece had its own norms of genre. From the beginning, its characters were both allegorical and biblical, and dramatic onstage action was sparse; many, if not all, of the texts are set in devotional time after the Entombment. Although the genre seems to have originated at

Introduction | 3

the behest of the dowager empress Eleonora (II) Gonzaga in winter 1660, it was occasionally imitated in other Viennese churches and even exported elsewhere. But in its essential structural nature, most clearly its unipartite overall form (unlike the two-section oratorio, which was normally interrupted by a sermon and performed earlier in Lent or Advent), and its physical/intellectual connection to the representation of the Tomb and to Holy Week ritual, it was a special product of music theater in early modern central Europe, one linked to sepulchral culture in general. Besides meditation on the dead Christ, the form’s thematics also focus on issues from epistemology to economics to aesthetics, in ways beyond that of the court’s large operatic repertory. For all that they have been considered in a separate category of the sacred—situated as a performative addition to the most intense days of the year—the sepolcri also partook in the theatricality that marked the dynasty’s self-understanding as well as its self-projection. By today’s standards, it might appear that the scholarly issues around the genre are hopelessly dated: allegorical drama in early modern Europe; the all-toofamiliar Pietas austriaca (a term that could be nuanced); the insularity and self-projection of the Habsburgs, not to mention the dynasty’s sheer if understandable morbidity; and the obscure post-Marinist conceptualism of the texts. But their production took place at a time of changing and conflicting devotional approaches, notable political shifts, and subtly varying organizations of knowledge; hence the seemingly antimodern stasis of the court was far from monolithic, and the works reflect this. Indeed, the discourse of death, penance, and redemption sometimes went in unexpected directions. The devotional literature circulating at court included Italian, German, Latin, and Spanish texts, and their resonances in the pieces are traced later in this study. In a wider sense, the mourning of the inaccessible Christ on display in the Tomb paradoxically raises issues of alterity and grief. The difficulty of consolation in the face of Christ’s death recurs in the genre’s discourse, and the universal omission of any mention of the forthcoming Resurrection casts a shadow over their final affect, as the royal audience would have departed to their own final meditations on the Passion that day. Any discussion of grief and allegory in seventeenth-century Europe is obviously indebted to Walter Benjamin’s considerations of literary voice and devices in Silesian Protestant “plays of mourning”; although the sepolcri are classic theater of lamentation, their theological heuristics are hard to compare to the ideology of Andreas Gryphius or Daniel von

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Introduction

Lohenstein. One feature of Minato’s libretti, at least, is the psychological complexity of the allegorical figures. Although the form maintained strong roots in the late medieval tradition, the epistemology and aesthetics of the texts are decidedly modern. In that sense, they are a parallel to, not a replica of, the German tragic repertory analyzed thematically by Benjamin. There were other generic features that set the Tomb pieces apart. From 1660 through 1686 (Eleonora Gonzaga would die later that year), there were separate works for Holy Thursday and for Good Friday, the former performed in the physical but also the labor space of the dowager empress’s chapel, the latter by Leopold’s own musicians, normally in the Hofburgkapelle. For three years between 1677 and 1682, shorter German-language examples for the chapel of Leopold’s daughter from his first marriage, Maria Antonia (1669–92), were added to the two other performances. From 1687 until 1711, works were produced only for Friday. Like operas, their texts and music, along with fresh sets, were normally created anew each year; this differs from the frequent repetition of oratorios in Vienna. In many years, there was a thematic link or dialectical contrast between the two pieces in any given Week. Their essential audience was the royals themselves: Eleonora, her two daughters, and her stepson Leopold, together with his three wives: Margherita Teresa of Spain (r. 1666–73), Claudia Felicitas of Tyrol (1673–76), and Eleonore Magdalene of Neuburg (1676–1705). From the late 1670s, Leopold’s various children must also have taken part, including his surviving sons Joseph I and Charles VI plus their spouses. After 1705 (despite his final illness, the emperor seems to have been able not only to experience but also to contribute to the Friday piece that year), Joseph took over, a shift marked by notable changes in thematics and musical style. In the logistical and ritual reconsolidation at court that followed Joseph’s death in 1711, the form disappeared, to return as a somewhat different form, the two-part azione sepolcrale (play at the Tomb), once Charles had established his own norms of dramatic production around 1715. The pieces were meant to function in a complex situation. Among the sovereigns, both Leopold and Joseph were trained musician-composers; of the empresses and princesses, Claudia Felicitas seems to have been the most musically talented, but all the women from Eleonora Gonzaga onward would frequently have heard new musical styles. The singers and players seem to have been drawn from the two groups of royal musicians, depending on the day of performance, with the empress’s on

Introduction | 5

Thursdays. In their length and number of singing parts (overall three to twelve, but normally five to eight), the pieces were most like the smaller secular works elsewhere in the court repertory (e.g., serenatas), with one piece from the logistically difficult year 1684 employing only four, and a few in the preceding decades using more. But their topoi of lament, sin, and loss, together with their most somber ritual context, set them apart from these former. The composers—Antonio Bertali, Giuseppe Tricarico, Leopold himself, Giovanni Felice Sances, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, and most prolifically Antonio Draghi—typically made modest instrumental demands: normally two to five parts of various strings (with occasional use of cornetti muti (mute cornets), whose somber timbre befitted the season) plus basso continuo, with trombones in a few pieces, and then a more varied instrumentation after Marc’Antonio Ziani took over their composition in 1701. Like all vocal music of the time, though, the settings were meant to deliver the text with affect and persuasion, above all the omnipresent call to penance. The seeming disjunction between the texts’ importance and their quickly changing librettists in the 1660s will be investigated presently. From Minato’s arrival in Vienna in autumn 1669, this Venetian opera professional would take over writing most texts for the two days, imparting not only his European renown and remarkable status for a court servant, but also a conceptual complexity verging on the hermetic, especially after 1690. This aspect was reinforced by Burnacini’s sets, documentable from about 1671 but possibly in place earlier, and continued by his son as late as 1709 (the very first ones for any secular theatrical work date back as far as 1659). Insofar as they often do not relate explicitly to the intellectual trajectory of the texts, the sets thus create the kind of emblem culture of which the genre was a dramatic manifestation (appendix 3). Minato also wrote most of the texts for the major court operas and important, if shorter, secular pieces, but both these forms sometimes lack the intellectual virtuosity of the sepolcri. For all that the pieces might seem aimed at the royal family, and to the degree that the viewing space in the chapels could accommodate them, other courtiers, local nobles, and European ambassadors were among their audience, and the printing of almost all the libretti, followed by the posthumous reprint of Minato’s “collected sacred works” in 1700 after the poet’s death, shows the public nature of the texts. One mark of the Habsburgs’ desire to make them comprehensible to local nobility was the publication of—surprisingly well-wrought—German

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Introduction

translations from about 1685 onward. Still, it was the sovereigns themselves who were at the center of the pieces’ messages: the various case studies at the end of each chapter here attempt to convey what a given member of the family might have heard in a given piece in a given year, and issues of the Habsburgs’ social identity were constantly on display. The circulation of the libretti also publicized the dynasty’s role as custodians of the Passion and of its relics, including a Nail from the Cross, a Thorn from Christ’s Crown, and a particle of the Cross (the copy of Veronica’s veil now in the Vienna Schatzkammer would not make its way to the court until later in the eighteenth century). These material proofs of Christ’s suffering were instantiations of salvational agency, and in Minato’s libretti they were joined by two numerical conceits: primenumber symbolism (Three Nails, Five Wounds, Seven Sorrows) and astronomical/temporal mechanics (the eclipse at Christ’s death or biblical stoppages of time), particularly in the works of the 1670s. The central theme linking the Passiontide pieces to other Lenten and Advent works was the Incarnation, or “Dio humanato” as it appears in some ten of Minato’s texts. The degree to which this idea of Christ’s two natures—technically, the Hypostatic Union—was also an attack on Islam is not explicit in the libretti, although the political situation with the Ottomans could be quite pressing (e.g., in 1660, 1663, 1683–84, and 1687). In terms of differentiating Christianity from another Abrahamic faith, there is a recurrent—revoltingly so, to modern sensibilities— amount of anti-Judaism in the sepolcri texts, no matter what their temporal origin or destination, with multiple mentions of Hebraic “guilt” in about half the libretti. These ideological issues are discussed further in a later chapter. The performances happened amid busy Holy Week ritual in Vienna itself, not least the Tomb installations in some thirty churches outside the court. The sepolcri were acts of recollection of Christ’s life and the Passion; only in a few are the events of Good Friday narrated in anything like real time. In most, the Savior is presumed already deposed and buried. They thus look toward the past, in their performance of memory (not for nothing was a sepolcro by Minato and Schmelzer of 1678 entitled Le Memorie dolorose), and toward the future, in their call for personal penance. Their degree of textual intersection with the ritual readings of the week thus deserves examination; from the libretti of Francesco Sbarra in the mid-1660s onward, there is some liturgical/ biblical citation, and this is footnoted—and massively extended to both patristic and classical literature—in Minato’s works.

Introduction | 7

For all the fascination of the devotional and literary aspects of the texts, still the theatrical music of the Viennese court has suffered musicanalytical neglect. In the widest sense, it is not easily comparable to Lully’s far more extrovert and tractable work, and even in terms of contemporary Italian opera north and south, the Viennese pieces take a midcentury aesthetic as their foundation. Perhaps the most evident sign of this is the moment of emotional stasis embodied in the normal lyrical form of the two-stanza aria, sung by a single character or shared by two (there are some cases of single- and three-stanza arias; da capo forms make their appearance only late in the repertory). In this form, textual parallelisms between the stanzas are underscored by the music’s repetition, normally with an intervening instrumental ritornello. Much of the musical projection of the texts was in standard recitational delivery, the stile recitativo, with only a few ensemble numbers. It was in this midcentury school that Leopold himself had been trained, and his own aesthetics seem to have continued unchanged. Thus it is difficult to isolate an unusually good—or bad—passage or aria in, for example, Draghi’s output at first hearing, and the uniformity of the musical surface, largely recitational with a respectable number of arias, reinforces the seeming predictability of the texts. Although musical means changed sooner in the Viennese opera and oratorio repertory, it was only with the switch in court composers to Ziani that sepolcri took on a different shape, more like other stage works of that decade. Scores for eight of this composer’s works between 1704 and 1711 survive and mark the changes, spanning the dynastic break as well as the transition in librettists from Minato’s self-proclaimed follower Donato Cupeda to Pietro Antonio Bernardoni. Clearly the interaction between the play of poetic meters and their musical projection is important, as are the tonal dichotomies often applied to this repertory. Indeed, the cantus durus/mollis (pitch systems based around natural/flat sonorities) binary, as found in the works of Athanasius Kircher seems to have relevance to the Viennese repertory, given the Jesuit scholar’s close relationship to the Habsburg court. Still, the overall pitch structures have their parallels in north Italian theories of “church-keys,” combinations of pitch centers and inflections. For all the different structures that appear in the sepolcri—and here the operatic repertory runs parallel—many can be explained as transpositions of these tuoni according to various Seicento schemes (the opening of La Virtù della Croce is in one such organization). In this study, two different systems are used to get at the overall pitch structure of sepolcri:

figure 1. Frans Luycx, Crucifixion with Habsburg Mourners, c. 1662, Vienna, Kirche am Hof. (Photo: UNIDAM database, University of Vienna, by permission.)

Introduction | 9

G. B. degli Antonii’s 1687 list of eight church-keys and their transpositions, along with Angelo Berardi’s 1689 idea of twelve modes, plus his later examples of these constructs’ possible transpositions (see appendix 2). Even as late as Ziani’s 1707 Il sacrifizio d’Isaac, the use of a hexachord device in a modern aria shows the genre’s debt to tradition. In some ways, sepolcri are epiphenomenal of the ways in which Habsburg culture seems both overdetermined and understudied. Although they have a timeless quality, due to both their generic norms and the events of the Passion, they are also linked to specific moments of devotion, royal self-portrayal, and conceptualist aesthetics. Given the money and effort that evidently went into their production, they should be taken as moments of the spectacle that, on many fronts, was central to the dynasty’s ideology. In a wider European sense, though, the Austrian Habsburgs’ musical reenactment of Passion memories in front of the Tomb was, in its details, unlike anything else to be found in the nexus of royal devotion and hegemony that characterized the century. An image not directly related to the genre’s sets summarizes the centrality of the Cross to this combination. One of Eleonora Gonzaga’s evidently few commissions in the visual arts, executed at the beginning of Leopold’s reign (c. 1662 and thus just after the first sepolcri), shows the Virgin, the Magdalen, St. John, and the living royals (Leopold, Eleonora and her two daughters plus her stepson Karl Joseph) as co-spectators at the Crucifixion, complete with its darkened sun, earthquake, and tearing of the Temple’s veil (figure 1; this altarpiece must originally have been meant for a court setting, although it now resides in the Kirche am Hof). In addition, two young cherubs in the space behind the dowager empress might represent her infant sons deceased in the 1650s. If such a design is medieval, Frans Luycx’s brilliant brushstrokes and somberly differentiated palette mark the image as modern. This sign of Habsburg desire for co-participation on Calvary and at the Tomb is embodied in the music theater, the subject of what follows.

chapter 1

Passion and Theater

The most striking feature of all sacred drama in the seventeenth century is its sharing of literary register, stage techniques, and musical expression with the wider world of theatrical forms. Best known in the Catholic world are the Jesuit plays across Europe, but at the courts—that of Louis XIV, the great Other for the Austrian Habsburgs, and that of their close Spanish cousins—many stagings, devout or secular, were tied to seasonality and/or specific moments in festive or sacred commemorations.1 In Vienna, an entire ritual year was marked by performances, and after 1660 these were largely musical: starting with oratorios in Advent, the opera and dance central to Carnival, oratorios again in Lent, sepolcri during the Triduum of Holy Week, and then large- and small-scale operas or serenatas for Habsburg birthdays and name days over the rest of the year, with occasional pieces for dynastic marriages.2 The longest items were normally the three-act operas before Lent and over summer through fall. Most of this repertory was in Italian, and almost all of it was intended for complete settings. The dynasty understood and expressed itself through contemporary musical theater. Despite the economic “waste” of the spectacle, a habit that led to internal intrigues and criticism even at the high points of Leopold’s reign, the royals rarely relaxed the pace, thus inevitably suggesting a Geertzian “music-theater state.”3 Indeed, the choreographic participation of the landed nobility in the Carnival court ballets was precisely recorded in the ceremonial documentation as part of the unwritten cov10

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enant between monarch and vassals. Although the Viennese pieces on sacred themes did not require the massive scenery, set changes, and multitude of singers needed for the festive operas—they were, after all, meant for penitential seasons—their frequency still meant a notable investment of creative and musical labor. In addition, the ex novo composition of the sepolcri separates them from the often-repeated oratorios, thus closer to the performative category of the operas; clearly, the annual commemoratio of the Passion required ever-new intellectual conceits and musical devices. Ultimately, their production reflected the royals’ self-imposed duty to follow the biblical Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus in lavishing resources on the buried Christ, in line with Isaiah’s prophecy (Is 11:10) that “His sepulcher will be glorious,” and according to the disproportions of a gift economy.4 This verse would crop up, in a changed devotional climate, as late as Pietro Metastasio’s 1730 oratorio for the Habsburgs La Passione di Gesù Cristo.5 Thus the first relationship in the repertory is that between Passion piety and theater. Although some sepolcri re-create dramatic moments from the Gospel accounts—the 1661 La Gara della Misericordia e la Giustizia along with the 1666 Lagrime di San Pietro both enact the Despair of Judas and the Penance of Peter—their overall trajectory is ultimately psychological, normally leading to a penitential or moralizing maxim, with some relationship to any given piece’s title, and encapsulated in the closing contrapuntal ensemble (this section is often called madrigale). In addition, all the texts seem to follow Augustine’s harmonization of the Gospel versions of the Deposition and burial, despite the discrepancies in the particulars among the four evangelists. Still, the most salient Passion events were largely recounted via characters’ memory. Librettists chose different biblical characters in addition to the generic (“A Sinner”) or allegorical (“The Three Hours of Darkness [over the Earth at the Crucifixion]”) ones for any given piece, sometimes employing only “minor” scriptural figures (Veronica or Simon the Cyrenian).6 The regular appearance of sinful personages (or, allegorically, of Sin itself) and the dramatic presentation of their remorse provided models for the royals’ own consciousness of guilt. In addition, the political status of the dynasty was implicit, and sometimes explicit, in the texts. In any case, Passion commemoration was the central ritual event of the year, outclassing even Easter. The evident creation of sepolcri as a genre at the behest of the dowager empress Eleonora Gonzaga in early winter 1660 falls into a wider pattern.7 Certainly this was the first Carnival/Lent during which the

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power of both Leopold and his stepmother was consolidated after the Imperial transition in 1657–58, and it evidently was a moment to establish new traditions, starting with the autumn 1659 operas, which marked the beginning of regular court performances of music theater overall. Indeed, the fixing of the sacred stage works represented a necessary penitential counterpart to the disciplined excess of secular spectacle. In order to introduce regular performances lasting anywhere between forty and eighty minutes, time had to be created on the afternoons or evenings of the busy events of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, and spaces set up in the sanctuaries of the empress’s chapel and the Hofburgkapelle. This must have meant cutting into the liturgical Divine Hour of Matins-Lauds on these two days, this service recorded under Ferdinand III in 1654 as lasting from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m.; it also meant rearranging the court’s visits to other city churches. The Habsburgs’ musical repertory for Office and Mass during the Passion Triduum was traditional Renaissance polyphony (with the possible exception of contemporary Lamentations by Giovanni Paolo Colonna in Bologna, copied for Leopold probably around 1685).8 The sepolcri represented, then, the irruption of modern music into the Triduum. In a wider sense, the establishment of music theater sacred and secular was not just a personal choice of Eleonora or Leopold, but rather reflected a larger shift, as the pre-1648 unity of Catholic Europe so desired by the dynasty fell apart between the Treaty of Westphalia and the Franco-Spanish peace of 1659–60. In this framework, the Spanish Habsburgs had had to end their dynastic loyalty in order to satisfy France, and the continental relationship of power was marked by betrayal and self-interest. The Austrians found themselves having to invent new ways of projecting belief and devotion in this changed political landscape, and one of them was sacred music theater. The performances happened in a Week full of penitential events between court and city.9 The most detailed description of court ritual comes from later in the eighteenth century, during Charles VI’s early years, after the annual Friday sepolcri had ceased to be performed, and so the physiognomy of the Week under Leopold is not entirely clear.10 But the musical drama took place as part of a chain, each moment with its own inflection: starting with the Palm Sunday liturgy, then Leopold’s annual journey on Tuesday from the Hofburg (the main imperial residence) along the “Passion Way” to the Kalvarienberg church in suburban (and formerly Protestant) Hernals, and the traditional foot washing

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done by the royals after Mass on Thursday morning. This last rite celebrated the presence of the Divine in humble humanity, and thus indirectly reinforced “Dio humanato//God made man,” a theological concept linked also to the Advent pieces as well as oratorios earlier in Lent. By the 1700s, the Holy Thursday rituals started at 8.30 a.m., and this too must have been a strenuous day for the court.11 Some of the Thursday sepolcri come in at only half the length of the Friday pieces, for instance, Minato’s 1671 texts the Epitaffi sopra il Sepolcro as compared with the much longer Il Trionfo della Croce that year.12 But the court was famous for its absolute devotion during Holy Week among European ambassadors, many of whom commented that all other business, no matter how important, came to a complete stop, as the royals could spend ten to twelve hours a day in church.13

the spacing of spectacle Given the sepolcri’s scheduling, the disjuncture between meditative time (on the buried Christ) and narrative/ritual time (in which the Passion events were supposed to be relived in order) was also at work. In Sicily, this split caused ecclesiastical censure in our period, but the Viennese repertory seems not to have suffered.14 The pieces performed in Eleonora Gonzaga’s chapel on Thursday—like the pedagogical ones in German for the archduchess Maria Antonia the same day between 1677 and 1682—presume a buried Christ. In part, this derives from the Reposition of the Host, in which the Eucharist had already been “buried” earlier on Thursday, after Mass and before any late afternoon performances of a stage work. The newly constructed Tomb in front of which the pieces were performed was itself covered until being unveiled at the beginning of the music. The stage direction “Scopertosi il Santissimo Sepolcro . . .” begins almost all libretti. But the complexity of royal Passion meditation also contributed to this seeming incongruity in Vienna. Given the centrality of penance to all Catholics’ experience in Lent, and Leopold’s own habitual confession on Maundy Thursday, the placement of the pieces at the end of the ritual day represented the last iteration of the call to repent before Easter Communion, and their performance, sometimes with Leopold’s own music inserted, formed a kind of musical penance. Although the emotional charge of the day was obviously greater, the Friday pieces were not necessarily more florid in terms of the resources demanded. Two works in the same year with texts by Francesco Sbarra,

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the 1665 Thursday Il Limbo disserato along with his Friday L’Inferno deluso, employed eight and nine singers, respectively. Once the stagings indicated in the libretti began around 1670, the planes of vision that Burnacini designed were not always more complicated on Friday. The two pieces of 1676, Il Sole ecclissato and L’Ingiustizia della sentenza di Pilato, featured set designs with a dark sky with an eclipsed sun, and Pilate’s atrium with a separate representation of the Tomb underneath the space, respectively. These two are roughly the same length (nineteen printed pages), and the density of their footnoted biblical or patristic citations is about equal. It was particularly painful that they were performed as the young empress Claudia Felicitas lay dying, with Leopold and/or her mother, Anna de’ Medici, constantly by her side. Most important, on Fridays the royals probably heard the sepolcri from their gallery on the chapel’s second level, perhaps some five meters high. Figure 2 gives the iconic 1705 view of the Hofburgkapelle just after Leopold’s death, although this is not a completely accurate representation of the space in the seventeenth century (repairs after the 1683 siege damage had changed some aspects of the interior). Figure 3 then superimposes over this a 1692 set design by Burnacini, together with a photomontage of the eighteenth-century-constructed Tomb surviving at Stift Zwettl, to give a sense of the visual ensemble on display during Triduum performances. Acoustically, the royals’ placement would have meant that they were closer to the heavenly singers—angels and God the Father—if these characters were placed in the glory above. In addition, this seating would have made the recitative sections of the sepolcri more intelligible, as the reverberation time at this level would have been minimal in the Gothic vault, with sound traveling straight up and little reflection.15 Presumably the presence of an audience on the ground floor, plus the draping of altars and statues after Holy Thursday, would have contributed to dampening some echo in the more public spaces, but also interfered with hearing higher frequencies, thus rendering textual intelligibility more difficult and underscoring the need for a printed libretto produced for the performance (of which there are extant copies for most of the repertory). The location of the secondary chapels, and their decoration, changed over time (figure 4). Eleonora Gonzaga’s original oratory, after the death of her husband Ferdinand III in 1657, was in the smaller palace across the Burgplatz (the Neue Burg), and the fire of February 1668 in her almost-finished residence of the Leopoldinischer Trakt forced her back into it, a site small enough that basic illumination was a problem.

figure 2. J. A. Pfeffel and C. Engelbrecht (after J. C. Hackhofer), 1705 view of the Hofburgkapelle, from L. von Bülich Edler von Lilienburg, Erbhuldigungswerk fur Joseph I., no. 5 (A-Wn). (Permission by the Austrian National Library.)

figure 3. Photomontage: Hofburgkapelle in 1705; L. O. Burnacini’s 1692 set design “The Sacrifice of Isaac”; and eighteenth-century Tomb, from Stift Zwettl, Austria. (Permission by Dr. A. Gamerith and Stift Zwettl.)

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Only with the repairs of 1673–74 was she able to use a large, newly constructed two-story chapel at the west end of the new Trakt (at the angle with the Neue Burg), and this may be evident in the slightly larger cast (eight, as opposed to her seven regular singers of 1666–72) of the 1674 Pietà contrastata as well as the first explicit stage set for Thursday in 1676.16 The pre-1674 chapel was evidently limited, with fewer acoustical issues, and the performances must have had only select audiences; the roughly 150-square-meter new oratory would have allowed for more “stage” motion and viewers, even if Minato explicitly described Thursday set designs only in 1682, 1683, 1685, and 1686.17

the rites of the sepulcher By choosing to stage music annually at the Tomb, Eleonora invoked both recent Habsburg practice and older, wider traditions in the effort to create a new sonic devotional world. Even today in Italy, popular processions on Thursday and Friday often involve journeys to a Sepulcher in local churches. At Pedali di Viggianello in southwestern Basilicata, women mourners continue to perform two-voice polyphony inside the parish church, with songs in the local dialect and specific to the occasion. In contemporary Sicily, some towns feature musical calls for community visits to Tombs, while several confraternities dedicated to the Addolorata sing in the vernacular at the Sepulcher.18 This represents wider practice in Catholic Europe. Some kind of constructed Heiliges Grab (most surviving examples dating from the eighteenth century) as a standing tableau can be found, in Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic, among churches and museums.19 One well-catalogued case is that of early modern Tyrol, in which Tombs not only were seemingly omnipresent in town churches, but dramatic representations at them persisted into the nineteenth century.20 Still, the Viennese court pieces are different from the German/Austrian plays, in that there is little action essential to the story of Holy Week, but only the performance of mourning. The material basis for the construction of court Sepulchers, new every year in Vienna, during Lent is found in the payment records.21 Single Tombs for Friday were built from 1555 onward; from the renovations of 1674, two were erected (presumably one in the Hofburgkapelle and one in Eleonora’s new chapel in the new Trakt), while the annual number rose to three and four even after the dowager empress’s death (1688–1705; the constructions themselves seem to have been

figure 4. Plan: The Alte Burg complex in the late seventeenth century; the Hofburgkapelle (Friday sepolcri) is “XII.” (From Herbert Karner, ed., Die Wiener Hofburg 1521–1705 [Vienna, 2014]. By permission of Herbert Karner and the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften.)

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made anew every year). The other installations seem to have been meant for the secondary chapels of the royal children, the sites also for the German-language sepolcri for Maria Antonia. The wider European panorama of Tombs in the early modern era is only now coming into focus. The report of the German architect Joseph Furttenbach on a room with a Tomb in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio in the 1610s also noted angels with “sweet music,” possibly some kind of mechanical instruments, designed by Giulio Parigi.22 Around 1700, Bologna hosted an itinerant Sepulcher that visited various churches in annual sequence.23 In the context of royal chapels, Vienna’s practice seems to be unusual; even in the 1686 inventory of the Madrid Alcázar, there is no Tomb listed among the many images present for the Spanish Habsburgs.24 In Rome, such installations were present in some city basilicas, for instance, the yearly constructions at S. Lorenzo in Damaso (done by Pietro da Cortona in 1650 and Alessandro Mauri in 1728, the latter commissioned by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni) or regularly at S. Giacomo degli Spagnoli. However, the mid-Cinquecento Sepulcher in the Vatican’s Cappella Paolina (in the space’s function as the altar of repose for the Sistina) seems to have been replaced by Federico Zuccari’s frescoes in 1580.25 The idea of having a Tomb as a backdrop for dramatic music, and then at some point around 1670 adding some kind of set design to it, seems particularly Austrian Habsburg. The court traditions of vernacular verses and music during Holy Week have been well studied; such pieces began with Giovanni Valentini’s poetry in the early 1640s.26 But various Sepulchers existed throughout the city, not just in the Hofburg, and these are testaments to the devotion crossing social classes. According to the German Protestant visitor Johann Sebastian Müller, reporting on his experience in 1660, Ferdinand III and Eleonora had been accustomed to visiting all thirtyodd constructions in the various churches and religious houses on Good Friday, even if wooden boards had to be placed in the streets so as to avoid the mud (and Ferdinand’s physical difficulties would also have been an obstacle).27 In Leopold’s reign, these visits were evidently limited and moved largely to Holy Saturday. The late seventeenth-century edifice in St. Stephen’s Cathedral, with music in the Passion play performed around it on Good Friday, was described in the standard account of cathedral life written down in 1687. The second part of this text took place after the Entombment reenactment, and thus it represented a kind of traditional popular Tomb piece, mixing prose and song in the vernacular.28 At the Jesuit University

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Church, Johann Baptist Staudt’s arias were performed as part of spoken Latin Passion drama at their Sepulcher on Holy Saturdays in the 1680s and onward, but evidently without a set design, and often in the presence of the royals. The order’s piece for 1685, Patientis Christi memoria, featured six seminarian singers and one professional for eight allegorical roles; its first act starts at the Tomb but moves later to suffering, penance, and redemption.29 The arias are relatively short, probably also because of the mainly amateur performers, and some of the other Jesuit works, of similar stamp, focus on the Name of Jesus devotion. The Ursulines’ church in the Seilerstätte also hosted newly written and composed sepolcri in Italian in the 1690s, and recent work has shown the chronology of these pieces composed by C. A. Badia for performance by the nuns.30 Shortly after 1700, the Viennese Oratorians put on a combination of prose, recitative, and arias in a piece called Schmerzliche Beweinung dess angehessten Heylands Iesu Christi on a Good Friday at 5:00 p.m. in their new chapel Zu der allerheiligsten Dreyfaltigkeit in the Judengasse.31 Outside the city, at the satellite court of Innsbruck and at the command of the recently widowed Archduchess Eleonora Maria (retracing the patronage of her mother, Eleonora Gonzaga) in 1691–93, Badia was also responsible for recomposing Minato’s libretti for the sepolcro La Sete di Christo and two oratorios to enhance devotion at the Sepulcher on Good Friday.32 In Prague around 1705, Jan Dismas Zelenka’s pieces for the Tomb in the Jesuits’ Klementinum college church set textual collages of liturgical and biblical citations in Latin, together with paraphrases and some first-person arias, dealing with penance and punishment (but not the Passion or Entombment), of a somewhat different stamp from Staudt’s works; one of them includes Isaiah’s verse on the glorious Tomb.33 Even farther afield, the dramatic embellishment of Tomb devotion might also parallel the development of spectacle during the Mourning of Muharram in Safavid Iran in the second half of the seventeenth century.34 Although local practice earlier had involved greater amounts of ritual combat (echoing the original Battle of Karbala) or animal sacrifice, the later travelers’ reports seem to indicate a pacification of this social grief, along with greater emphasis on theater and song, not least the lament genres of noha and marsiya, for all that these latter are often battle retellings. The issue of Husayn’s absent body at the physical center of the commemoration (except in Karbala) also resonates with Christian practice. The Habsburg case differs in the restricted public participation in the imperial chapels, and the focus on both the Tomb and the effects of salvation as played out in the music theater.35

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the imagination of entombments The sepolcri were formed in the intersection of Holy Week experiences of those Italians responsible for the creation of the genre, on one hand, and the court traditions, on the other.36 Those active in the production of the early pieces came from all over the peninsula: Giovanni Pierelli from the Garfagnana; Niccolo Petronio, count of Caldana, from Istria; Camillo Scarano and Giuseppe Tricarico from Apulia; Draghi from Emilia and then Venice; and Antonio Bertali from Verona. They also were of different status: laymen (Draghi, Minato); secular clergy (Pierelli, Petronio, Scarano, Domenico Federici); and the occasional friar (Vito Lepori).37 Pierelli used his favor with Eleonora Gonzaga not only to write the first sepolcro text but later that year to gain a job as the Italian secretary to the imperial general Raimondo Montecuccoli, despite his previous neglect of his duties as a minor agent of the Estense court in Vienna.38 The other librettist of 1660, Caldana, had been a professor at the University of Padua and was later bishop of Parenzo (now Poreč) from 1667 to 1670.39 He had ties to the court and must have been present in midwinter to create a libretto. Since both were working on what would become a new annual genre, the previous Italian literature involving Deposition meditation takes on salience. In lyric poetry, the primary collection that limned Passion aesthetics for the century was Angelo Grillo’s Dell’essequie di Christo co’l pianto di Maria Vergine (Venice, 1607), of which a copy was held in the imperial library. Although Grillo’s poems were set at a moment before the Entombment, with special emphasis on contemplating the blood, eyes, and ears of the dead Christ, still their placement of lament largely in the mouth of Mary provided a lexical supply for the many occasions in the sepolcri when either the Virgin or the Magdalen would imagine the now-irretrievable Body of the Savior. The traditions of early modern laments in general, along with their classical antecedents, were important to the genre’s vocabulary: this is particularly true for the static and repetitive character of the texts.40 The long heritage of sacre rappresentazioni also offered models for Tomb drama; a fifteenth-century Deposition dialogue from Perugia features Mary, Joseph, John, Longinus, the Magdalen, and the Centurion, while in Aversa, Marco de Vecchio’s Opus super exclamationem Christi begins with a dispute between Nicodemus and a Jew on Christ’s nature.41 All these figures or themes would recur regularly in the Viennese libretti.

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Several Seicento plays provided theatrical situations and vocabulary for burying Christ. The gigantic spectacle of the friar Bonaventura (Cataldo) Morone, Il Mortorio di Cristo (Bergamo, 1611), with its fifteen editions up through 1656, circulated widely. This marathon enactment of almost every aspect of the Passion, ranging from 256 to 314 printed pages, offered a host of themes and characters (some twentyfour), many to be found in the early sepolcri: allegorical figures (Justice and Mercy, to recur in the 1661 Gara); resurrected sinners (Il Trionfo); the contrast of Judas and Peter; the Three Marys at the Deposition; Joseph of Arimathea/Nicodemus performing the burial; and the presence of one lament of Mary over the dead Christ and another at the Tomb (the latter scene the starting point for a number of Viennese pieces, including the 1670 Sette dolori and Sette consolationi), all finishing with the final liturgical Responsory for the Triduum, Sepulto Domino. Rather than a single play, one might consider Morone’s work as a compendium of possible dramatic scenes. It would continue to be reworked and printed into the Settecento, including in Austrian Naples.42 Similar pieces seem to have been done in Sicily as late as the nineteenth century. Along the way, Morone included biblical intermedi, choruses of angels and singing musicians, and in the worst Franciscan tradition, anti-Judaism embodied in the rabbi Misandro. This character appears again in Francesco Belli’s Deposition drama of 1633, Essequie del Redentore, a sacra rappresentazione in prose dedicated to none other than G. F. Loredano, the founder of the Accademia degli Incogniti. This prolix piece traces the time from Christ’s death to the burial, including a fugitive devil’s report of the Harrowing of Hell; like Il Mortorio, it features a double lament of the Virgin, Judas’s despair, and the Three Marys with John the Evangelist on Calvary. Its prologue is spoken by the prophet Jeremiah, paraphrasing both his eponymous book and Lamentations with direct reference to the Passion. Finally, the Cristo sepolto, ovvero il Sepolcro glorioso (Venice, 1644) of the Camillian Paolino Fiamma is a rappresentazione divotissima that uses the secondary characters of the Passion story (Joseph, Veronica) to tell the background; after four acts of Deposition events, the last one culminates in an actual Entombment by Joseph, Nicodemus, and John, preceded by a single lament of the Virgin, and ending with the evil Jewish character (not Pilate), the Pharisee Iadir, giving the command to post guards at the Sepulcher. In comparison to Morone’s wildly popular piece, it would be easy to dismiss this work, but it does contain the first display of a relic in the context of Italian Passion drama, Veronica’s Veil.

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It also makes mention of a theological term that would recur constantly in Minato’s texts, the Hypostatic Union of two natures in Christ.43 Such works come ultimately out of the medieval depositio tradition. In the sacred imaginary of the seventeenth century, the Tomb held symbolic equivalence with Christ’s cradle. Following the interpretation of the standard Catholic exegete of the period Cornelius a Lapide, along with some patristic opinion, the Somascan priest Giovanni Francesco Priuli in 1676 considered that Christ had come into the world not in a manger but in a gouged rock; he then made the parallel clear “[so that] the Savior, being born in order to die, was born in the rock, a symbol of the Tomb.”44 That this should have come up in a Marian sermon also shows the centrality of devotion to the Virgin. It ultimately reflects Augustine’s equivalence (Tractate 120 on John 19) of her womb and the Tomb, both virgin repositories for His Body.45 The main difference between other Entombment drama and the Viennese repertory is that, in many sepolcri, Christ is presumed not only dead but buried already and thus inaccessible. In the first pieces of 1660–61, this is implied only by the unstated presence of the constructed Tomb behind the singers, but with Lepori’s Le Lagrime della Vergine, the 1662 Friday piece which begins with the Magdalen (not the Virgin, despite the title) weeping at the rock, it is made explicit. In that sense, the Sepulcher itself becomes a kind of silent character, invoked directly or indirectly. Lepori’s Magdalen enters by reworking the opening of the famed Franciscan preacher Francesco Panigarola’s Sermon 13 on the Passion, a text dedicated to Judas’s despair and the patience of God with sinners, thus neatly encapsulating both Christ buried and the availability of penance: “O rock, or rather o sky, who hides the Sun / Son from me.” Lepori (c. 1620–91) was likely to have used this source, since he himself was a renowned Conventual Franciscan orator; he also provided the libretto for P. A. Ziani’s Vienna oratorio L’Assalone punito.46 Still, the passé nature of Panigarola’s sacred aesthetics to Seicento sensibilities might also explain the search for new or different librettists after 1662.47 The theatrical space of the Sepulcher functioned inside the sacrality of the royal chapels, as it would in any church. The various “pointing out” or imperative “turn to this stone” references to the Tomb in the libretti— a kind of lithic deixis—underscore its silent onstage presence. Although it works as a prop around which the guards sleep in Minato’s Sette consolationi (1670) and in Giberto Ferri’s text for La Pietà contrastata (1674), the Sepulcher otherwise remains untouched, except in two cases. In La Corona di spine (Minato, 1675), a trio of biblical mourners makes

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preparations to open the stone, until they are stopped by the arrival of the Three Magi. This is another in the librettist’s rewritings of Passion devotion, as there appears to be no source for this in Christian legend. At the beginning of the 1677 Le Cinque piaghe, Joseph and Nicodemus return to the Tomb to uncover and anoint Christ’s Body, re-cover Him with the Shroud, and then expose him again so that four other grievers— the Virgin, the Magdalen, and John plus Peter—can view Him. Their observation of the Five Wounds on His Body then inaugurates the basic conceit and title of the piece. However, this is the last time such an intrusion occurs in the repertory. Indeed, a distancing from direct reference to the Tomb later began to characterize Minato’s texts. In 1677, both pieces had a Sepulcher in the set design, in addition to the constructed one in the sanctuary. But there are no references in the two libretti of the following year, nor in the Prague works of 1680, the one new piece for 1682, and the two for 1683. In the 1680 Friday Il Vero sole fermato in croce, Giuseppe d’Arimathea mentions his upcoming—not past—work in the Deposition and burial (“Staccherò l’essangue pondo / Da quel tronco insanguinato//I will remove the bloodless Body from that bloody wood”), and the piece ends with his leaving to perform the Entombment, thus moving the entire piece back to a moment just after Christ’s death and away from the Sepulcher. The lack of direct references continued in 1684, in which the Friday piece was imagined on Calvary after the burial, as noted later (see chapter 4). Still, in 1685’s Il Prezzo, the set featured the garden of John 19:41 inside which the biblical tomb was placed, and this served to focus attention on the actual constructed Tomb in the sanctuary. Although again in 1691’s I Frutti dell’albero della Croce (the source for this book’s title), a Tomb was included in Burnacini’s set, the next sung reference to the Sepulcher was not until the next year. Although the libretti continued to be dramas of grief, their psychological trajectory moved toward salvational, epistemological, and allegorical considerations on Christ’s death, as opposed to outpourings of pain at the rock, signaling a new kind of interiority in the repertory. That “Church Ritual” itself would not only sing, but also open the entire piece, bespeaks a remarkable reflexivity in the court’s symbolic world. Thus the exegetical ramifications of the Sepulcher also played into the literary process. Lapide took the alternative translation of “rest” in Isaiah’s “Et erit sepulchrum” verse (“requies” in the earlier Vulgate instead of “sepulchrum”) as analogically meaning Christ’s Beatitude. He also noted the universal Catholic habit of honoring the Tomb on

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Holy Saturday (without mention of music). The 1660 “Sermon 48” of the Neapolitan Theatine Giuseppe Silos concerned the effects of the Sacrament on one of the Seven Works of Mercy, that of burying the dead. Although elsewhere in his lengthy sermon collection he had polemicized against Rupert of Deutz’s popular idea of the daily Eucharist as an ongoing “funeral of Christ,” here Silos turned to the example of the Magdalen having received an early taste of the Sacrament in the same way that she had anticipated anointing His dead Body while He was still alive, all this used as a model for ordinary Christian burial.48 Thus the labor of Christ’s exequies was linked to the Magdalen/ penitent’s reception of the Eucharist, also connecting the ritual events of Holy Thursday and Good Friday, as well as to human interment. Lapide’s understanding of Isaiah referred to the glory of the Sepulcher, but also to its two mystical meanings: Christ’s living in the faithful’s souls, and Eucharistic splendor (the “burial” of the Host). The frequent placement of the consecrated wafer (“Il Santissimo”) in sepolcri stage sets reflects this, providing overlap with Forty Hours’ installations outside of Holy Week. The actual configuration of Christ’s Body in the royal chapels was complex: the physical figure inside the Tomb, but also His Real Presence in the Host inside a monstrance on the Reposition altar, and then the Eucharist if visible in set designs. Interweaving sacramental theology in the libretti was another conceptually sophisticated feature of Minato’s texts.

the norms of genre It seems that the system of two pieces per year, one on Thursday and one on Friday, was called into being from scratch in 1660; Pierelli boasted of his text’s success in a letter to Alfonso IV d’Este back in Modena, as if this were an innovation, while Caldana’s Il Sagrifizio d’Abramo is securely dated to the Friday of that year. Pierelli’s poetic collected works of 1669, La Sampogna del pastor Elpireo (an anagram), includes a group of four libretti in a section of the book named “Il sepolcro” (this is the first and only Seicento evidence for the genre’s name); none of these texts survive anywhere else.49 The author claimed that all four had been sung in Eleonora’s chapel on Holy Thursdays in the presence of the empress and her stepson. The only years with no hitherto identified Thursday pieces are 1660, 1663 (a time of massive Carnival entertainment), 1664 (when Leopold was at the Reichstag in Regensburg and Eleonora was in Linz), and 1668 (when the whole court was in Wiener Neustadt because of a fire in the Hofburg). Accepting the use of

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Pierelli’s four texts in these years would also imply a cycling through various librettists for Thursday works in the 1660s: in order, Pierelli, Scarano, Draghi, Pierelli (two years), Sbarra, Federici (two), and Pierelli again, with Draghi called on for the 1669 La Morte debellata, yet another text dealing with the victory over Death. If the printing order in La Sampogna corresponds to performance dates, then Pierelli’s opening libretto, Il Trionfo della vita eterna, would have been the 1660 piece. It is striking for its omission of biblical characters and Passion narrative, and its use of purely allegorical figures: Vita, Morte, Penitenza, and three resurrected sinners. Although this casting makes for a balanced ensemble, the last group might have symbolized Eleonora’s deceased: her husband, Ferdinand III, and their two children who had passed on (Theresa Maria in 1653, and Ferdinand Joseph in 1658; less likely herself and the two surviving archduchesses, Eleonora Maria and Maria Anna). In that sense, Il Trionfo, besides being a Tomb piece, also reiterated the triumph of life over the deaths that had dogged the dowager empress, a theatrical overcoming of grief. The following years’ works set out the genre’s character types: at least one male sinner (Peter, Longinus, and/or the Centurion), one female mourner, one New Testament male figure of support (John, Joseph of Arimathea), not to mention the plethora of allegorical roles discussed later. Coming out of the medieval tradition, opening “dialogues of character recognition” (e.g., “Chi sei tu? / Io sono . . .”) allow entering figures to query others and to identify themselves. Although the lexicon of the 1660s could be quite operatic, especially in Draghi’s libretti, the contributions of Sbarra and especially Minato took the genre’s vocabulary into the highest literary register to be found at court. Its most obvious norm is that Christ Himself is never—until the 1708 La Passione nell’orto and the 1709 Gesù flagellato—a character, for all the Christological content of the pieces.50 The Resurrection is not even mentioned until the 1706 La Morte vinta sul Calvario. All these late libretti, closer to contemporary Passion oratorios than to local tradition, by Bernardoni testify to a changing piety in the new century, less focused on the Tomb as object and the events immediately surrounding the Entombment.51

the visualization of meditation To the degree that the pieces presented both sound and spectacle, they participated in the century’s ideas of aural and visual theology. One popular Italian model for the internalization of Passion events was Bar-

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tolomeo de’ Cambi’s (or da Saluzzo’s) Vita dell’anima desiderosa di cavar frutto grande dalla santissima Passione di Giesù Christo (Venice and Rome, 1614), a mixture of poetic narration of the Passion in ottava rima together with meditations on each of these canti. Two copies survive in Vienna, including the 1614 Roman edition with illustrations for each canto, dedicated to Cardinal (later Duke) Ferdinando Gonzaga of Mantua with a testimonial from the Oratorian Agostino Manni, the latter the librettist for Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di anima, e di corpo. Cambi’s verses describe every action of the Passion in detail, while the prose meditations are spoken in the voice of the devout soul. The entire project was meant to furnish a series of mental images and then appropriate reflections on Christ’s sufferings.52 As is the case for much Seicento devotional literature, the narrative source is sometimes pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditationes vitae Christi. In Canti 28 and 29, Cambi’s account came to the Deposition and to the Tomb, having already introduced Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus together with two laments of Mary and the Magdalen on Calvary in Canto 27 (these roughly correspond to chapters 80 and 81 in the Meditationes: first the Entombment, Lamentation at the Tomb, and the disciples’ return to Jerusalem, followed by the song of the patriarchs during Christ’s Harrowing of Hell).53 After praising the Gospel figures, Cambi’s meditations then turned lithic: “Could I only be entombed with my Jesus in that holy and blessed Sepulcher, never to emerge again during my life. O Tomb, o most sacred Tomb, o holy Ark, you were worthy to receive that most valuable joy within you.” Cambi referred to the Hypostatic Union and then, in a move also found in pseudo-Bonaventure but more recently in Giambattista Marino’s Dicerie sacre, took Paul’s metaphor that “the rock was Christ” as a pivot to consider the Tomb’s clefts as the wound in Christ’s side in which the meditative believer was to dwell. The idea of Mary burying herself both in the Tomb and in the “sepolcro” of the Divine Will came up in the Dominican Ignazio del Nente’s meditations Solitudini di sacri e pietosi affetti (Florence, 1643) at the moment of the imagined final closing of the Tomb. As noted later in this study, it would recur strikingly in the repertory of the later 1690s. Following his medieval sources, Cambi’s imaginative path then retraced the steps of Mary, the Magdalen, Martha, John, Joseph, and Nicodemus back into Jerusalem from the Tomb, portraying the Madonna’s grief in vocabulary taken from Lamentations. According to some traditions, John persuaded Mary to return to the Cenacle where the Last Supper had taken place, inside which Cambi had his characters continue to lament.

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For the 1689 L’Esclamar a gran voce, Burnacini would fashion a set design of the Supper’s space as imagined after the Passion, and this piece opens with Mary’s grief, surrounded by the Magdalen, Veronica, and John. Minato justified this staging with references not to Cambi but to the authority of Nicephorus Kallistos’s Ecclesiastical History (whose unique manuscript was in the imperial collections) and to the so-called Christus patiens, a cento of ancient Greek dramatic verse reworked during late antiquity into a Passion narration and sometimes attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus. Cambi’s meditations in Canto 29 concentrated on Mary’s sorrow but also included the Christian soul’s addresses to the Magdalen and the other mourners, as it asked to join in their grief. The engravings that precede each canto in the 1614 Rome edition are also suggestive: that for Canto 28 represented both the Deposition with Mary and the other mourners as well as the Entombment in the background with Joseph and Nicodemus, on two visual planes. The following canto depicted Jerusalem in the background, Calvary in the middle ground, and no fewer than six women plus John returning from the Tomb in the foreground. Thus the very presence of a Tomb “onstage” with differing visual realms set up a series of meditative associations, and it was the task of the set designs to create emblematic meaning to be deduced while the sometimes complex theology of the texts was being sung. In that sense, the demands on sepolcri audiences, even a theologically and musically trained royal such as Leopold, were high. As if to echo Cambi’s epistemological divisions, or perhaps to explain them to a new generation for whom they were losing validity, Minato’s preface to one of his last texts, the 1696 La Passione di Christo, oggetto di meraviglia, returned to these categories: “For if marvel abstracts the mind from other objects, the marvels of Christ’s Passion can divert [it] from the errors in my pages. . . . the contemplation of Christ’s Passion causes pain in memory; illuminates the intellect; purifies the will; creates jubilation in the angels; amazement in humans; and terror in Hell. Thus it is indeed an object of marvel.” In this remarkable work, all the characters are allegorical, and three of them derive from Cambi’s explication: Contemplation is flanked by Memory, Intellect, and Will, and the “audience” for the contemplative subject consists of a different trio: the allegorical Angels’ Jubilation, Human Stupor, and Hell’s Terror. Burnacini’s drawing for the upper part of the set—Moses and the Burning Bush—also survives (Vienna, Theatermuseum, Min. 29/29b1; figure 5). Along with the 1691 I Frutti,

figure 5. L. O. Burnacini, Moses and the Burning Bush. (Permission by KHM-Museumsverband.)

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this is one of Minato’s pieces on the process of meditation, and as such is discussed later. Unfortunately, the scores for both these sepolcri went missing after Draghi’s death on 16 January 1700, or perhaps they were simply considered too anachronistic for a new century’s devotional taste and thus not preserved.

the emblematics of staging The loss of La Passione’s score is all the more regrettable since Minato asked for three separate orchestras, each on a discrete set level, to play different music in the opening sinfonia simultaneously.54 This is one of the correspondences among poetic conceit, Burnacini’s multiplane designs, and music, and it seems to have been generated by the threefold divisions of subject and audience in the piece; perhaps it was the first “marvel” to be heard musically in the work. Throughout the piece, sinfonias celestial and infernal function as sonic markers of characters on various planes (Heaven, earth, Hell). Differentiating Burnacini’s drawings among sepolcri and other projects for operas, Forty Hours’ expositions, and even capricci (fantasies) is not easy. A clear case can be made for eight of the drawings (now in the Österreichisches Theatermuseum; see appendix 3) to represent sepolcri sets. To these should be added Minato’s ekphrastic descriptions at the beginning of some fifteen libretti. Most important for the technical and intellectual complexity of the design are the number of representational planes—one, two, or three—in the conceptions. The former concept is analogous to, but different from, Benjamin’s consideration of “vertical” and “horizontal” planes in tragedy, which in the case of drawings he considered to interfere with the representations of the celestial. Burnacini’s surviving wash drawings are sometimes hard to correlate with Minato’s set descriptions, and they seem to date from the later repertory. They were designs, subject to modifications, and not finished constructions. Some of their gestures, as recent research has shown, are taken from emblem books available in the court library, notably Melchior Küsel’s Icones biblicae (Augsburg, 1679), an illustrated Bible synopsis from the primary illustrator of the time and a figure with links to the Habsburgs.55 In addition—and unlike the opera sets—they remained visible throughout the entire piece, and thus their meaning developed as the symbolic trajectory of any work unfolded.

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Thus the sets have to be taken as integral parts of the sepolcri’s manufacture of meaning. Even the works of the 1660s imply action with characters’ comings and goings (in Federici’s 1666 Gli affetti pietosi, Adam begins his scene 2 by lifting his torso from his grave under the Cross, slowly to come entirely onstage), and although none of Burnacini’s designs can be safely matched to any texts earlier than the 1680s, it is hard to imagine pieces of the previous decades without a basic staging.56 The first two scenes of the 1662 Fede trionfante take place in the darkness over the earth at the Crucifixion, before Faith illuminates the stage with her sheer brightness in scene 3, overwhelming Longinus and presumably the spectators in Eleonora’s small, dark chapel in the Neue Burg.57 Indeed, some of the deictic textual indications suggest a basic visual environment, at least some kind of Crucifix, such as the famed one of Ferdinand II kept on the high altar of the Hofburgkapelle.58 The first presence of a constructed stage design can be deduced from the Friday 1670 work by Minato and Sances, and the opening indication for such a scene is in the following year’s libretto for the same Day, Il Trionfo della Croce. Of course, after the rites earlier on Thursday, all statues and altarpieces in the royal chapels would have been draped for the Triduum; thus the Tomb and, after 1670, the set design were the only representational objects visible.59 One example of such interplay is the very last sepolcro for Eleonora, La Sorte sopra la veste di Christo of 1686 (Minato, with music by G. B. Pederzoli). The libretto gives Jonah’s ship with the whale as the set design, and there survives a likely drawing (Theatermuseum, Min. 29/39b1; figure 6), which also includes the biblical motto from Jonah 1:7 (“And they cast lots [sortes], and the lot fell on Jonah”). Given the long tradition of identification of the prophet with Christ (the former’s three days in the whale ≈ Christ’s three days in the Tomb), one level of identification (whale=Tomb) would have been obvious. Still, the motto referring to “casting lots” comes before the first mention (Jon 2:1) of the fish, and the libretto works out the symbolic equivalence of Jonah’s lots with those thrown by the Roman soldiers on Calvary over Christ’s clothes. This design would have involved at least two architectonic planes with the motto on top (and no Eucharist present in either the drawing or Minato’s description), hence setting up the triangular process of meditative association. As on many other fronts, the works of the 1670s had already raised the level of visual complexity in the single design in front of which all

figure 6. L. O. Burnacini, Jonah Cast Overboard. (Permission by KHM-Museumsverband.)

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the psychological action plays out. The distance between image and devotional topic thus engaged the same kind of meditative association as did emblems, working out the invisible similarities that the imprese presented at any given moment over the course of an hour’s worth of text and music. A single year’s sets (for which there are no drawings) give some idea of the emblematics. The Thursday piece for 1683—a moment at which the upcoming Ottoman threat meant curtailed stagings as early as the winter operatic works—was La Sete di Christo. Minato’s indication gives the set background as Calvary with Christ crucified, and the text opens with the entire cast onstage, an unusual quintet of biblical lamenters: the Virgin, the Magdalen, John the Baptist, Joseph, and Nicodemus.60 This text was later reworked by an anonymous author and set to music by Bernardo Pasquini, probably for his Borghese patrons in Rome, with this version then performed in Modena in 1689.61 Its Friday pendant, L’Eternità soggetta al tempo (another case of Minato’s upending an early modern commonplace), featured a set with Ahaz’s sundial (Is 38:8, the story of Ezechias’s recovery from sickness and the divine reversal of ten degrees on the dial to give the king a longer life) as its apparato, and some twelve completely allegorical figures singing: a Penitent, Time and Eternity, the Four Seasons, Day and Night, and the Three Hours of Darkness. Thus the intellectual material differed; on Thursday, listeners would have had to place John the Baptist at the Tomb with Calvary in the background, even though the Precursor had died before Christ. Friday’s message was more encoded, and it is again helpful to turn to Lapide’s exegesis of the verse from Isaiah 38.62 After a long disquisition on the astronomical implications of the reversal (whether the sun or just its shadow retroceded, whether the ten degrees meant ten hours, how long the actual day was, etc.), the Jesuit had given his characteristic four meanings for the passage beyond the literal sense, of which the tropological and allegorical ones are most relevant. In terms of the spiritual, souls undergoing conversio like Ezechias were indeed restored to their earlier merit and perfection; allegorically, Christ in His Passion and Harrowing of Hell descended ten levels (~degrees) below the choirs of angels and humans, then to rise again in the Ascension. This sepolcro’s concern with astronomy and measuring time also echoed Leopold’s own scientific interests, typical of the libretti around 1680. Finally, the royal listeners on Friday would also have thought of the following verses of the book, Ezechias’s song of recovery (Is 38:10ff.),

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“In the midst of my days I shall go to the gates of Hell; . . . I shall not see the Lord God in the land of the living,” as a direct reference to Christ’s entombment and the Harrowing. To complete the hermeneutic circle, Lapide had referred to this biblical song as a “carmen eucharisticum,” whether the text was written by Ezechias or by Isaiah himself. The presence of the Santissimo in the set design had reflections in the textual allusions of biblical passages. Still, the unfolding of the emblematics was a dramatic process, beyond the initial visual impact. In working out the Thursday piece, Minato would also have had in mind Marino’s second Diceria sacra, “La musica,” whose theme is the Seven Words of Christ. Minato’s preface works around the ideas of “fountains of eloquence,” along with various meanings of “thirst,” and ends by wishing the reader to be “thirsty for divine grace.” La Sete begins with a long paraphrase of the Improperia, reproaching the Chosen People for its “ingratitude,” and moving on to a consideration of Christ’s suffering.63 This is interrupted by one of the Words (in Latin), “Sitio” (I thirst), sung by the offstage Voice of Christ (this device is normally used for choruses or for God the Father), which leads the five characters to a sacra conversazione. Since the Word’s enunciation had happened before the Entombment, this is a representation of meditative memory. In the discussion, the Baptist’s presence is justified, as he had baptized Christ with water at the beginning of His mission, as a sign of His humanity; the Magdalen’s tears represent the later presence of water in salvational history; and the simple opposition of water/fire swings the discourse around to “ardor.” Along the way, Minato played on a characteristically diverse set of authorities: Drogo of Laon/Ostia, Johannes Tauler, and Seneca. The three non-hidden followers of Christ (Mary, the Magdalen, the Baptist) then begin a series of metrically differentiated choral interjections. These continue with other trios involving Giuseppe and Nicodemo, until the Baptist recognizes Christ’s real need: “Yes, my crucified one, I believe that Your thirst is [really] Your desire that sinners may enjoy the fruits of the Blood that You shed.” After Nicodemo invokes the Hypostatic Union, the Baptist moves the meditative progression one level further by concluding that “thirst holds a profound mystery”; the Magdalen then echoes Minato’s preface, “Yes, incarnate and crucified God, for You am I thirsty”; and all five characters then come around to their thirst for the Cross. The Magdalen and the Baptist, as human followers, have the last word, and the

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final madrigale is addressed to sinners, royal and other: “When Christ thirsts, he is thirsty for your weeping.” Thus the seemingly simple set of the Cross, perhaps ultimately dictated by the constraints of the military situation, turns out to reveal liquid associations. In Friday’s L’Eternità, the one-plane (and hence relatively easy to construct, given the logistics in 1683) set, however obscure it might have seemed at first view, also played out sequentially. Beyond the despairing Penitent with whom the libretto begins, the other eleven allegorical figures are all related to time, and they are introduced in descending order of temporal scope: (1) Time/Eternity, (2) the Four Seasons, (3) Day/Night, and (4) the Three Hours of Darkness. Eternità begins the pedagogical process with explanations of Divine Unity so technical that Draghi’s ability to set them to music is astounding. But given the looming Ottoman threat, this could also be construed as the musical answer to Islamic criticisms of Christian “polytheism.” After an analogously hermetic explanation by Tempo, the Stagioni appear to exemplify temporal change, and to enunciate the central conceit of the text: that the Hypostatic Union was parallel to eternity’s becoming subject to time. Tempo and Eternità then summarize this point, allowing the issue of “limits” to be raised via the introduction of Giorno and Notte, related to the Creation (Gen 1:14, “He divided the day from the night”). The first four characters to appear then retell Christ’s life and Passion in terms of temporal spans (e.g., the forty days in the desert). Here, however, the visual emblem of the sundial becomes important, as Ezechias’s canticle in Isaiah also features a refrain foretelling Good Friday: “de mane usque ad vesperam finies me//You finish me from morning until evening.” In the sepolcro, this is echoed by Tempo and Eternità’s references to Passion events that occurred by both day and night. Lapide’s commentary on Isaiah had taken this verse as only a meditation on the brevity and vanity of human life, without reference to Good Friday. Minato did not miss the occasion to connect temporality to the preceding day’s piece by having L’Estate sing the second stanza of a two-strophe aria, “and His thirst was so terrible, lasting so long that finally on the Cross He showed Himself thirsty” (sitibondo, the key word of La Sete’s conclusion). In Minato’s careful construction of scenes, Il Giorno then sets up the entrance of the final trio of characters, Le Tre Ore di Tenebre, by lamenting his own abandonment of Christ that allowed darkness to come upon the earth. Their entrance toward the piece’s climax would have

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presaged the coming sunset on that 16 April, as sunset happened around 6:45 p.m. (in modern terms). The combination of each Hour of Darkness brings the Penitent to a culminating two-stanza aria of penance (“Mio Christo, perdono”), and the concluding coda, on the “reversed” idea of using earthly time to acquire eternal life, also retrogrades the order of appearance of the allegorical characters. Listeners had to make the meditative connection among the stage set (never explicitly invoked in the sepolcro’s text), the poetic conceits, and the musical experience. These pieces raise the issue of audiences’ reception of allegorical figures, as they arise also in Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s autos sacramentales.64 The role of such characters in Italy, coming out of the medieval rappresentatione tradition, is less known, and their specific employment by a dramatist of European renown like Minato will be investigated in chapter 2.65

eleonora’s view: la gara della misericordia e giustitia di dio (1661) The totality of the messages for the 1683 Triduum also suggests that penance and Passion mourning were woven together in close (and not always obvious) ways in any given year. At the very beginning of the genre, the 1661 Thursday piece gives one view of Eleonora Gonzaga’s devotional world.66 She would have learned early how to use spectacle and music in the service of penance. Her mother (also a widow), Maria Gonzaga, had personally supervised the cultural and physical reconstruction of Mantua after the devastation of the 1629–31 War of the Succession, and in the 1640s, the duchess had set up a Sunday Eucharistic celebration in the ducal capital, officiated by the local Jesuits, with candles and the ducal musicians at the church of S. Stefano, entitled the “buonamorte.”67 In the devastated duchy, the young (and half-orphaned) Eleonora would have seen musical enactments of a Christian death. Still, there seems to be no tradition of Tombs, with or without music, in Mantua’s churches.68 There also survives evidence for her own piety, notably an incomplete manuscript, gathering daily prayers plus orations and occasional Offices for important sanctoral celebrations throughout the year (the fascicles containing feasts from January to May, and hence potentially Holy Week, are sadly missing).69 This Prattica di divotioni bears a manuscript colophon indicating its destination for the Varese printing house in Rome in 1659, the main publisher of both devotional and historical

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works by the Jesuits around midcentury. Although nominally written “di mano propria,” the neat hand looks nothing at all like Eleonora’s large script in her letters from the 1650s back home to Mantua. For whatever reason, it was evidently not printed until well after her death, as Prattica di divotioni quotidiane (Vienna and Trent, 1706), since there is no record of a Roman edition.70 The volume, both the print and manuscript versions, includes daily prayers of adoration, texts for each individual day of the week, invocations of Christ’s Five Wounds, addresses to Christ Crucified, “Ave Marias” based on the virtues of St. Joseph, Carlo Borromeo’s “Protesta a ben morire” (like her childhood experiences), and then texts for important (to Eleonora) feast days, including St. Anne, another model for widowed mothers of female children. The Five Wounds devotion would appear in the 1677 Le Cinque piaghe for her chapel, repeated in 1681. Eleonora’s sense of female piety was evident in the two different Viennese oratorios (possibly 1668, and 1683)— evidently the first in the Italian repertory on the topic—on the life of her patroness St. Helena, and her Prattica had also noted the presence of an “Eleonora” among the eleven thousand virgins martyred with St. Ursula.71 The extremely sensual devotion in the empress’s text for the feast of Mary’s birth (8 September) might have represented an obstacle to its actual publication around 1660; this outburst of corporeality on Baby Mary was a highly charged version of devotion to the Immaculate Conception. The opening of the whole book gives a sense of Eleonora’s own formulations, indebted not least to the tradition of Christian optimism: “All-powerful God, fountain of all good, Heaven has been enriched by Your Divine Majesty with so much beauty that it is hard to tell Your glory, for which purpose as many tongues would need to come forth as stars appear to us at night.” This text, along with the sepolcri, probably comes close to the empress’s own unmediated devotion.72 Devotional prints written by others and dedicated to her include Lenten manuals and reflections on other important saints. The Discalced Carmelite Emanuele di Gesù Maria inscribed his Fiori di Carmelo sparsi nelle festività de’ santi (Vienna, 1666) to the dowager empress, including sermons for Bl. Luigi Gonzaga (her relative) and St. Joseph given that same autumn at court. If these items show off the festive side of her devotion, penance and mortality are more evident in the work of the Modenese Jesuit preacher Giovanni Battista Manni (1606– 82), who spent enough time in Vienna to write the rules of the Order of

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the Starry Cross that she had founded in 1662, and who dedicated the first part of his Lenten sermons to her in 1681. Manni also published a biography of the empress’s mother, Maria, and an emblem book on death, his Varii e veri ritratti della morte (Milan, 1671). Yet Eleonora had even more direct models for how to mourn at Tombs. In his massive 1,031-page compendium of virtuous Christian widows, La reggia delle vedove sacre, dedicated to the empress in 1663 (and reprinted in 1682), the Paduan Dominican Girolamo Ercolani (c. 1620–68) recalled the piety of an earlier female Gonzaga who had gone to Austria, married a Habsburg, and then was left widowed at age twenty-eight, Anna Caterina (1566–1621). In her time as ruler in Innsbruck, Anna had had a new church of the Sepulcher built with seven chapels (the now-secularized Siebenkapellenkirche). During her widowhood spent as a Servite tertiary in the monastery that she had founded in 1614, according to Ercolani Anna had participated in the nuns’ reenactments of the Via Crucis, their forming a “living Cross,” and seeming “like so many Magdalens in their watch day and night, destroyed by sorrow, at the Tomb of God deceased.” Ercolani’s dedication of this tome forms part of Eleonora’s efforts to create a circle of virtuous and religious women in the world, something like a revival of the medieval bizzoche (roughly “secular tertiaries”) tradition, organized around both the “Starry Cross” and her all-female “Slaves of Virtue.” For all her piety, the empress was also active in court politics.73 Clearly she played vital roles in the transition from her husband to her stepson, and even after the arrival of Margherita Teresa in 1666, largely taking the side of the Spanish party at court.74 She weighed in strongly on Leopold’s choices for his second and third wives in 1673 and 1676. Her political place was also evident in her patronage of sepolcri, as the case of Holy Thursday in 1684 (discussed in chapter 4) shows. As for many early modern Christians, Eleonora’s devotional world was thus complex.75 Lent 1661 seems to have been a particularly busy time in her chapel, as a letter from the new Modenese ambassador suggests, partially because of her response to Pope Alexander VII’s universal Jubilee of that year to implore pardon for Christian sin along with heavenly aid in the battles against the Ottomans.76 Indeed, the foregrounding of Misericordia in the Thursday piece might have been a response to this theme in the Jubilee. The sepolcro enacts the remorse of two character pairs: Giuda and Pietro together with the Centurione and Longino (in the Viennese tradition, these latter were separate figures on

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Calvary). This quartet is in dialogue with the three allegorical figures: the contesting Misericordia and Giustizia, along with Disperatione. The allegorical trio parallels that of 1660’s Trionfo, and the piece’s virtuoso bass part for Giuda suggests what the music for Morte might have been like the previous year if Pierelli’s Trionfo (for which Tricarico’s score does not survive) were the text. Given that Draghi was the only bass singer employed by the empress in 1662, this part or parts might well have been meant for him; certainly the character’s unusual presence in this piece testifies to some kind of extraordinary singer. Five of eight scenes include the traitorous disciple, starting with a despairing monologue at his first appearance in scene 2.77 In the literary environment, there were even longer treatments of Judas’s fate, such as the forty-five-page poem by Giulio Liliani printed in 1627 under Tasso’s name. Quoting Ambrose, Manni noted in his Lenten sermons that the apostle’s despair was a greater sin (because of its denial of divine mercy) than his betrayal of Christ.78 Obviously, the creation of an allegorical Despair was not original with Scarano, dating as it did to the Mystère de la Passion of the fifteenth-century Parisian organist and author Arnaul Gréban. Giuda’s presence in this piece also reflects an undated oratorio, probably from the 1660s, for the court by the castrato singer and occasional composer Filippo Vismarri, Giuda disperato (score in I-Baf). As the lineup of characters suggests, La Gara works around paired duets leading to trios, thus imparting an expansive dramatic macrorhythm to the scenes. Like the 1660 Il Sagrifizio, it starts in media res, here with a squabble over precedence between Misericordia and Giustizia, followed by a duet of Giuda and Pietro and then a trio of these two last and Misericordia. The pattern repeats with a duo for the Centurione and Longino, followed by Giuda and Misericordia, and another trio for these two plus Giustizia, featuring the betraying disciple’s most florid music. The final three scenes move from a trio on Giuda’s final despair, to a quartet, to a quintet of characters, as he disappears and penance is enacted by the others. The constructivism of the structure is evident, and the piece marked the first use of the “competition” trope in a sacred context, although the idea had originally been employed for a Viennese opera in January 1652 to celebrate the birth of Margherita Teresa in Spain. The same idea would return in Pierelli’s (?1663) sepolcro La Gara di pietà, which features the Virgin, an angel, and some four allegorical characters (Fede, Amor Divino, Gentilesmo, and Paganesmo), before it went on to a long career in stage works

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secular and sacred. The Thursday 1661 piece was followed on Friday by Draghi and Bertali’s Il Pentimento, focusing only on penance and calling for fewer (six) singers than did La Gara della misericordia. How Scarano might have come up with his dramatic scheme is not entirely clear. He had been born into a middle-class family in Taranto, educated in the seminary and taken orders, and at some point made his way to Vienna, where he would collaborate on other dramatic projects before returning home and dying in 1671.79 He might well have known Tricarico in Apulia before ever reaching Austria. His piece marks the first use of New Testament characters in the repertory, and the first reference to a Habsburg relic, by virtue of his inclusion of Longino and thus the Holy Lance which the soldier had wielded to pierce Christ’s side. Rather than having Penance be an actual character, as in the two pieces of the previous year and the other 1661 work—indeed, Penitenza’s “epilogue” to Il Sagrifizio d’Abramo on Good Friday 1660 had turned out as a show-grabbing solo for Vismarri—here remorse is enacted in different ways by Pietro, the Centurione, and Longino, while rejected by Giuda. Thus every nonallegorical figure is a sinner of some sort. The setup of the first three scenes shows the links to the past tradition of rappresentazioni, while the music is firmly rooted in midcentury styles. The two allegorical figures open by snapping at each other in versi sciolti, with their opening scene falling into the flatter regions of their G mollis tonality. Misericordia points at a Crucifix, while Giustizia places the scene temporally by noting that nothing has been the same for her since Christ’s death. In this recited dialogue, even the smallest vocal flourish stands out. With the entrance of two soliloquizing sinners, the literary register drops in scene 2, the verses even out into settenari, and the tonal environment shifts abruptly into durus regions around D. Giuda opens with a long, despondent monologue descending to his low E, while Pietro reiterates the depth of his betrayal, and the two squabble as to whose sin was greater, a parody of the opening dispute between the allegorical figures (example 1.1). Perhaps because of the underlying popular tradition of Tomb theater, the opening of this piece, while serious, comes off as livelier than might be expected. It is certainly nothing like the outpourings of unbridled grief that would open some later sepolcri, starting with Minato’s 1670 Sette consolationi. And in its studied ignoring of the actual Sepulcher, it focuses attention from the outset on penance—just as the works of the previous year and Il Pentimento would do.80

Passion and Theater | 41 example 1.1. G. Tricarico, La Gara della Misericordia e Giustizia (1661; A-Wn 18716), “Uccidetemi omai,” f. 8v.

? c ‰ œR œ # œj œ œ œ b œj œr r j j Œ ‰ œ œ R œ œ œ R R J Giuda

? c ˙.

Uc - ci - de - te - mi
I
o - mai,

spir - ti d'In - fer - no

bœ

? #œ œ œ œ œ J J J J

hor m'ac - com - pa - gna

? ˙

-

te,

se cru - de

˙

? œ œ œ œ œ J J J J

j œ œj œj œj Œ

ge - te ques - to mos - tro d'A - ver - no?

? ˙

˙

œ œJ œ J -

li

voi

˙ #

sie

w

œ # Jœ J

fu - rie spie - ta - te ch'ogn'

#˙

w

#

7-6

w Œ # œJ œJ œ

œ

e voi

# œ œ œJ œ J

-

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œ œ J J # Jœ Jœ Jœ # œJ te

per - che non

tra - fig -

œ ‰ R œR # œ Rœ # Rœ J

œ œ j r r J œœ œ œ œ œ

˙

œ.

Uc - ci - de - te - mi
I
o - mai, spir

-

ti d'In - fer - no!

j œ

œ œ

The first aria, cast in the two-stanza form that was normative in both sacred and secular dramatic works, is given to Pietro at the end of scene 3, cast in settenari and endecasillabi and based on E, moving to a more distant tonal center. As if to contrast all this, the two Roman soldiers arriving from Calvary frame their penance with duets in scene 4, before we return in the next scene to an increasingly desperate Giuda, who asks Giustizia to kill him with the sword of Justice. Although she lays out the path of penance culminating in hope, the former apostle refuses to take it, despite a duet plea from the two sisters. Misericordia leaves Giustizia to observe Giuda’s downfall, which begins with his aria at the end of scene 6, paralleling Pietro’s three scenes earlier. By this point, the didactic division between “good” and “bad” remorse has been made evident, and Scarano then introduces Disperatione (with Giuda’s reference to her black armor) in another “dialogue of recognition” at the beginning of scene 7. The essential identity of the two characters becomes evident

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(Disperatione: “[io] son quel che tu sei”), and, still in relatively sharp pitch areas, the two go off together in a bouncy triple rhythm, despite Giustizia’s offstage warning about the horror of Hell. This jocund banalization of suicide seems to come out of the rappresentazione tradition. Before the scene ends, Giuda becomes the target of an invocation of despair by the devils, with a repetitive sinfonia consisting of only two pitches. The remarkable moment closes with second thoughts from Giuda, and Giustizia’s vow that she will accompany him even in his suicide. To the degree that there is any contemporary model for this scene, it was probably not Liliani’s poem, a series of solo laments for Judas with minimal narration, but rather a moment in Fabio Glissanti’s guide to Hell, L’horribile e spaventevole inferno (Venice, 1617). Here a damned soul is led through infernal regions and passes a mural that depicts the dialogue between Despair and the betraying disciple. As a major creator of allegorical drama, Glissanti also served as something of a model for the early sepolcri. The reappearance of Misericordia at the opening of scene 8 thus marks the denouement, as she brings mercy to the three repentant sinners. This moment also marks the only recurrence of the piece’s opening pitch structure (G mollis), after most of the central scenes’ placement on A or D durus. Set in the sharp sonorities that had characterized most of the piece, the finale depicts the end of the contest between the two allegorical sisters, as Giustizia shows herself satisfied by the “expense of tears” of Pietro, Longino, and the Centurione. The concluding couplet, set homophonically and not as an imitative madrigale, simply states the point: “Arise, o sinner, and raise your head, for heavenly grace is always ready.” Uniquely in the entire repertory, the sepolcro ends on a different pitch center and system (in Athanasius Kircher’s sense) from that in which it had begun.81 La Gara thus works out the tension between the didactic, neatly paired, duet scenes for sinners, on one hand, and the dramatic confrontation of Despair and Judas in scene 7, on the other. Eleonora’s sepolcro of the following year, La Fede trionfante, kept some emphasis on penance, but moved in a more explicitly operatic direction. It was the third libretto provided to the court by Draghi, who had started with Il Pentimento and then written Leopold’s 1661 birthday opera L’Almonte, dedicated to Eleonora. Both these texts feature shorter line lengths, greater amounts of sdrucciolo and tronco (stress on antepenultimate and last syllables, respectively) line endings, and more frequent soliloquies, with one of which La Fede opens. The character of the post-1661 texts, then, becomes more explicitly operatic and less like a medieval play.

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The ethos of the court in 1660 is described by Müller’s travel report. To understand the expectations that Eleonora would have brought to hearing her Thursday pieces, it helps to review the construction of a system for stage music overall, after the obligatory year of mourning for Ferdinand III (1657–58). Besides spoken comedies by G. A. Cicognini, opera came to Leopold’s court at Carnival 1659 with Amalteo/Bertali’s Il Re Gilidoro, followed by a June birthday opera for Leopold but dedicated to Eleonora on one of her favorite themes, namely, virtue, La Virtù guerriera (libretto and music by Aureli/Tricarico, respectively). This massive work featured some nine allegorical characters along with three stock low-register opera figures. Eleonora’s birthday opera that year was the standard Venetian Il Pelope geloso (G. F. Marcello/?Tricarico; dedicated to Leopold and employing mythological/pastoral personages); it was not performed until the end of December in order to avoid conflict with Advent. This interplay between the emperor and his stepmother of dedications and commissionings of music theater would remain constant until Leopold’s marriage. Notably, 1659 had also marked the first oratorio in Lent, possibly one by Tricarico for Eleonora’s chapel. Some of this activity represents the empress’s own recovery from the deaths of the 1650s, starting with Ferdinand IV and III, her stepmother-in-law Eleonora (I), and her own son Ferdinand in 1658; as she reported back to Mantua after the last loss, “In all this time I have felt not ordinary suffering.”82 Her other solace was writing back to her mother about her daughters’ talents, as they grew up. The following year, featuring the first sepolcri, began musically at Carnival with a resetting (after Cesti’s for Innsbruck a few years earlier) of Cicognini’s Orontea as composed by Vismarri. The Mantuan ambassador Antonio Calori reported back home on the other offerings during that winter of commedie dell’arte (which might explain the sacra rappresentatione approach to the sepolcri of 1660–61), but then the summer/fall 1660 festivities took place on a smaller scale, largely one-act introduzioni.83 Why these entertainments were more modest is not immediately clear, but the pattern continued until summer 1661. Hence, the two sepolcri of that year were relatively major events that spring, however brief they might seem; Tricarico’s Gara could have lasted up to forty-five minutes. The pattern of large-scale operas with multiple sets by Burnacini resumed only later in 1661, with two three-act pieces for the royal birthdays. The first of these, L’Almonte (Draghi/Tricarico), is the only Italian

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opera anywhere to this point whose prologue features allegorical/artistic figures constructing an opera set, a kind of metatheater.84 As the performance seems to have marked the return of the stage designs to the repertory, this thematic choice reinforces the reinstitutionalization of opera. The other novelty of this year was the import of oratorios, including Roman pieces by Carlo Caprioli and Marco Marazzoli that the dowager empress seems to have had sent from the Eternal City, thus reinforcing the sense of her chapel’s activity.85 She arranged for their performance in Advent 1661 and Lent 1662, although these pieces run shorter than the sepolcri. At Carnival 1662, the musical intermezzi for Cicognini’s spoken drama Marienne took on greater length, and Amalteo/Sances’s Roselmina was a long, complex Venetian opera, a pattern repeated later that year in Sbarra’s important Generosità d’Alessandro. Thus the sepolcri fit in as part of a wider (re)turn to extended opera, part of their more extrovert nature. The breaks in stagings over the next two years, along with the 1665 arrival of Sbarra in Vienna and the festive cycle around the 1666– 67 wedding festivities for Leopold and Margherita, would change the wider dramatic scene and set up new expectations as the musical expression of the royals’ personal piety began to be shaped. It is striking that the 1666 report on Holy Week by the new Roman nuncio Giulio Spinola is the first one explicitly to mention sepolcri and weeping in the Imperial Chapel.86

chapter 2

Devotional Strategies

In addition to the visual context and the dramatic background, current piety conditioned the pieces’ meaning. The topics were not confined to the postburial mourning of Christ, but entailed meditative trajectories on the entire process of redemption, from the Incarnation through the Cross. Since the libretti were both commemorative and didactic, they had to adumbrate the need for, and efficacy of, the Passion. Given that little of the entire Viennese oratorio repertory addressed Christ’s death directly—and with the silent but overwhelming presence of His Body on display in the Tomb during the performances—the pieces were also to explain the reasons for His sacrifice in the first place.1 And they had to be couched in terms meaningful to the royals, beginning with a littleknown but important part of court ideology.

the economics of redemption Like sepulchral culture and Passion devotion in general, the repertory stands at the intersection of soteriology (the theology of salvation) and justification theory. But its vocabulary also invoked ideas of price and exchange in early modern Europe, even if its background is that of classical explanations of redemption. Beyond the reaffirmation of Anselm’s idea of the Passion as satisfaction for sin, codified in the early discussions at the Council of Trent, Catholic understandings of the medieval saint’s treatise Cur Deus homo? placed the reconciliation of divine justice and 45

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mercy precisely in the Cross. With the addition of Aquinas’s emphasis on Christ’s free self-sacrifice, and its reiteration using His Blood as the fluid of salvation, a general consensus was set out in chapter 2 of the 1547 Tridentine “Decree on Justification.” Within that framework, however, different emphases on satisfaction for original sin could circulate. The degree to which Christ’s death placated God, and ultimately the need for the Incarnation-Passion, was expressed in the repertory via formulations of restitution and price, as found in Minato’s Sette consolationi (1670). Here Giustizia Divina enters in scene 2 by describing herself in the third person, metrically echoing the versi sciolti with which the grieving Virgin had opened the piece (see chapter 3): S’havea di sodisfarsi; / la Giustitia Divina; / era dover così, l’oggetto offeso / se riguardar si deve, / infinita è la colpa /del transgressor Adamo, / che l’infinito suo fattor offese: / e redimer potea / sol de la trina, ed indivisa essenza / Una persona eterna; / l’huomo caduto al pricipizio rio; / che infinito non è, se non Iddio. // Divine Justice had to be satisfied; it was necessary if the “offended object” is considered. The sin of Adam transgressing was infinite, he who offended his infinite Maker. Only an eternal Person of the threefold and undivided Essence could redeem humanity, fallen from the evil precipice; for the only Infinite is God.2

Beyond traditional satisfaction theory, though, the various exchanges present in redemption and sinners’ reactions—for example, guilt for tears, or Christ’s Body for Adam’s sin—took on special weight in Leopold’s court, given the rise of mercantilist thought in economics and its local Viennese exponents. Such thinkers in court circles as Johann Joachim Becher, P. W. von Hörnigk, and Wilhelm von Schröder favored internal trade, the development of an urban mercantile class, and modern financial administration. Outside economics, their ideas also had an impact on ceremonial language and behavior at court, for all that the expenses on music theater and staging might have seemed “irrational” from a monetarist perspective.3 Thus the libretti’s inclusion of payment, prices, and balance showed the presence of both the scholastic and the modern in court discourse. Becher’s own eclectic theology, drawing variously from hermeticism and from the contemporary spirituality of Cardinal Giovanni Bona, also suggests another link between the lexical fields of exchange and soteriology.4 In addition, the openness of Catholic anti-Machiavellian thought toward trade (particularly in the political theorist Giovanni Botero, whose ideas had framed Habsburg claims to sovereignty) added weight to this discursive use.

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The first transaction to come up in the libretti was that of sinners’ debt. In the 1661 La Gara, it was expressed in terms of how much humanity owed to justice. After Giuda’s exit to suicide, in scene 8 Misericordia addresses the three remaining figures (Pietro, Longino, and the Centurione) to induce penance. Then Giustizia, armed and furious, reappears, as pitch organization switches in a sharp direction, from G mollis to G durus, and when Misericordia attempts to claim the trio for herself, Giustizia trumps her by pointing to their status: “each one of them is a true debtor to me of tears and pain.” With a sudden lurch toward even sharper pitch regions (on E), the sinners move to comply: “The disbursement of tears from our pain will be made to you, like cash at the bank of the Earth.”5 Giustizia accepts this promise with another change in pitch center, moving to C durus, and essentially the contest of justice and mercy is over, resolved dialogically and tonally by the differing remorse of each sinner. Even before, payment had come up in the closing madrigale of the 1660 Il Sagrifizio, as Caldana put it in halting verse: “From our eyes, let us pay out the heart’s capital in coins of flowing tears, nor let any penitent greedily hold on to them; pardon can be bought only with these pearls [margarite=“tears”].”6 Minato’s 1678 piece for Eleonora, I Tre chiodi di Christo, begins with Redeemed Humanity joyfully shedding its chains, but then being instructed as to the price of the transaction by Catholic Piety: “How much this your fate cost Jesus: thorns, whips, nails, the Cross, and death. . . . Humanità Redenta: Catholic Piety, you move me to tears; I would almost say that it pains me that my Redeemer bought me back from the Devil’s eternal slavery, if the price of my salvation is so great.” But it was in the Friday 1685 libretto (Draghi’s score is not preserved) that Minato rang all possible changes on redemption’s value, starting with his characteristically artificial and self-abnegating preface: “Reader, yesterday [the Thursday sepolcro] you gave me a large capital of sympathy for my Bevanda di fiele; today I seek to pay you with my Prezzo dell’humana redentione. . . . The price that I present you is Christ’s Blood, of infinite worth.” This piece featured one of Burnacini’s more complex designs, which moved the garden where the Tomb was traditionally located back on to Calvary (one drawing, Vienna, Theatermuseum, Min. 29/58b2, seems partially related, but some important details differ). Above the Crucifixion’s hill was the Cherub who expelled Adam from Eden, and in the heights of Burnacini’s set, the typical glory (an earlier version of this

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design, without the Cherub, had been used for the 1677 L’Infinità impicciolita). Its unusual cast of characters included four symbolic figures linked to redemption (Humanità Redenta again, Amor Divino, Misericordia Eterna, and Pentimento) along with three angels past or present: the Cherub, Lucifero, and a Guardian Angel, the last of whom begins the piece by releasing Humanità from the chains in which Lucifer leads her: “Drop these chains, get out of here, rebellious spirit! Lucifero: Have I lost my spoils? I, made utterly weak?” This echoes the seemingly optimistic opening of I Tre chiodi, and the four characters continue until Amor Divino and Misericordia Eterna appear out of nowhere in the Glory, narrating the events of salvational history with jabs at Lucifer. Finally, Pentimento arrives, eventually causing the Devil to flee entirely and offering the material means of a penitent life—namely and obviously, the Cross—to Humanità. Rather than hammering away at price, the underlying conceit of the piece, Minato held back until all the details of redemption had been sung. Then Pentimento’s two-stanza aria brought it back in: “(1) Weep, weep, never cease your weeping at Christ’s Feet; in giving your tears, you give little to Him Who gave His Blood for you. (2) Jesus shed His Blood from the five rivers [a gesture to the Five Wounds devotion], but for weeping you have only two eyes, miserable one, and nothing else. Cherubino: Redeemed Humanity, you cost so much to your Lord, and yet you are subject to only a small tax. a4: Penance and sorrow cost you nothing.” After Pentimento departs and returns with a crucifix, the final madrigale returns to the metaphor, leaving the Cross behind: “O human, you are earth, but you cost so much to Heaven.” This battle over just payment had an uncanny echo in Leopold’s fiscal policy for the imperial estates, subjected to levies that Vienna deemed necessary and which the nobility rejected as excessive. Even in the more hermetic libretti of the 1690s, the trope continued to function: the Apocalyptic Il Libro con sette sigilli of 1694, a piece set in remarkably sharp tonal areas, opens with a duet between Il Dolore del Cuore Più Appassionato di Tutti i Cuori and L’Amor di Christo (“The Pain of the Most Passionate Heart of All” and “Christ’s Love”), an opening like that of the 1697 La Virtù della Croce discussed in this study’s introduction.7 Then three other unusual symbolic characters appear: La Pietà di Chi Diede il Velo per Coprire la Nudità di Christo in Croce; Lo Sguardo Pietoso di Christo a Pietro; and L’Aiuto del Cireneo (respectively “The Piousness of Him Who Gave the Sheet to Cover Christ’s Nudity on the Cross”; “Christ’s Merciful Glance at Peter”; and

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“The Help of [Simon] the Cyrenian”); these are all “second-order” figures of allegory discussed presently. For all their unusual conceptualist nature, Pietà and Sguardo open with a commonplace of mercantilist discourse: “The immortal descended to redeem the mortal; / Such a great price was paid for humans, who are worth nothing.”8

the personae of allegory The presence of such symbolic figures throughout the repertory is no surprise, coming as it does from the rappresentazione tradition. As noted, they also crop up, much more briefly, in the prologues of the Viennese opera and serenata repertory. That such roles elsewhere could have convincing musical depictions even later is evident in Alessandro Scarlatti’s output, for instance, the five allegorical figures found in his 1715 Oratorio della Santissima Trinità. But the Viennese novelty consisted of innovative choices for allegorical personages in both Sbarra’s and Minato’s libretti, and the use of second-order allegory in the latter’s. I have coined this latter term for characters that embody only one aspect of a human or biblical personage, for instance, Il Merito di Christo and Il Peccato d’Adamo//The Merit of Christ and Adam’s Sin, both found in the 1686 Friday piece Il Dono della vita eterna, or the just-mentioned trio from the 1694 Il Libro. Minato began to use them in the Thursday 1671 Epitaffi sopra il sepolcro (e.g., “L’Humanità di Christo”), then in 1672’s Il Paradiso aperto (“L’Humiltà della Beata Vergine,” who presents herself at the Father’s feet for intercession). Strikingly, the latter piece thus features both Mary and her Humility among its characters, a remarkable externalization of inner personality.9 In 1682’s Il Terremoto, this abstraction is extended to features of allegorical characters, in this case Il Lume della Scienza and Il Lume della Fede (“The Light of Knowledge/Faith”). The 1696 La Passione di Christo features four straight allegorical roles (mentioned earlier: Contemplatione, Memoria, Intelletto, and Voluntà), plus Il Giubilo degli Angeli, Lo Stupore degli Huomini, and Il Terror dell’Inferno, the last three—The Angels’ Rejoicing; The Amazement of Humans; The Terror of Hell—here all figures of affect. The practice returned in Cupeda’s 1701 Song of Songs sepolcro, Il Fascietto di mirra, combining biblical roles with symbolic ones, although it is entirely absent from the postLeopold works, a testimony to the waning power of allegory in the new century and new regime.

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In Cupeda’s libretto (M. A. Ziani’s score does not survive), two different allegorical traditions for the canticle’s Sponsa combine, and it is striking that neither is Marian. The cast list gives the female spouse as representing the Church Militant, and thus in the ecclesiological tradition of interpretation, but the preface explains the title’s “bundle of myrrh,” taken from the Song, as the “figure of the Redeemer’s Passion, to be held between the breasts, that is between the soul’s two powers,” and thus in individual or tropological understanding. A devotional tract published in Rome the previous autumn, La sublime contemplazione e sicura pace in Christo Giesù crocefisso, by the Discalced Carmelite Onorio dell’Assunta (G. C. Guidetti, 1639–1716), had seized on precisely this verse (Cant 1:12) as a symbol for the believer’s own contemplation of the Crucifixion.10 In line with Minato’s explanations of the previous decade, Cupeda also gave an ekphrastic description of the sepolcro’s staging: The set will represent a garden of lilies and other flowers. Midstage there will be a small hill with a myrrh tree, near which there will be the canticle’s Sponsa, who will have in her breast a myrrh bunch, the figure of Christ’s Passion, with a motto: My beloved is a myrrh bundle to me; He will remain between my breasts. [NB: Cant 1:12]. Jerusalem’s virgins will surround her, presenting her with flowers and apples, expressing the Passion. In the distance the canticle’s Sponsus will be seen, a figure of Christ, climbing a palm tree, with a motto: I shall climb a palm tree and pluck its fruit. [NB: Cant 7:8]

The piece opens with the Sponsa, the three cardinal virtues, and a penitent sinner, all paraphrasing various Canticle verses while making the link between the palm tree and the Cross; one of Burnacini’s drawings seems related to the scene as given by Cupeda.11 The female spouse then cites the parable of the vineyard (Matthew 21, etc.) in Passion context, and Carità calls her the vine planted by God the Father, using an interpretation from Ludolph of Saxony’s Vita Christi that also contains a swipe at Jewish “guilt” via the Tenebrae Responsory Vinea mea electa. After having ignored the Tomb thus far, the Sponsa then turns to it in a deictic gesture, leading to the appearance of the second-order figures L’Amore di Giovanni, La Penitenza di Pietro, and La Disperatione di Giuda (“John’s Love”; “Peter’s Penitence”; “Judas’s Despair”). This scene recalls the interactions of Peter and Judas from the texts of the 1660s, and here their “derivative” nature seems to distill their characters for dramatic expediency (they enter only two-thirds of the way through, and without the “Chi sei tu?” dialogues of recognition typical of earlier texts).

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From the surviving scores, it is most noteworthy that such characters do not sing differently from the normal biblical and allegorical personages. According to the cast list for the 1692 Il Sacrifizio non impedito, Il Rito della Chiesa (“Church Ritual”) was performed by the veteran bass Giulio Cesare Donati, active since 1665. Besides the opening of the 1697 La Virtù discussed in the introduction, this is evident in a less typical beginning, that of the 1686 Il Dono della vita eterna. Here four allegorical characters, posed between earth and Hell, inhabit a rocky valley: Il Genere Humano, Il Peccato d’Adamo, L’Odio Infernale, and La Morte Eterna (“The Human Race”; “Adam’s Sin”; “Infernal Hate”; and “Eternal Death”). At the same time, up in the set’s glory, Dio Padre, L’Amor Divino, Il Merito di Christo, La Vita Eterna, and La Grazia (“God the Father; Divine Love; Christ’s Merit; Eternal Life; and Grace”) look down on sinful humanity: that is, all nine singers, representing positive and negative characters, appear at once. For modern readers, these figures recall Benjamin’s trajectories of allegory in The Origin. Here two points from the second subsection of “Allegory and Tragedy” are relevant, even if some details (e.g., the importance of the chorus and the interludes in Silesian drama) do not apply to sepolcri. One is the necessarily Christian and courtly nature of the characters; another is Benjamin’s analysis of semantic richness, which leads to a disjunction between text and sound.12 From this the role, real and symbolic, of music in Trauerspiel is evident. The sepolcri resonate with both these points; as for the former, the frequent presence (but not necessity) of allegorical figures in the repertory contrasts with their restricted appearance in secular music theater. As for the second, the libretti lend another dimension to the literary/ phonetic disjuncture; the musical settings bring across the poetic meters and thus contribute to the pronuntio of the text. What is more difficult, and more in line with Benjamin’s telling analysis of this disjuncture, is the hermetic and conceptualist nature of Sbarra’s and Minato’s poetry, delivered in the same recitational style in which Passion events or psychological change could be musically recounted. Since Benjamin was dealing with spoken drama, the musical projection of the sepolcri introduces both partial resolution of his polarities and further difficulties with them. The printed libretti, evidently with some but not massive diffusion, stand as models of court mourning, especially in Minato’s case, in which every libretto had its text-specific conceptual preface. Benjamin’s invocation of “melancholy” describes some of the characters, but Mary’s often extrovert grief seems to emerge

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from another affective universe. That the scores did not circulate, however, testifies to the restricted nature of the entire dramatic experience beyond the immediate court audience. Benjamin’s argument for the necessarily modern nature of his texts as reflecting the conflicting epistemes of the seventeenth century also holds (with the necessary confessional/cultural differences) for the sepolcro repertory. In Minato’s hands—evidently in accord with Eleonora Gonzaga’s and Leopold’s tastes—allegorical characters move from being late musical avatars of the medieval rappresentazione to figures incorporating seventeenth-century ideas of human understanding, given sharp focus in the second-order personages.

the presence of scripture Since allegory had first to do with the correct understanding of scripture, its deployment in the libretti was linked to the use of the Bible as the ultimate proof text. To the degree that the sepolcri enacted memories of the Passion, recounted by mourners (Mary, John, the Magdalen), explained by allegorical figures, or narrated to sinners, they needed to draw on the Gospel accounts as well as references to Old Testament prophetic books. But in those texts (all by Minato) that introduce actual prophets, there is further intertextuality with the words of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others.13 The footnoted prophetic citations began in unexpected voice in Minato’s third libretto. The large-scale 1671 Trionfo della Croce starts with a penitent Centurione, descending from Calvary with the Cross, accompanied by two angels invisible to him, who must have been placed in the upper set near the Habsburgs’ gallery. The entrance of Mary and her dialogue with the seraphs cause him to withdraw for a moment, another moment of onstage nonrecognition derived from the stock gestures of medieval sacred plays. His opening words to her are unusual— there seems to be no precedent in the rappresentazione tradition for a greeting of “I bow to you, for whom incorporeal minds are visible substances and speaking oracles. Tell me, are you the uncorrupted Mother of Christ?”—evidently a hermetic Immaculatism, referring to the Virgin’s direct discourse with angels found in pseudo-Dionysius. Then, liberated from Limbo by the Harrowing, the souls of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezechiel appear on Calvary, unleashing a torrent of citations— some fifteen in forty-three lines—voicing both verses from their own books and a panoply of patristic authorities. The trio plus an angel use a variety

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of sources in praise of the Cross, each addressing Mary. Yet the quotes were anything but simple. The angel begins with John Damascene’s equivalence between the Cross and the Tree of Life in Eden, followed by Ambrose’s understanding of Paradise’s quadriform river as being like the four arms of the Cross. Both the Sacrifice of Isaac and the Bronze Serpent of Numbers 21 (as symbols of an exalted source of salvation) appear as prefigurations of the Crucifixion. Isaiah then cites his own book as well as Justin Martyr’s First Apology, roughly chapters 47 through 55, followed by Jerome’s commentary on the prophet’s chapter 11 (which also contains the “et erit sepulchrum eius gloriosum” verse) to the effect that “the sign of the Cross will be raised over all nations.” Jeremiah quotes himself as well as Tertullian’s Against the Jews, and the most arcane symbolism is reserved for Ezechiel, who paraphrases Rupert of Deutz’s commentary on Trinitarian aspects of the prophet’s description of the Temple’s Ark (Ez 41:22; that is, the wood of the Cross was like the wood of the Ark, insofar as they were both material instantiations of covenants).14 The idea that prophets would cite their own later exegetes is remarkable—but not dissimilar from Mary’s being onstage with her own Humility. It was thus the task of Minato to turn all this into singable verse. Given the citations’ diversity, he must have used one of the florilegia utilized by preachers and available in the court library.15 The ebb and flow of the prophets’ solos with their citations was rendered by versi sciolti, and the final four-voice praise of the Cross, culminating in the first mention of “triumph,” turned to straight settenari piani and tronchi (“O spoglia di vittoria . . . / Trionfo di Giesù//O spoils of victory, triumph of Jesus”). Not for nothing was this last citation to a passage in Ambrose’s funeral oration for another Christian emperor, De obitu Theodosii (pars. 38–47), which had imagined Theodosius greeting Constantine in Heaven, while recounting Mary’s role in defeating the Devil, and St. Helena’s (Eleonora’s patroness saint) rediscovery of the Cross. Ambrose had made the latter event—and not Constantine’s vision at the battle of the Milvian Bridge—into the foundation of a Christian empire.16 Here Minato’s patristic citation goes to the very heart of Habsburg claims to sovereignty as based on material relics and female agency. As the sepolcro progresses, Mary interrupts this triumphalist discourse with her inconsolable sorrow, recalling the previous year’s pair of pieces on pain and consolation, the Sette dolori and Sette consolationi. In line with Minato’s employment of a libretto’s conceits to provide universal explanations, the next set of citations are sung by the

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Virgin (using Anselm’s Cur Deus homo?) and the Centurione, as the latter points to the universality of the Cross’s form in nature, employing Girolamo Bosio’s treatise La trionfante e gloriosa croce (Rome, 1610).17 Bosio’s symbolic encyclopedia had explained the figure’s presence both in the celestial spheres (including observations from Southern Hemisphere travelers) and in Islamic culture as transmitted by Marsilio Ficino. After this, scriptural and modern citations flow through the rest of the libretto, voiced by all the characters including Lucifer; they end only with the Centurione’s final aria enacting penance, “Stillate, stillate, / mie ciglia dolenti, / pentiti miei lumi / in lagrime a fiumi//My sad eye sockets, my penitent eyes, drop your tears like rivers,” cast in the first appearance of senario meter and employing the language of affect alone, without reference to auctoritates. Another twist on citation appears in Minato’s 1675 L’Ingratitudine rimproverata. Mindlessly listing the events of Good Friday without comment, L’Huomo Penitente opens the piece by singing a cento of Gospel phrases (for all of which Minato footnoted the original verses) until he is interrupted by Onnipotenza from the set above with instruments accompanying. She iterates the Penitente’s ingratitude and unawareness, and in retrospect clearly the sinner has been only a ventriloquist’s dummy for scripture. That this piece, like the 1668 Il Lutto discussed later in this chapter, was repeated twice (1679 and 1700) gives a sense of the centrality of human failing to the discursive world of the sepolcri. For all that the Gospels read at Mass were used to recount events in Christ’s life, the repertory’s paucity of citations to the Divine Office, the other extensive services of Holy Week, is striking. Until the very last piece, there are almost no references to the Lamentations verses used at Matins except for the standard Marian plaint of 1:12a (“O vos omnes, qui transitis per viam”), and overall only a few to the nonallegorical Triduum Responsories. These start in the 1660 Sagrifizio d’Abramo with the opening one for Maundy Thursday, In monte Oliveti (Isaac’s sdruccioli “Deh Padre, s’è possibile, / lungi dal figlio timido / passi l’amaro calice//Oh father, if it is possible, let this bitter chalice pass from the fearful son”); in the 1678 Memorie dolorose, the last Responsory of all twenty-seven, Holy Saturday’s Sepulto Domino, closes the piece with the Magdalen’s paraphrase “Sepolto Christo!/ Ed io respiro?//Christ is buried, and I breathe?”; and in the 1676 L’Ingiustizia della sentenza di Pilato, Penitenza Fruttuosa in settenari tronchi (“Il Tempio si spezzò / il sol si scolorì / la terra vacillò//The Temple broke, the sun was discol-

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ored, the earth shook”) paraphrases the one for Good Friday describing the events at Christ’s death, Velum temple scissum est. But generally, citations of most Office texts except for Psalms 50, Miserere mei Deus (from Lauds) were infrequent.18 Possibly the temporal placement of the performances, just before or after Tenebrae, played a role in this distancing. That the biblical citations were not simply confined to Minato’s encyclopedic use of authority is evident in the second German-language sepolcro for the nine-year-old Archduchess Maria Antonia, Thron der Gnaden (anonymous/Schmelzer, 1678; music lost). This piece, on the theme of the “Seat of Mercy,” features (scene 4) a dialogue with Geist des Gewissens (The Spirit of Conscience), in which Sinligkeit (Sensuality) attempts to use scripture against doctrine by reworking 1 Esdras 3:11 (“The Lord is good, for His mercy is always over Israel”) as an argument that sin does not matter, since forgiveness is always present. Conscience replies that God’s mercy is at His discretion, and follows up by citing John Chrysostom’s Sermon 37 on Matthew in an aria: “As the earth without rain, and the rain without earth, brings little blessing to the herd, so too grace without [human] will, and will without grace, is little fruitful.”19 This exchange on the necessity of good works, also emphasizing the correct Church interpretation of scripture, was also a veiled anti-Lutheran/Calvinist polemical point, should Maria Antonia’s future marriage have turned out to be to a Protestant.

the pedagogy of penance This level of sophistication seems remarkable for its intended audience. In 1678, Maria Antonia would already have made her first Confession, although her First Communion might have been later. Thus the piece reinforced sacramental penance for her. This work, along with the three other German texts—Stärcke der Lieb (1677), Die Erlösung des menschlichen Geschlechts (1679), and Sig des Leydens Christi über die Sinligkeit (1682)—were all meant to be sung in her own chapel (probably one of the secondary oratories in the Hofburg), a Fürstinnenspiegel practice for her upcoming adult years.20 Still, a wider audience was envisioned, evident in the presence of a German-language libretto for Thron der Gnaden, whose preface used Augustine’s writings on Baptism to explain the nature of grace and the withholding of divine forgiveness from those who did not contribute to their own salvation via good works.21

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But perhaps because so much needed to be explained for the princess, the stage set for the 1678 German work received its own allegorical gloss in the libretto, one more explicit than those for the Italian-language pieces. Notably, there was no set design for the sepolcro performed the same Thursday in Eleonora Gonzaga’s rebuilt chapel (I Tre chiodi). The concept of “seat” or “throne” found in Revelations 5:1 caused the author to require an Apocalyptic design behind the Tomb, and the printed text evidently included the only engraving of an actual set (as opposed to Burnacini’s drawings) known in the whole repertory (this was, alas, excised from the one surviving copy in A-Wst). After describing the scene from the New Testament, with its throne, the Lamb with the Book of Seven Seals, the four animals, and the elders, the author of Thron der Gnaden then explained the Seals as the Seven Deadly Sins, and Christ’s Body in the Tomb under the altar as the “mystery, eating which in the Eucharist we obtain our access to the Divine Throne”; this interpretation differs somewhat from Lapide’s summary of a secondary exegetical tradition of Apocalypse 5:1.22 But in a straightforward way—simple enough to have been designed for Maria Antonia— the gloss underscores the connection among sacrament, Tomb, and penance. In a final statement in the libretto, parallel to summations by Misericordia in earlier Italian sepolcri, Barmherzigkeit (Mercy) concluded by recalling Hebrews 4:16 with the addition of the Sepulcher: “Behold, sinners, here through Christ’s Tomb the Throne of Grace stands open to you.” When Minato and Burnacini would return to this topos for Il Libro con sette sigilli in 1694, the set design would add a representation of the island of Patmos with an enraptured St. John, while subtracting the Lamb, thus emphasizing meditation on the Book and its Seven Seals. For modern sensibilities not used to the means and aesthetics of early modern penance, the deliberately simple level of the German-language pieces can be clearer than that of the Italian ones. Stärcke der Lieb (anonymous/Schmelzer), combines two themes: the power of love, and penance, starting with three scenes for the Magdalen and Peter (example 2.1).23 At this point, Mary appears, and Peter spends the middle of the piece offstage in remorse, leaving the adumbration of love to the two women. The lexical field of this dialogue is taken—for the first time in the repertory until a moment in the 1691 Il Frutto—from the Song of Songs (notably Cant 8:7, “Aquae multae non poterunt extinguere caritatem”), here placed largely in Mary’s mouth as the searching Spouse of the canticle (her first recitative in scene 4, “Ich sueche den meine Seel

Devotional Strategies | 57 example 2.1. J. H. Schmelzer, Stärcke der Lieb (1677; A-Wn 16883), “Uebe dich forthin,” f. 16.

Aria 1: Magdalena

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liebet,” comes from Cant 3:1).24 Love itself appears as an allegorical figure (Amor), first singing echoes of other characters’ phrases, then finally its own aria (set by Leopold himself and not by Schmelzer) in scene 9.25 But still, the central message for Maria Antonia was penance, along with humility and devotion, accented by Schmelzer’s breaking the musical declamation in the Magdalen’s first aria in order to accent these two words, “Demuth” and “Andacht.” Since Mary herself did not know sin, she asks Peter, upon his return to the stage, what penance is: “Mary [to Peter]: So that your affection can give consolation to my plaint, tell me, in what does penance consist? Peter: Can I give consolation? Mary: My heart and tongue consume themselves to have it [a veiled reference to the 1670 Sette consolationi].” The news of Christ’s death interrupts this, leading to Amor’s aria explaining His death as the triumph of love. One of the most unusual appropriations of a German sepolcro took place much later, in the Stephansdom on 3 May 1917, as hunger began to affect the Austrian provinces and the war effort ground to a halt (consciously chosen or not, this was also the liturgical feast of the Invention of the Cross). The Viennese choral director and composer Viktor Keldorfer (1873–1959) took fourteen of the thirty-five movements of the 1682 Sig des Leydens (J. A. Rudolph/Leopold), modernizing the

œœ

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literary text, adding a Mozart-era orchestration (the original had only two violins and continuo), rewriting some of the solo arias to include four-part choral passages, and changing some vocal scoring, in order to come up with a thirty-five-minute piece on suffering.26 This was performed together with Beethoven’s Christus am Ölberg in a benefit concert for war widows and orphans in the presence of the empress Zita, featuring the Vienna Philharmonic and two different choirs. Its program booklet included an introduction to the piece by Guido Adler, quoted also in Keldorfer’s piano reduction of his version, and a note by Wilhelm Freiherr von Weckbecker, who had produced an edition back in 1892. Part of its appeal must have been its emphasis on the “battle of life,” as the human race was figured in the person of the warrior Joshua, although in the revival there was also an implicit appeal to the pleasureloving Viennese to share in wartime austerity. The 1682 work began with Joshua, who then interacted with the standard trio of biblical mourners (Mary, John, Peter) imagined at the Tomb, as the threesome begins “Jesus lies in the grave. . . .”27 The twentieth-century reworking of this antisensuality piece, perhaps originally written out of anxiety around Maria Antonia’s upcoming puberty and adulthood, combined other aspects of wartime Austria: support for the dynasty (it was, after all, Leopold’s music); the glorification of (very real in 1917) suffering in a noble cause; and an implicit anti-Italian polemic against da capo arias and Italianate style. This was most evident in the review published in the journal Musica Divina, probably written by the Caecilianist composer Johann Venantius von Wöss, in praise of the two-stanza aria as opposed to its later ABA form, and attributing a “folkishness” to Leopold’s music, in a hint to race.28 The other reviews emphasized varying aspects of this unusual revival. Besides the favorable notice in the Deutsches Volksblatt, the most musically detailed report was found in the Neue Freie Presse, which cited the opening aria “Das menschliche Leben ist nichts als ein Streit,” sung originally by Joshua, appropriate enough for wartime Vienna even if the seventeenth-century use of the character had reflected the Habsburgs’ fascination with time and its stoppage (Jo 10:13, the theme also of the 1680 Il Vero sole). The report continued with the “interiority” of Mary’s aria (this must have been “O ihr grimmen Gaiselstreich”) and then John’s “O du scharfes Arml.” The Neuigkeits-Weltblatt gave a sense of the aristocratic public beyond Zita (tickets had been sold for fifty and ten Kronen), including the archbishop Friedrich Cardinal Piffl, most of the rest of the royal family, and a good showing of the old court

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aristocracy, a kind of belated reflection of whatever the original 1682 audience might have been. Most thoroughly, Friedrich Funder’s hardright Catholic Reichspost ignored the musical details and expounded (not entirely accurately) on ancient Habsburg musical traditions, including the original performance conditions of sepolcri under the conditions of semidarkness in the seventeenth-century Hofburgkapelle.29 Another means of diffusing the texts to a wider public around the time of their creation were the German translations for Italian-language sepolcri, oratorios, and operas from the 1680s onward.30 Most of them are found in one or another libretto miscellany in A-Wn or A-Wgm; one such collection of Italian texts belonged to the imperial chamberlain Johann Bernhard von Herberstein (1630–85). The libretto of Thron der Gnaden now in A-Wst was part of a collection recorded in 1728 at the Piarist college in Nikolsburg (Mikulov), which included German translations of the sepolcro La Passione di Christo (1696, including a version of Minato’s didactic preface) and of the oratorios L’Amor della redentione, Il Sacrifizio d’Abramo, and La Resurrezione (1702), among others; these were evidently kept for possible performance or study by the Piarists’ students, who might not have known Italian. The translation of another meditative duet opening gives a sense of the literary level. The 1694 Libro con sette sigilli opens, as noted, with characters of the most passionate heart and of Christ’s love.31 These two then share a two-stanza aria. The German version takes some liberties with exact meaning to arrive at a text that largely replicates the original settenari. Although it is hard to conceive of the translation as a singable version, given the different stress structures of the two languages, the importance of maintaining Minato’s meters seems to have trumped literal precision. Once again, the importance of poetic rhythm to signal discursive level, character shifts, and affect was underscored. Yet even beyond the German pieces or translations, a kind of basic pedagogy was enacted via the Friday works in Italian. In the same 1677 that had witnessed Stärcke der Lieb—the first Triduum that the new empress Eleonore Magdalene would have experienced in Vienna— Minato’s L’Infinità impicciolita (Schmelzer’s score is lost) begins with a sense-driven Humanità Peccatrice fixated on only earthly beauty, before Rimorso and Resipicienza inform her of the Passion. This again recalls the opening of L’Ingratitudine rimproverata of 1675. Then, in an intersection with Burnacini’s multiplane designs, Infinità herself appears at the top of the set in a misty veil, with the Archangel Gabriel and angels (i.e., the Annunciation and its infinite divinity) below, introducing

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herself as “I am Infinity, the essential attribute not aggregated in God”; that is, representing infinity was parallel to Christ’s taking on flesh. To Humanità’s question of how infinity can be “diminished”— another gesture to Leopold’s interest in mathematics—Rimorso sings a catalogue of how Christ had been limited or confined in various ways from birth onward, thus beginning the process of education and reflection from a starting point of pure sensual perception. Two two-stanza arias express Humanità’s changing understanding, first of herself as dust and then of Christ’s sacrifice, and this is capped by a deictic gesture on the part of Rimorso: “Turn to this stone, where your God lies buried, and see how He was diminished for you. The heavenly spheres do not contain Him, nor does His burial-place bound Him. There is no dimension to which He must conform [a2:] and yet here He is in a small Tomb.”32 Thus the pedagogical process of understanding the piece’s essential theological conceit is shared by both Humanità as character and the very real humanity in the Hofburgkapelle viewing the Sepulcher.

the poetics of metanoia On the other end of the generational spectrum from the children, the position of Leopold, his stepmother, and his spouses as chief penitents needs some clarification. In addition, following both Plato and Augustine, the achievement of virtue, penance, or conversion was part of a process, to be enacted every year during Lent and Holy Week. In that sense, each year’s sepolcro was not a onetime act of metanoia (a definitive and totalizing change of life), but rather an annual dramatic exercise. Again, the 1677 L’Infinità impicciolita gives one of the most extended enactments of penance in the repertory; the 1692 Il Sacrifizio non impedito, with its seven second-order allegorical characters plus two penitents, furnishes a more abstract path to repentance, showing two sides of Minato’s approach. In the 1677 work, Rimorso’s call to view (i.e., meditate on) the Cross sets off a long development in Humanità’s self-understanding. Gabriel demands human recompense in return for Christ’s sacrifice; this “payment,” echoing all the other mercantile transactions, would consist of renouncing the world and adoring God. Humanità’s aria in ottenari, while she kneels and cries, asks for the gifts of penance and faith along with the desire for eternal life, and the three corresponding second-order allegorical figures (e.g.,

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“Il Dono della Penitenza”) promptly appear after an instrumental sinfonia of consolation. This encounter between Humanity and the latter characters is set out as solos for each one of the second-order personages, with two threevoice refrains (“Se brami eterna vita” and “Se credi, che Dio / Per te s’incarnò//If you desire eternal life. . . if you believe that God was made incarnate for you”), leading Humanità to another weeping two-stanza aria (“canta piangendo”), “Legno di mia salute.” This praise of the Cross brings her to cast aside flowers and jewels in a final rejection of sensualism. After interrogation about Humanità’s future life by all three groups (Gabriel plus angels; Rimorso and Respicienza; and the three second-order figures), the still-shrouded Infinità sings the final verses linking infinity and the Cross: “Thus you will see that, only so as to give you eternal life, God’s Infinity has been diminished.” On the other hand, the original thematics of the entire genre (the Sacrifice of Isaac first portrayed on Good Friday 1660) recurred in the 1692 Il Sacrifizio, that is, why Isaac’s death was stopped and Christ’s was not. Yet this question and answer, although adumbrated at great length in the prefatory material, are not directly posed by the piece’s two sinners until three-quarters of the way through. The answer, by Verità Evangelica (“Gospel Truth”), has again to do with Divine mercy and justice. Here, the sinners’ trajectory is shorter and more intense, moving from general remorse to actual self-abnegation at Christ’s feet, again recalling the end of the 1685 Il Prezzo cited earlier. As has been noted, Burnacini’s drawing (Theatermuseum, Min. 29/36) of the Sacrifice of Isaac for this piece is clearly identifiable, and the lighting effects must have been stunning. In a continuing pattern, Leopold himself contributed three arias to Draghi’s score, all in the voices of allegorical characters. In line with what seem to be the problems of hermeneutics later evident in the 1696 La Passione, Minato gave a nine-point outline of Il Sacrifizio’s reasons for why Christ’s sacrifice was not obstructed. The piece opens with Il Rito della Chiesa and La Commemorazione della Passione recounting Good Friday to the two sinners, with deictic mentions of the set design and of Tomb piety; that is, this is a sepolcro that begins by explaining its own genre.33 Whether the sinners were meant to represent Leopold and Eleonore Magdalene, or the archdukes Joseph and Karl, or simply to serve as a balance to the seven allegorical characters, is not as important as the stages through which they pass, as indicated by the extremely wide-ranging pitch relations in the course of the piece, discussed in chapter 4.

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the staging of rapture For all the omnipresence of penitential enactments in the repertory, there were other possibilities portrayed for its audience. The foregrounding of contemplation is immediately evident at the beginning of the 1696 La Passione di Christo (music lost, as noted previously). Here, Contemplazione opens with a two-stanza aria in the unusual novenari as an invocation: “Eternal light, infinite splendor, oh illuminate the shadows of my mind.” Memory immediately personalizes the plea with a reference to the empress in the Hofburgkapelle: “Contemplative soul, who, like the Magdalen, picked the better part, tell me . . . whither you would turn your desire?” As the conversazione of these faculties, assisted by Human Amazement, continues, Contemplazione moves from Trinitarian marvel to the Passion. Then the Harrowing of Hell was introduced by a sinfonia in the celestial part of the set, while simultaneous “noisy” music below was to represent Christ’s actual passage through Limbo, followed by the appearance of the second-order allegorical figures of the Angels’ Jubilation and Hell’s Terror at this event. In all this, Contemplazione continually guides the stunned Lo Stupore, another stand-in for the normal sinner, back to remembering the Passion and the Cross, and in that sense the entire piece is an enactment of fruitful meditation. Of all this later “hermetic” repertory, I Frutti dell’albero della Croce (1691; another piece from around 1690 with no surviving musical source) is among the most striking pieces, beginning with its stage set. Minato and Burnacini came up with an apparato of a luxurious temple with a tomb inside, separate from the constructed Tomb in the Hofburgkapelle and again evoking Isaiah’s “Et erit sepulchrum eius gloriosum.” It thus shows a double visual reflexivity, as there were two onstage Tombs. The character lineup includes Pious Meditation herself along with Fear of God, joined by the second-order Sorrow for the Passion, an angelic choir (evidently two singers), the spirits of four prophets, and, throughout, the Just Soul. Thus it was clear that this piece would treat meditation as a process, staging the Soul but also—for the only time in the repertory—her ecstasy. In constructing the piece’s central conceit, Minato expanded on the “fruits of the Tree of the Cross” idea found first in book 3 of Luis de Granada’s Introducción al simbolo de la fe (Salamanca, 1584, with various later Italian editions), then in Felice Passero’s Trofeo della Croce (Venice, 1610), and once again in the Dominican friar Angelo Paci-

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uchelli’s (1594–1660) sermon collection Discorsi morali sopra la Passione (Venice, 1664, with a fourth edition already by 1694). Granada had provided some twenty, largely moral, “fruits,” while Passero and Paciuchelli had given different lists of its effects; editions of all these were in the Imperial Library. The libretto begins and ends as a Triumph of the Cross work, but its central section consists of the Soul’s rapture while singing in midsentence, moving to a visionary sequence in which the four major prophets appear to her; only she can see them, although the whole cast can hear them.34 The actual moment of her vision comes after Meditazione, Timore, and Dolore have detailed the sufferings and the contradictions of the Passion. In the middle of the second strophe of a two-stanza aria (technically while singing the endecasillabo of an eight-line versi sciolti section), Anima is enraptured, while the others continue their contemplation of Christ’s sufferings. Only later do they perceive her transport, as she sings of divine justification and reconciliation together, unaware of their presence. The definitions of “ecstasy,” “rapture,” and “abduction” were fluid in the Seicento, and it is not clear exactly which one Minato followed here. Possibly he used the distinctions of Jean Gerson and Maximilian Sandaeus, in which “ecstasy” referred to the individual’s will as resting in God, while “rapture,” a higher state, involved the abstraction of the intelligence. This latter seems to be what Minato wanted to enact in this piece. There were more complicated taxonomies of extraordinary mystical experience available to the librettist, but a precise mapping of their various stages onto the sepolcro’s text was probably not the dramatic point.35 That the transport should take place during the lyrical moment of an aria makes sense. Minato’s positioning the rapture precisely at the lines “The King of the Elements / [has been] made the Man of Sufferings, and of Torments” might have resulted from the Soul’s internal recall, not sung, of Isaiah 53:3 (“despectum et novissimum virum dolorum,” followed by 53:4, “vere languores nostros ipse tulit”). Certainly the density of Passion references in contemporary exegesis of these verses was high.36 The Soul simply lapses into automatic song, and then silence, as she repeats her line “made the Man of sufferings . . . and of torments [she is enraptured].” Without noticing her at first, Dolore, Timore, and Meditazione continue to detail the Crucifixion, assisted by two angels; again, the hyperreflexivity of having both Meditation and her effects on the Soul onstage

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simultaneously is evident. This kind of characterization shows how the sepolcri constituted a thickly layered psychological world. Only then do the allegorical figures realize that Anima is enraptured, leading to the first mention of the piece’s underlying conceit, as Dolore speculates, “Perhaps, in ecstacy, she is viewing the fruits of the Cross.” At this point, the four prophets appear onstage to reiterate the first two fruits (justification for sin and reconciliation with the Creator), and to explain the other seven on Minato’s list, moving outside the realm of prime numbers: the redemption of the human race; the remission of sin, both original and current; the infusion of grace; the beautifying of the soul via baptism/grace/sanctity; the opening of Paradise; the Harrowing of Hell; and the compensation for the fallen angels (by the admission of saved humans into Heaven) along with the consolation of Paradise. After the prophets leave and Anima returns to normal discourse, she decides to take the Cross as her “seal” in the sense of the Song of Songs’ Sponsa (Cant 8:6), following an early exegesis by Theodoret of Cyrrhus explicitly noted by Minato. Although there are biblical, patristic, and Scholastic citations in the text, the librettist seems to have come up with the overall conceit on his own. The three allegorical characters then sing praises of the Cross, and the piece concludes with no reference to the Tomb whatsoever. Still, this is a unique depiction of a contemporary enraptured soul to this point in Italian theater of any kind.37 The peninsular oratorios on Teresa of Avila and Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi largely concentrate on the title figures’ early choice of an ascetic life, and not their later visions, with the exception of the 1703 Sacre visioni di Santa Teresia for the Viennese Carmelites, in which the title character appears already in ecstacy.38 Yet Minato’s staged portrayal of rapture suggests that one of the Cross’s fruits was also the possibility, for any given listener, of mystical experience via Passion contemplation. In that sense the sepolcri of the 1690s push the limits of what stage music could do in the seventeenth century.

the messages of a year Up until 1686, the two works of any given Triduum could well have played off each other. This is most obvious in the conceit of “seven” shared by the two 1670 pieces on the Seven Sorrows and Seven Consolations of Mary, or in the idea of “opening” common to the works of 1672, with Limbo and Paradise both entered. The subtler connections

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between the 1683 pieces have been discussed already, and those of 1684 are treated later (see chapter 4). But even before 1687 there seems to have been a conscious choice to link the subjects chosen for the two days in any given year, even as binary opposites. In 1660, the allegorical Il Trionfo contrasted with the two-part Sagrifizio d’Abramo on Friday, the latter an oddly schizophrenic text, which first recounted the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac and then turned to an apotheosis of Penance in its shorter second part; the only connection between the two sepolcri is the character of Penitenza in both. Still, the piece taken from Genesis would have been echoed in the door of the Hofburgkapelle’s main altar tabernacle, which depicted the same scene, reinforcing the link between Passion allegory and Eucharist. In 1662, the minor Gospel figures of Draghi’s Thursday La Fede trionfante (the most prominent being the Centurion and Longinus) were replaced on Friday by Lepori’s more predictable marshaling of Mary, the Magdalen, and John the Evangelist for Le Lagrime della Vergine.39 For those years in which only one librettist produced both sepolcri texts, connecting the pieces was obviously easier. Minato’s selfconscious prefaces to his readers, affixed to all his printed libretti, cite themes of both days; he first used this kind of linkage in his two Venetian operas of 1667 on the story of Elia Sejano, later repeated in Vienna. Both of Sbarra’s 1665 works, Il Limbo disserato (performed on 2 April, the eighth anniversary of Ferdinand III’s death) and L’Inferno deluso, share more than just their subterranean themes. The former alternates between earthly mourners and figures from Limbo, with Mary finally invoking the Tomb at the end, while the latter starts with grieving characters en route to the Sepulcher.40 The Limbo piece employed a normal trio of Gospel figures, plus an impenitent Pharisee, and an unusual group of patriarchs awaiting Christ (Abel, Abraham, and Moses), together with the Mother of the Maccabees (2 Macc 7). Her inclusion was probably a gesture to Eleonora’s interest in strong holy women; it marks the first appearance of this character in the entire Italian oratorio repertory.41 The first deictic invocation of the Tomb in a Thursday piece also comes up here. In scene 6, the Madonna enters the set with the first versi sciolti to be heard, after long stretches of ottenari and quadrisillabi, followed by other metrically differentiated scenes, until the Virgin returns with “her” same poetic meter in scene 10: “O sepolcro felice, / Che nel tuo seno accogli / Quel, che accolsi di già nel seno mio / Io prima del

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natal, tu dopo morte, / Deh, perche non poss’io / Cangiar teco mia sorte?//O happy Tomb, who hosts Him in your breast Whom I once hosted in mine; I before His birth, you after death; ah, why can I not exchange my fate for yours?” In the Friday piece (despite its title, there is no Devil), the characters consist of paired Christian mourners with different relationships to the Tomb, plus an unholy allegorical trio of Interesse, Invidia, and Tradimento. Among the biblical characters, Marta and Lazaro prefigure Christ’s burial and resurrection; Giuseppe d’Arimathea and Nicodemo represent the first appearance in the repertory of Christ’s actual buriers; while an angel and Giacomo (St. James the Great) are extraneous to the traditional set of Passion figures.42 Sbarra’s choices for the sepolcri that year can be compared with the other major stage works of 1665. Draghi/Ziani’s La Cloridea for Carnival had been a typically complex opera without clear political or moral lessons, while the spring/summer works included another pair of operas that mixed literary registers, characters, and messages: Draghi/ Bertali’s L’Alcindo and a first version of Cristoforo Ivanovich/Ziani’s La Circe. In Lent, the oratorios for Eleonora had included one import from Ferrara and two local works, treating the stories of Balthazar and Daniel, St. Thomas the Apostle, and the Massacre of the Innocents, again with no reference to Passion narrative. The piece performed immediately before the sepolcri that year was Pietro Guadagni’s oratorio on Peter’s penance, San Pietro piangente, which brought the apostle close to Judas-like despair at the hands of three Furies, before achieving remorse helped by his Guardian Angel.43 This sense of angelic agency combined with penance is not found in the standard literature of the time.44 Guadagni’s thematics continued the Justice/Mercy contrast typical of the entire decade, and, having addressed penance exhaustively, it allowed for Sbarra’s two sepolcri to focus on other themes. The devotional complementarity of the two 1665 works foreshadowed the next paired set of texts (both by Draghi) in 1669’s L’Humanità redenta and La Morte debellata, as these two invert what might seem to be a normal progression (here redemption-death defeated). This busy year—once Il Pomo d’oro had been staged the previous summer—featured seven full operas (one in Spanish for Margherita) plus two serenatas, along with Draghi’s sepolcri, set musically by himself and Sances (what happened with Eleonora’s oratorios is not clear).45 These last pieces share both the vocabulary and the means of the secular theatrical repertory. As noted later, Thursday’s L’Humanità redenta opens with a duet for Giuseppe and

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Nicodemo whose refrain could have come directly out of opera: “È morto il mio dio, / Estinto è il mio nume.” After Simone Ciraneo describes the events of Good Friday in another disjuncture between ritual and theatrical time, Speranza consoles the three mourners. But the process of penance is interrupted by Humanità’s arrival, so focused on sin that the three initial characters are overwhelmed by human guilt; this is followed by a trio refrain recalling Seneca’s followers in L’Incoronazione di Poppea, “A morire, a morire / Ingrata humanità.” Similarly, Friday’s La Morte debellata counterposes four allegorical figures to four sinners (Pietro, Longino, and two generic peccatori). Its overall binary construction is evident from the opening parallel arias for La Pietà and the penitent Pietro. With the addition onstage of the other sinners, this piece seems destined to be a penance drama, as all of them attempt to enact it, until they are interrupted by Vita trying to extricate herself from Morte’s grasp, a gesture to be echoed, if not precisely repeated, at the opening of Minato’s La Vita nella morte (1688). Morte’s power is overcome only (in “real time”) at the announcement of Christ’s death, but the language of penance is again so operatic that sacrality threatens to get lost (“Fuggi incauta gioventù / Da quel Cerbero latrante, / Che divora in un istante / Quel piacer ch’adori tu//Reckless youth, flee that wandering Cerberus, who devours in an instant the pleasure you adore”). In that sense, just before Minato’s arrival, the sepolcri for Holy Week fit the discursive modalities, if not the thematics, of this moment in court self-expression. This is all the more striking after the near catastrophe in the later 1660s described presently.

leopold’s view: il lutto dell’universo (1668) Amid all the other events of winter 1668—the secret peace treaty with France, the massive fire in the Hofburg on 22–23 February—the death of Ferdinand Wenzel, Leopold and Margherita’s first child, on 13 January must have hit particularly hard. It certainly was a shock for the sixteen-year-old empress, and this was not helped by the meddling of the high court counsellor Count Johann Weikhard von Auersperg, who attempted to worsen the already edgy relations between her and Eleonora before his disgrace in December 1669. In the aftermath of the palace fire, the forced late winter move from Vienna to Wiener Neustadt added further uncertainty. Although Leopold put a good face on his own and his consort’s moods, still the Roman nuncio’s deputy Properzio Aloisi, writing back to Cardinal Decio Azzolini in Rome on

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25 February (during the interregnum between the prelates Spinola and Antonio Pignatelli), put it succinctly: “In just a few months we have seen enough disasters to last a century.”46 Aloisi also reported on the fire’s destruction, Eleonora Gonzaga’s desperate hunt among her palace wing’s ashes for jewelry and for the Cross relic, and the empress’s plea to Rome for a new Cross devotion to be introduced at court. According to Aloisi, over Lent the court had heard the sermons of the veteran Jesuit preacher Filiberto Boccabella, although no trace seems to have survived, while the performance of oratorios, possibly including one on St. Helena and the Invention of the Cross, is not easily ascertainable.47 In the chapel—today’s St. George’s Cathedral—in the Burg at the temporary residence of Wiener Neustadt, the Good Friday service of 1668 took on special meaning. Eleonora’s Thursday piece had probably been Pierelli’s L’Esaltatione del serpente nel deserto, a relatively short text on Numbers 21 and John 3:14.48 As noted, the Cross allegory of this story was commonplace, and Arcangelo da Salto had recently provided some thirty-six chapters on how the memory of Christ’s Passion as symbolized by the serpent aided the soul in his Il mistico serpente della Chiesa, cioè Cristo addolorato (Turin, 1665). If L’Esaltatione was indeed the 1668 Thursday piece, its opening chorus of afflicted Israelites lamenting their own “dying” state (“moribondo trà viventi”) was a sign of the court’s desperation. Just as Penitenza had taken over the second part of the 1660 Il Sagrifizio d’Abramo, so in Pierelli’s text the four characters’ enactment of penance gives way to a long closing solo for Profezia, who makes the prefiguration of the Passion explicit. She adds a deictic reference to the Tomb for the first time in the courtier’s libretti (“In così mesto giorno / a questa Tomba intorno / fate col pianto il vostro duol palese//On such a sad day, make your sorrow evident with your lamenting around this Tomb”). Both pieces would have been heard in the castle chapel in Neustadt, a space roughly comparable to the size of the Viennese Hofburgkapelle, but probably without a set.49 Whether or not both sepolcri of 1668 were planned before the infant’s death is not clear. Sbarra himself must have been in ill health, perhaps not making the court’s move to Wiener Neustadt in early March. He seems to have died while the court was still away.50 Possibly Leopold himself took over composing the music as a special gift to Margherita. There had been no documented sepolcro for Good Friday 1667, nor any festive piece for Ferdinand Wenzel’s birth on 28 September, and

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the opening of 1668 conveys a sense of the preparations for Il Pomo having taken over everything at court, only to be interrupted by the infant’s death, followed by the Hofburg fire. The bittersweet nature of this moment—the ritual theater for the marriage almost at fruition until the misfortunes took place—is clear. Still, the idea of the Four Elements, who open the work with a series of self-presentations describing their relation to the Passion while narrating it, should not have been surprising, whether or not it was meant to express the magnitude of the heir’s death as well as that of Christ. As has been clear for some time, the program of all the major festivities of 1666–68 had emphasized the role of the Elements as dynastic representations. Sbarra had incorporated two such allegorical figures into the serenata La Contesa dell’Acqua e dell’Aria (the first piece actually to celebrate the wedding, on 24 January 1667; Water and Air) as well as into his previously finished Il Pomo d’oro (in the latter case, Fire, who disobeys Juno’s order to destroy the earth, was an anticipation of the Elements’ resolution to ruin the world until stopped by Misericordia Divina in the sepolcro). Even earlier, he had deployed all four figures in a panegyric vein in a short work for his former employer Sigismund Franz of Tyrol.51 Yet it was only the Friday 1668 piece that brought them together in universal grief. Although the “disturbed elements” were a commonplace of Passion narration, Sbarra might have taken the idea of their mourning from the combination of patristic writers (Cyprian’s De bono patientiae, an appropriately consoling text on suffering, along with a Passion sermon by Augustine) to be found in another book in the imperial collections, the Trattato della Passione del Salvatore (Rome, 1607) by the Milanese Jesuit Domitio Piatti (1556–1643). The “sixth consideration” of this text cited Cyprian on the elements’ upheaval at the Crucifixion before proceeding to Christ as an example of patience, followed by Marian suffering, and an individual exhortation to take “dead sin out of the tomb of your heart.”52 The entrances and exits of the 1668 sepolcro’s three groups of characters—(1) the Four Elements with “Mother Nature” (in the score, she is called “La Natura Humana”); (2) Justice/Mercy; and (3) the basic biblical trio (the Virgin, Peter, John)—delineate the piece. In order, these proceed as follows: the Elements’ fury led by La Madre Natura and their taming by Misericordia Divina; Peter’s penance in the face of Giustizia, recalling the 1661 La Gara; and Mary/John’s grief, culminating in a last lament for the Virgin (“Qui spargete, occhi dolente / Due

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torrenti//O my sad eyes, let drop two torrents [of tears],” the first use of ottenari and quaternari in the text). Sbarra thus condensed a good deal of thematic material into a not overly long work, and its seams are so smooth as to have confused later reworkers attempting to divide it into three acts.53 Within the overall modular structure of the text, then, the moments of recognition or psychological change apply to the allegorical characters as well as to the biblical ones. The Elements both present themselves and narrate the Passion, in non-traditional order: Water, Earth, Air, Fire (although the latter two switch places at points), together with a collective self-interruption typical of laments (“Ma con chi parlo, ahimè!”) which is their reaction to the Mocking of Christ, and then a synoptic view of Calvary that includes the suffering Virgin. At the Savior’s death, Mother Nature arrives; her destruction aria “Ah, non fia vero” is in straight quinari, leading to the Elements’ quartet of vengeance on sinful humanity. Then, Misericordia’s dismissal of enraged Nature allows her a solo moment at the text’s center, in a new poetic meter mixing settenari and quinari (“Mondo frale, in qual periglio / Era ogn’Alma, al ciel gradita// Frail world, in what danger was every soul dear to Heaven”). Again, this emphasis on Mercy seems aimed both at the general devotional spirit at court and at the specific dynastic juncture. The essentially binary nature (two-by-two characters) of the discourse is clear in the following passage, Giustizia and Misericordia’s joint recitative addressed to the world and the underworld, followed by their exchange of their opening lines. Since penance has not figured in the piece thus far, Peter’s expression thereof is given an unusual three-stanza aria, in senari and endecasillabi, with echoes from the two allegorical figures.54 The apostle then hides from the approaching Mary and John, whose entrance shares another formal novelty: a two-stanza lament aria for the former interrupted by a single strophe for the latter, all in quinari: this first plaint of the Virgin is generated by the citation of Lamentations 1:12a (“O vos omnes” paraphrased as “O voi, che n’andate”). After the mutual sorrow of these two mourners, Mary’s second aria introduces a topos that will become important two years later: that of the inconsolable mother who wishes never to have given birth (“Se io non ero genitrice / Non moriva in croce un Dio//If I were not a mother, God would not have died on the Cross”). Although the two allegorical figures speak to her, the Virgin is never really consoled, and her third lament aria, “Occhi dolenti,” prefigures the Consolation piece of two years later, and might well have held meaning for the still-grieving Margherita.

Devotional Strategies | 71 example 2.2. Leopold I, Il Lutto dell’universo (1668; A-Wn 16899), “Ha l’ocaso nell’orto,” f. 39v.

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Key to understanding the overall message is an earlier brief comment by L’Aria, as the Elements recount the Crucifixion: “Con funesto pallore / Il pianeta maggiore / Confonda ogn’or di più l’occaso, e l’orto//With its deadly pallor, the Sun ever more confuses its setting and rising”). All four then exclaim on Christ’s death, and are called on by La Madre Natura to destroy the earth. This emotional nadir a third of the way through has its dialectical resolution in the final madrigale for the five other characters: “Homai qui s’accorga / Il Mondo fallace / Che, sol per sua pace / E sol perche sorga / Eterno il giorno alla terrena prole / Ha l’ocaso nell’orto il vero Sole//Let the deceitful world ever know here [i.e., at the Tomb], that—only for its peace, and only so that the day may dawn eternally for its inhabitants—the true Sun has its setting in its rising” [with a pun: “in the garden,” i.e., the one surrounding the Tomb according to John 19] (example 2.2). This is the only answer to the Madonna’s final aria. Despite all the mourning, the essentially consolatory nature of the piece is clear in this citation to Psalm 112, one of the “Laudate” sequence,

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via the “ocaso/orto” paradox: “A solis ortu usque ad occasum laudabile nomen Domini//From the sun’s rising to its setting, the name of the Lord is to be praised.” This soothing understanding of the psalm verse is not found in Robert Bellarmine’s standard contemporary guide to the book, his Explicatio, which refers only to lauding God in the world’s expanse, without temporal or consolatory purpose.55 Nor was the text used in Holy Week liturgy. In a certain way, this reflects Leopold’s own unshakable Christian optimism in the face of everything, even if Ferdinand Wenzel, the infant sun-to-be, had passed on to be Leopold’s intercessor in Heaven, as the emperor himself had said. It also suggests that the deceased Ferdinand (a puer) was among those who praised God. In terms of choices for local pitch structures, Leopold showed himself unusually flexible. Most surprising are the elaborate procedures for the Four Elements. In the middle of their opening recollectio of the Passion, the tonal organization switches from the opening regions of cantus mollis in and around C, to durus (around a tonal center of A; at Aria’s “Già dell’huomo inhuman si sferza un Dio!”). The Elements had just finished a moment of self-reproach for not reacting to such a terrible event, and the tonal change coincides with a moment of Passion vision, followed by a rebuke to the world. A farther peregrination to sharp pitch centers comes on B/durus at Il Foco’s “Corona di spine, / Le tempie divine / Trafigge del mio Re//A crown of Thorns now pierces the divine temples of my King,” the first meditative moment on the Thorns, often a locus for sharp sonorities. This third large contrapuntal section of the opening tableau continues until the Elements witness Christ’s forced separation from His mother on the Via Crucis (Terra: “Ma da la madre al fine / lo disgiungono a forza / le masnade ferine//The wild bands finally forcibly separate Him from His mother”; it should be remembered that this part was originally sung by Cesti). This is marked by a return to the home tonality of C/mollis. Compared with the first tonal change, this second switch seems to have the justification of affect and characterization, and then flat pitch regions continue through the next events: the arrival of Madre Nature, Divina Misericordia’s dismissal of the Elements, the entrance of Giustizia, and up to Pietro’s colloquy with the latter two. The turn to sin and Peter’s penance then swings to sharper sonorities around G/durus, underlining Misericordia’s self-identification to Peter as “Io quella sono / di cui nasce il perdono//I am she from whom pardon is born.” The Virgin’s entrance aria, in two stanzas, is a double surprise: using the consort of viols, it paraphrases Lamentations twice but is set on the

Devotional Strategies | 73 example 2.3. Leopold I, Il Lutto dell’universo, “O voi che n’andate,” f. 26v.

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poetic meter (quinari sdruccioli with two tronchi), with a different instrumental band (high violins sordini) and pulling slightly back, tonally, from B to an ostinato on E. Mary rejects his attempt to equate their grief in a dual metric/tonal shift: first her ottenari, and then in her accompanied aria “Lassa, ahimè! S’è convertita / La mia gioia in aspra sorte//Alas, my joy has been changed into cruel destiny” (a reworking of pseudo-Bonaventura’s Meditaciones), as she returns to deictic weeping and to her inconsolable misery, all symbolized via a sudden return to flat pitch centers, this time in cantus mollis around D. Another visit to G tonalities underlies the following verses of Pietro’s self-identification to Mary (thus linking the penitent apostle’s two colloquies), and prepares her third lament, with a final tonal return to C/mollis via the sinfonia that sets up the closing madrigale. Her last complaint features the most unusual poetic meter of all, settenari alternating with ternari, perhaps the most explicitly operatic gesture in the whole sepolcro (“Qui spargete, occhi dolente / due torrenti / per tributo a un mar di pene .//Sad eyes, let two torrents pour forth here as your contribution to a sea of sorrows”). A synoptic look at the meters and the tonal centers of the lamenting moments in this final section of the piece gives a sense of how widely these sections could vary in brief dramatic time: laments in il lutto Incipit

Poetic Meter

Pitch Center

BV: O voi, che n’andate Giovanni: Giovanni misero BV: O voi, che venite (stanza 2) [dialogue] BV: Lassa, ahime! / S’è convertita [dialogue] BV: Qui spargete, occhi dolente

6p-t+11 5s-t 6p-t+11

B/durus E/durus B/durus

7p

D/mollis

7p-3p

C/mollis

On a technical level, Sbarra’s skill in intertwining the themes and differentiating affect and rhetorical level via meter is clear. But the text also straddles personal and collective grief. That it was not confined to this moment of court mourning is evident from its two repeats, each with a cast list noted in the original score, in 1674 and 1682, years without immediately preceding royal deaths.56 Likewise, the “redoing” of the work in the former year and its repetition in the latter suggest that the surviving score in A-Wn represents the 1674 version; in addition,

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the “earthquake” theme of the Thursday 1682 sepolcro also resonated that year with the Friday revival of Il Lutto. Leopold’s own piety has normally been subsumed under the general category of Pietas austriaca, with an added emphasis on Trinitarian devotion around the plague years of 1679–80. But looking at the strongly image-focused Passion tracts dedicated to him gives a different sense of his possible thoughts while composing this music. Giovanni Bucellani’s Meditationes de passione (Vienna, 1655) provided forty-two scenes for personal contemplation, covering the story only from the Agony in the Garden up to the Flagellation, with instructions on their mental visualization; it was inscribed to Leopold just after Ferdinand IV had died and it became clear that he was to be the heir. Another set of actual images plus short reflections was found in the Prague Jesuit Ludovicus Crasius’s Prodromus libri vitae de cruenta Passionis (Vienna, 1667), dedicated to Leopold and Margherita just before Lent that year. Its eleventh engraving featured the Addolorata at the Deposition, and its meditation thereon gave explicit instructions for a personal Entombment: “Thus Mary, weeping, asks us . . . to perform His exequies . . . both public ones by custom and private ones out of love, at the altar of compassion; and to excavate a hole in the center of our heart, with the shovel of compassionate sorrow, so that we may entomb the lifeless Body of Christ in it. Let love be the vespillo, compassion the praefica, the striking of one’s breast be the bells, sighs the singer, prayer the organist. Let piety be the priest and lamentation the sacristan, with our thanks as the master of ceremonies.”57 Thus the sovereign was constantly reminded of Tombs. Even before the 1660 Abraham/Isaac piece, Leopold had been prepared to compose Triduum music; a 1654 libretto, which he evidently penned for performance at (but not about) the Tomb featured four converted sinners and a fifth in process. These “Versi italiani per la musica fatti dall’Arciduca Leopoldo per il sepolcro della Settimana Santa 4 aprile 1654” would have given him the chance to write at least the text of recitatives, arias, and ensembles.58 This work opens with a “Canzona,” whose musical text was by Ferdinand III. Whether or not the thirteen-year-old prince also composed the rest of the music, perhaps under Bertali’s guidance, is unclear. Still, the middle section in the second part of Caldana’s 1660’s Il Sagrifizio set by the sovereign, with its chorus of four penitent sinners, recalls the language of the 1654 piece. At Lent 1660, the Venetian ambassador had reported that the emperor took pleasure “only in private discussions, poetry, and music, setting [texts] excellently in music.”59

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Compared with the small surviving repertory of the decade (three scores from 1660–61 and one from 1669), Leopold’s 1668 setting stands out on several counts: its semiotic use of contrapuntal ensembles at beginning and end; its widespread employment of the two string bands (viols and violins, especially the former); and its reliance, almost to excess, on the cadenza in mi (half-step) formula for characters’ bits.60 The monarch took the opening quartet of characters as an occasion to produce three large imitative sections for the Elements, mixed with solos for their recounting of the Passion events. And for the key phrase in the concluding madrigale, “Ha l’ocaso nell’orto il vero Sole,” he first set the opening in counterpoint, then divided the sentence before “il vero Sole,” providing separate and contrasting soggetti in order to emphasize “ocaso” and “Sole.” The sovereign’s taste for short instrumental sonatas to accompany the entrance of characters or to change affect had already been on display in the 1660 piece; here in Il Lutto, the number of arias, and even a normally unaccompanied recitative, with strings is striking, perhaps a sonic reflection of “universal” mourning. The 1668 work has five such sections; there had been four, split between Abramo and Penitenza, in the earlier work. A comparison with similar procedures earlier in the repertory is helpful.61 In his 1660 score, Leopold had set the reluctance of Abramo and Humanità to go through with Isaac’s sacrifice by a pitch switch, from flat regions around C moving to A. Then, Ubbedienza’s reminder to the patriarch of his duty reverses the tonal center. Perhaps the most striking such relation is Isaac’s final plea for mercy to his father, “Pietà, padre, pietà,” set on E over the normal emblem of lament, a descending bass. This is followed by Abramo’s resolve to continue with the sacrifice, in Caldana’s unusual metric combination of quarternari sdruccioli and nonari, with a sudden tonal catabasis (downward descent) to regions around E-flat, and then the quote from the Responsory In monte Oliveti noted earlier, as the literal and metaphorical nooses tighten around Isaac.62 The only other surviving Friday score up to this point, Bertali’s Il Pentimento for 1661, also revolves around C in cantus mollis, but both its first two brief excursions to A in cantus durus are the tonal background for calls to have Christ return from the Tomb, first by Amor verso Dio and then in a duet between the Virgin and the Magdalen. A third shift to sharp regions is less obvious in its textual motivation, as it coincides with the second Sinner’s recognition of his mortality. Bertali essentially uses the same contrast thrice, but limits his exploration of

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sharp areas, compared with Il Lutto. In part, this is a difference of compositional generation, although the affect of universal sorrow in the 1668 piece also played a part. With respect to the repertory of the surrounding years, then, Il Lutto is distinguished by its textual economy but also its scope of mourning (the word lutto is infrequent in the entire textual corpus). Whether or not meant to console the grieving parents, it concentrates on social and collective sorrow. Over the coming years, there would be sharp turns in the rhetoric, and the staging, of the sepolcri. But the works of the 1660s made personal meaning explicit and began to index spectacle, as the next decade would bear out.

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Social Others and Selves

Sepolcri performances had to do with mourning Christ, but also with Habsburg self-understanding and place in a cosmic order and their social relationships internal and external. Compared with the other genres of music theater, the pieces enacted the central parts of the dynasty’s conception of salvational history and of a Christian worldview. But they also reflected specific junctures in European affairs as well as the restructuring of piety.

the politics of plot All the works, sacred or secular, had a political edge.1 One of the best examples comes from the oratorio repertory, not precisely the sepolcri. Federici’s L’Ambizione punita, a 1667 Lenten work commissioned by Eleonora (Pietro Ziani’s score is lost), deals with the seemingly obscure events of Numbers 16, the rebellion of Core, Dathan, and Abiron against Moses and Aaron after the Exodus from Egypt. Among the few other dramatic works of the Seicento on Moses’s life, this episode seems to come up nowhere else. The gruesome revolt, ending in the death of 250 of Core’s followers plus their families, had been listed by Lapide as an example of sedition against God’s anointed, with a brief hint at a New Testament parallel (the Exodus followed by this derision of Moses viewed as a foreshadowing of the Magdalen’s ointment of the living Christ followed by Judas’s mocking). It had also been mentioned briefly as an 78

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example of a nonfortuitous miracle in Friedrich Förner’s catalogue of Catholic wonders dedicated to Ferdinand II back in 1620, his Palma triumphalis miraculorum.2 A drawing by Burnacini depicting this moment also survives, perhaps as a set design (Theatermuseum, Min. 29/38a; figure 7) for the 1667 work. The choice of this obscure topic, and its performance, must be a reference to the Hungarian magnate rebellion of 1664–71, as the nobles chafed at the quickly concluded Peace of Vasvár (1664) with the Ottomans; they then turned to a possible alliance with France, and finally even sought Turkish rule rather than the Habsburgs’.3 Even before Federici’s piece, at the very end of Sbarra’s 1665 Limbo text, the Virgin unexpectedly denounced those who profess to be Christian but act otherwise, and this must also have been a first reference to the disloyal Magyars.4 Another, less obvious case comes from among the sepolcri. At the close of Leopold’s reign, Cupeda/Ziani’s Il Mistico Giobbe (1704) set the story of the Just Man’s (a “mystical Job”) trials. Its role for L’Empio Prosperato (“The fortunate evildoer”) might well have referred to the Franco-Bavarian alliance’s victories in late 1703 against the empire during the War of the Spanish Succession, or to the once-again resurgent Hungarian rebels. The piece was also the first sepolcro heard since the death of Leopold’s daughter Maria Josepha, the last family loss that the emperor would experience before his own passing. The only tomb represented in the set was that of Job’s perished children—again a direct reference to Leopold—and there are exclusively prophetic references to the Passion. The untriumphant ending of this text—an imploring aria for Il Giusto Tribulato and a closing madrigale on hope and constancy— seems also to reflect the temporary downturn for Austria in the war.5 The other locus for political meaning back in the 1660s was the appearance of allegorical figures linked to anti-Machiavellian discourse, which latter the dynasty took from Botero and later Catholic social theorists. The character of “Interesse”—which can be glossed as “selfinterest to the detriment of the Christian/imperial polis”—is clear; as an allegorical personage it had come up first in a 1653 secular and republican libretto for Lucca by Sbarra.6 This role was also part of a trio, on the side of Fortuna against Amore, in the prologue of the first staged opera at Leopold’s court, the 1659 Re Gilidoro, a piece that also enacted the hopes for dynastic succession via the ultimately successful quest for love on the part of its title character. How “interest” might be defined in a sacred context thus starts with its role in the secular theater music. In Aurelio Amalteo’s intermedi for

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figure 7. L. O. Burnacini, Punishment of Core and Followers. (Permission by KHM-Museumsverband.)

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Mercurio esploratore (1662), Interesse plays the cynical observer of love, an echo of its role in the prologue to Il Re Gilidoro. The character had wider, pro-Machiavellian connotations in other dramas by Sbarra and Cupeda. In this social sense, then, “interesse” comes closest to one contemporary definition found in La Rochefoucauld’s famed comparison of the quality to an actor speaking all tongues and possibly even feigning disinterest in the service of its own aims.7 The import of this character together with L’Invidia and Il Tradimento (“Envy” and “Betrayal”) as a sinful allegorical threesome into the central bloc of Sbarra’s 1665 L’Inferno deluso was possibly meant as another condemnation of the disloyal Hungarians, like the one in the librettist’s Limbo disserato that year.8 Here, the interaction of the allegorical and biblical characters is fenced off by the former’s limitation to scenes 4 through 6 only, flanked by two scene complexes for the mourners, again a gesture to the traditions of sacre rappresentazioni.9 Invidia begins scene 4 with a triumph aria in quinari (“Cingetemi il crine / O palme vittrici / De’ nostri nemici//O palms, victorious over our enemies, crown my head”) at Christ’s death, which naturally leads to her quarrel with Interesse over their seeming victory (scene 5). During its parodistic contest with Invidia expressed in a two-stanza aria split between the characters, Interesse claims for itself supremacy among human motivations, adding a specific mention of the Machiavellian ragion di stato in its stanza.10 Tradimento arrives, switching poetic meters from quinari to settenari in order to break the paradoxical news that the three have been defeated (hence the title’s “deluso”) precisely by Judas’s treason, which led to the Crucifixion and thus human salvation. Their final trio, in quaternari and ottenari, seals the ironic reversal that is central to the piece’s conceit: “O misfortune, that all honor of our kingdom has been destroyed, since, in defiance of Acheron, man has been made worthy of Heaven.” The emphasis on the Iscariot’s betrayal would be echoed in Sbarra’s Friday piece for the following year, Le Lacrime di San Pietro, in which Giuda has duet disputes with Peter and with the Magdalen, divided by another solo scene of personal despair; again the nascent rebellion in Hungary might have lurked as a backdrop for the treasonous apostle.11 But the simultaneous appearance of “Interest” in works secular and sacred also reflects the new imperial perception of a sinister, postWestphalia outside world, one marked by cynicism and anti-Catholic treachery. Thus the sepolcri again reflect Leopold’s attempts to stage a political consciousness in which the royals were the only remaining upholders of an earlier, more sincere Catholic Europe.

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Yet one final appearance of this allegorical character raises wider and uglier associations. In the 1676 L’Ingiustizia della sentenza di Pilato (Minato/Sances; music lost), Il Malvagio Interesse Politico is part of a different trio, together with Il Cieco Furor Plebeo and L’Ostentatione Giudaica (“Malevolent Political Interest”; “Blind Plebeian Fury”; “Jewish Obstinancy”). After the first duet opening in Minato’s output (for two angels weeping at the Tomb), La Pietà Cattolica appears to recount the Passion. The Interest/Fury/Obstinancy threesome enters, with Interesse citing Luke (23:2) on the Jews’ claim that Christ wanted earthly kingship. Pietà is joined by La Verità Evangelica and La Verità Storica, and after a first dispute of the two groups, Interesse also shares Furor and Ostentatione’s call “His blood be on us and our children” (Matt 27:25). Different citations are then brought to bear by Gospel and Historical Truths, and in the course of the debate, the anti-Christian lead is taken by L’Ostentatione. Finally, Interesse admits defeat in the face of Historical Truth, Catholic Piety, and Fruitful Penance, which last reproaches Interesse for its “enchantments and phantasms.”

the ineluctability of anti-judaism Thus this 1676 sepolcro highlights the marking of Jews as “guilty other” after the 1670 expulsion of the local population from Vienna.12 Across social classes, anti-Judaism had different tones, and its appearance seems to have had little to do with Jews’ physical presence or absence. But any Passion narration contained at least the possibility of not only emphasizing the role of Hebrew individuals in the events but also going beyond the Gospels in assigning “responsibility” and demonizing the entire population. Why this should have first emerged at the opening of Sbarra’s 1665 Limbo text for Eleonora is not clear. At its beginning, Giovanni’s recitative hints at the Improperia, but then makes the reproaches much more explicit.13 The dowager empress herself would have grown up with Jews tolerated in Mantua, perhaps constituting some 5 percent of its city dwellers, even after the losses of the forced evacuation and repatriation of the community during the warfare of 1630.14 None of the devotional material from her hand, nor the treatises dedicated to her, emphasized the chosen people’s so-called responsibility for the Passion. On the other hand, Sbarra’s previous residences of Lucca and Innsbruck both lacked Jewish populations.

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In Vienna, the hostility toward the local community had built up, in good part from townspeople, from 1666 onward.15 Popular literature and some of the diplomatic reports added the factors of Spanish Habsburg enmity and Margherita’s blame of Jews for the death of Ferdinand Wenzel and/or the Hofburg fire of 1668. But there were also strong economic reasons to impound Jewish property, and a variety of interests combined in the Imperial Council’s discussions of summer 1669 on expulsion and its recommendation to Leopold to proceed with the banishment. The actual deportation took place in stages, with the poorest members given little notice in late summer 1669 of their forced move in autumn, and richer Jews expelled with a decree of 14 February 1670 (these both preceding the birth and death on 21 February of Johannes, the second male born to Margherita and Leopold; see later in this chapter), to take effect in summer 1670. A look at the entire textual corpus of the 1660s shows the scattershot nature of the reproaches. Penitenza’s last words (before the final madrigale) in the 1660 Il Sagrifizio d’Abramo are slightly ambiguous in this regard, and there is only one instance in Pierelli’s four texts; similarly, none of the 1661–62 libretti contain denunciations, with only one disparaging reference in La Gara.16 Thus the appearance of the slurs in Sbarra’s 1665 piece is striking, and without clear attachment to any immediate imperial or urban campaign. In light of the 1670 events, the sepolcri texts of that year merit special consideration. Ferri’s plodding piece on Mary’s sorrows has Marta reproach the Jews in scene 2, with the Magdalen joining in her charges, followed by Lazaro’s extraneous condemnation that ends scene 3, after his narration of his own death and resurrection.17 But the final scene’s opening, a forty-one-line paraphrase of the Improperia by the Virgin, represents a new level, in length and dramatic centrality, of the attacks. This speech anticipates the liturgical placement of the Latin text, liturgically assigned to the next day’s services. In a certain sense, Mary here acts as a ventriloquist for her Son. Minato’s Friday piece on failed consolations makes the guards at the Tomb Jewish, opening with their resistance to Mary’s attempt to visit it. They are thus the subject of her reproaches, including an ugly insinuation of the blood-drinking myth.18 Before viewing Veronica’s Veil halfway through the piece, the Virgin inserts another gratuitous slur, and thus the anti-Jewish atmosphere of the political moment is strongly marked in these two texts. But in the immediately following years, the only explicit denunciation occurs in Ferri’s 1672 text for Eleonora, Il Limbo aperto.

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Once in the semantic field of the libretti, the attacks appear in about half the texts, perhaps worsening in those of Joseph I’s reign. They are evident in many Thursday pieces and in some Friday works. There are outcries against all Jews in the 1677 Cinque piaghe and the 1678 Memorie dolorose, while I Tre chiodi of the latter year repeats the inclusion of a “perfidious” allegorical character, here L’Ebraismo Perfido with a prominent solo role, who steals the relics from the believers (thus accounting for their historical loss) until Lo Spirito Profetico appears to prophesy the recovery of one by none other than St. Helena. This was followed by the 1679 Il Titolo posto’s use of yet another “Ebreo.” The attacks disappeared until the Thursday 1682 Il Terremoto but recurred in the 1684 Le Lagrime più giuste for the same day, in which the Virgin reproaches the innocent Jairo, the rabbi whose daughter Christ had healed according to the Synoptic Gospels, for all the “wrongs” perpetrated by his people. As noted in chapter 4, this kind of blame had an echo in Friday’s piece that year (Il Segno della humana salute), and another New Testament Jew, the Samaritan Woman at the Well (John 4), takes up the accusations in the Thursday 1685 La Bevanda di fiele; they were then passed on to be sung by the Magdalen in the last piece ever written for Eleonora Gonzaga, the 1686 La Sorte sopra la veste. It is not clear why the attacks should have been so common in the pieces for the dowager empress. Taken as a whole, the repertory presents the largest number of anti-Jewish slurs in any corpus of texts for music in early modern Europe, and some libretti are so awful as to preclude performance today, while others, less consistently ugly, need at least clear dissociation in any production. The possible anti-Islamic polemics considered later, though less obvious, fit into the same category of explicit distancing for modern revivals. The striking aspect of the “Jewish guilt” topos is its presence even in situations of real danger to the empire from the Ottomans. In the 1683 La Sete, performed just a few months before the Turkish advance, and a piece nominally about the symbolism of water/thirst as noted earlier, opening laments for the Virgin, John the Baptist, and the Magdalen lead to a paraphrase of the Improperia.19 There is no mention of any other enemies; in contrast, the allegorical L’Eternità soggetta al tempo of the same year is a meditation on time and penance that castigates only Penitent Humankind. Thus the anti-Judaism was not necessary for the devotional processes enacted by the sepolcri; still, in 1687, another critical moment for the Ottoman wars and a generation after the expulsion from Vienna, Il Ter-

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remoto was repeated, possibly as a posthumous tribute to Eleonora Gonzaga, for whom it had first been performed in 1682, and features both a Scribe and a Pharisee. This text opens, after a lament aria for the Virgin discussed later, with the other three biblical mourners (the Magdalen, Mary Cleophe, and John) bursting out in a trio exclamation of “Plebe ingrata, popol rio, / Così tratti il Salvator?//Ungrateful populace, evil people, is this how you treat the Savior?” No matter how grave the military threat from the east, the differentiation between Ecclesia and Synagoga hung in the background. After Minato’s death, the attacks became more regular. After a brief reference in Cupeda’s 1699 Il Secondo Adamo disformato, his 1701 Il Fascietto deepened the accusations. The librettist had a collective Jewish character return in the entirely allegorical lineup of the 1702 Le Profezie adiempite, as most of the piece consists of a dispute over the meaning of prophecies between Christian figures and La Sinagoga Incatenata (“The Chained Synagogue”), ending with her departure from the scene.20 The 1704 Il Mistico Giobbe, for all its fixation on Old Testament suffering, managed to include a “Quei perfidi Giudei” line sung by La Consolazione Spirituale, while Bernardoni’s lengthy preface to his 1705 Le Due passioni—although not the actual text—repeated the reproach of Jews. The 1708 libretto includes both slurs and an unrepentant Jewish leader.21 In the last two examples of sepolcri, Sinagoga is one of five allegorical characters in G. B. Anchioni’s 1710 La Sapienza umana. Although the piece is primarily about the enlightenment of Human Knowledge by its recognition of the Passion’s meaning (another case of emergent rationalizing piety that would come to full flower under Charles VI), Sinagoga plays the foil to Religione’s explanations. Finally, in Stampiglia’s Il Sepolcro nell’orto of 1711, both the Magdalen and Maria Giacobbe attack Jews, before the middle section turns to a series of paraphrases from Lamentations, with condemnation lurking in the background. One point of comparison is the level of such bias found in Italian oratorios between 1665 and 1700. Many of the Roman works of this kind, including those sent to Eleonora in 1661, are based on sanctoral or Old Testament stories and thus present no occasion for such denunciations. In Italy, specific Passion thematics are relatively rare before 1700 (one reason why Pietro Ottoboni and Alessandro Scarlatti’s Roman oratorio Per la Passione of 1706 seems to have made a real impact), and several texts recount the narrative without assigning extra blame to Jews, historical or present. The meditative Passion cantatas

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written by Bernardo Pasquini for the Borghese family in Rome omit the slurs, and the anonymous adaptor of 1683’s La Sete as an oratorio for the same chapel, who otherwise added “affective” arias for the biblical figures to Minato’s original text, held off on further anti-Jewish reproaches until the penultimate moment of the Virgin’s final lament, when they returned in full force: “O betraying envy, o obstinate hearts of the Kingdom of Judah, O unhappy Zion, ungrateful people.”22 The other discongruity, then, is one of social register. For all that Italian and Viennese anti-Judaism seems to have been practiced by the middle and lower classes, and transmitted via mendicant orders, the cultural environment of the sepolcri is remarkably high. Thus the sentiment showed an uglier side of dynastic piety in a way not audible elsewhere in the Viennese oratorio repertory, local or imported. The anti-Islam utterances implicit in the texts are harder to trace. The famed Koranic translator and polemicist Ludovico Marracci would dedicate his Refutatio Alcorani (Padua, 1698), a critique of Islamic scripture and of Mohammed, to Leopold. Marracci mentioned Trinitarian doctrine twice, but his main emphasis was on scriptural (and even Islamic) evidence for Christ’s Divinity; thus the many mentions of the Hypostatic Union in the sepolcri libretti possibly carried concealed antiMuslim connotations.23 In the theologically complex L’Ingratitudine rimproverata of 1675, one moment of Trinitarian emphasis stands out as a possible reaffirmation of Christian doctrine against the Turks. After the piece’s opening described earlier, and Mary’s first lament—which leaves L’Huomo Penitente helpless—Divine Love and Spontaneous Grace begin a dialogue about divine nature and then recount the nature of the Three Persons. This is interrupted by the Virgin’s reproaches of L’Huomo, as she again envoices the Improperia, with the target this time being not Jews but humankind as a whole. Even though the Habsburgs were more preoccupied in 1675 with the French wars than with their eastern front, the seemingly arbitrary nature of this insertion points to its use as polemic. That the piece was later repeated twice shows its importance; still, the relative rarity of Trinitarian themes in the repertory suggests that this part of what historiography has considered central to Pietas austriaca [recte: habsburgica] was largely not dramatically enacted, in sharp contrast to Marian and Cross devotion. Coming from the medieval tradition, the presence of the devilish might seem more likely in the earlier sepolcri. Yet the opposite is the case: the first appearance of Lucifer himself is in the 1671 Il Trionfo della Croce, while he is part of the opening tableau in the 1685 Il Prezzo.

figure 8. L. O. Burnacini, Tempest with Shipwreck. (Permission by KHM-Museumsverband.)

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In none of the works from the 1660s does any demonic character appear, and this stands in stark contrast to devilish presence in the rappresentazione tradition (or even Roman sacred opera earlier in the century). A low-voice demonic quartet opens 1672’s Il Paradiso aperto, while much later, Cupeda brought Lucifer back for the 1699 Il Secondo Adamo. The second-order figure of Il Furor di Lucifero (“Lucifer’s Rage”), together with “Sin’s Horror,” interrupts another reflective opening in Cupeda’s 1703 Tempesta de’ dolori. Here the opening dialogue of Meditazione herself with La Compassione de’ Giusti is cut short by this demonic duo, each of whom claims to be the strongest wind in the tempest of evil that produced the Passion, a storm symbolized by Burnacini’s surviving drawing for the set design (Theatermuseum, Min. 29/5; figure 8).24 This depiction of universal ruin epitomized the near destruction of the world caused by the Crucifixion. Bernardoni made a point of introducing a generic devil to start the 1706 La Morte vinta sul Calvario with an anti-lament for Christ’s death, which Ziani appropriately set as a virtuoso bass aria, doubling cornetti and trombones with strings.25 This role was sung by the veteran bass Rainaldo Borrini, who had been raised to a high pay level (1440 fl.) in 1702, as part of a general wage increase after Draghi’s death. The late arrival of infernal characters in the Viennese repertory also postdates developments elsewhere, such as the 1680 oratorio for Mantua, La Penitenza, in which various demons fight over a penitent soul until the latter is rescued by a guardian angel.

the possession of the material For all that the Habsburgs’ claims to Christian sovereignty were based on their understanding of rulership, their self-assertion had more tangible proof. Among the actual objects of the arma Christi owned by the dynasty, the list of Passion relics seen by Müller in the Imperial Treasury during his 1660 visit included one of the Nails, a drop of Christ’s Blood, and one of the Thorns from the Crown.26 Although it was not mentioned in this account, a Cross fragment was one of the Habsburgs’ most precious treasures and, as noted, had been rediscovered by Eleonora herself in the palace wreckage after the 1668 fire. In addition, the dynastic collection of relics housed since the fifteenth century in Nuremberg (until its 1796–1800 transfer to Regensburg and then Vienna) also preserved another Cross particle and the Holy Lance, the latter considered as belonging to Longinus, not the Centurion. It could have been

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expected that these would be mentioned in the texts, but their central role in generating the conceits of various libretti was less predictable. The Lance appeared in the sepolcro texts as early as the 1661 La Gara, as noted the first piece in the entire corpus with explicit Passion thematics, and its association with Longinus continued in both libretti from the following year. Conceptual structures were built around other relics: the Nail in the 1678 I Tre chiodi; Christ’s Blood in the 1693 Il Sangue e l’acqua; and the Thorn in the 1675 La Corona di spine. The Nail is specifically cited in about a third of the repertory (twenty-three libretti), and the Thorn in about equal number (twenty-two). It is harder to find specific references to the actual drop of the Blood, given the omnipresence of the saving fluid in all the Passion narrations. Still, Minato’s 1693 libretto (the score is lost) on salvific Blood and Water, Il Sangue e l’acqua, begins ambiguously; Burnacini’s set design represented Noah’s Ark with the dove released by the patriarch to assess the state of the Flood, and thus emphasized water as a purifying fluid. Burnacini’s various drawings of the Ark do not correspond precisely to this description. Lapide’s commentary, in its moralizing account of Noah’s story (Gen 8:7ff.), had made the link of this passage to penance clear: “The dove, not the raven, returned to the Ark; those who put off penance, saying ‘Soon, soon,’ are the ravens; the weeping doves are those who repent instantly, returning to the Ark”; hence the set design stood as an emblem of penance. Then the other relics are mentioned by the second-order allegorical character Il Pianto di Longino Illuminato (“The Weeping of the Enlightened Longinus”), who paraphrases Venantius’s Holy Week hymn Vexilla regis. Later, the dialectic of the two title fluids is exemplified by Dolore and Pianto’s repeated references to Augustine’s same Tractate 120 on John which also had provided the equivalence of Mary’s womb and the Tomb. Here the water from Christ’s side cleans the world, while the Blood redeems it. But by this point, if not at the beginning of the piece, the audience would also have recalled Augustine’s equivalence of the window in the Ark with the Wound in the Savior’s Body. Among the other relics, the Lance itself was an instantiation of human offense, insofar as Longinus had used it gratuitously to produce the fifth Wound. The sanctoral cult of this Roman soldier had Gonzaga connections, in that he was considered as hailing originally from Mantua, and his remains, along with Christ’s Blood which he had brought back to the city, were venerated in the basilica of S. Andrea there.27 After the saint’s appearance in the Thursday works of La Gara of 1661

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and La Fede trionfante of 1662, Pierelli made his conversion into the subject of a sepolcro, perhaps in 1667, again following Eleonora’s devotion closely. The Lance appears in some thirteen texts besides the piece named for it, La Sacra Lancia (written for the Prague stay of the court during the plague in 1680; it should be remembered that the Bohemian capital was much closer to the relics in Nuremberg than was Vienna). This was the Thursday work that year, in Eleonora’s chapel, and hence Gonzaga piety was foregrounded even without Longinus as a figure in this text. The Hessian envoy Justus Passer described the Triduum ceremonies in Prague, including the Thursday foot washing, the adoration of local Passion relics, various decorated Tombs, and Burnacini’s set design for the Friday piece Il Vero sole, which was a sun stopped in its place on the zodiac.28 Presuming that his Holy Thursday diary reference to “die gantze passion in Italianischer Sprach in den Verkleidungen singend agiret worden” reflected Passer’s understanding of the performance of La Sacra Lancia (at 10:00 p.m., and in court, not in a chapel), then this piece was also sung in costumes. In the Lance work, the allegorical representations of Austria and Bohemia do penance for their sins (“impure loves” and “miserliness toward the poor,” respectively) in the presence of the Church Militant and of the allegorical character (“Il Voto”) representing Leopold’s vow to erect a Trinity column after the plague’s passing (the future Pestsäule in Vienna’s Graben). In a wider perspective, the frequent references to the Lance also celebrated its preservation and role in Catholic ritual agreed upon at Westphalia, despite the changes after 1660.29 In line with Minato’s habit of postponing a libretto’s central conceit, the relic is absent in much of the work until the end. Nominally about imploring relief from the plague (which had just killed the composer J. H. Schmelzer), the text employs nine singers: six allegorical characters, two spirits from the First Crusade (Raymond IV of Toulouse and the hermit Peter Bartholomew of Marseille, these latter present—without reference to the Lance—in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata), and God the Father. After a discussion among the allegorical figures as to which Passion relics should be venerated to stem the pestilence, the two Crusaders enter to trump all other objects with the relic; the hermit reenacts his discovery of the spear in Antioch during the Crusade; and the two soldiers venerate it. In another infringement of theatrical Tomb space, they conclude by kissing the Wound in Christ’s side—which had been created precisely by the Lance.

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The Thorn was the first of the various relics to have its own piece built around it in La Corona di spine of 1675. This work’s destination for Eleonora’s newly redone chapel space might also explain another prominent part for Longinus, the second character to appear, flowers in hand, en route to adorn the dead Savior. The text is one of several from the 1670s that open by staging Tomb processions, starting with the 1671 Epitaffi sopra il Sepolcro. Although the Thorn had already come up in Giovanni Valentini’s 1642 poem for Good Friday services at court, Minato set up a trajectory for the 1675 piece by again holding off on any mention of the relic until late. The conceptual link between the opening pilgrimage and the Thorn is the floriculture of Christ’s Body, a real-life practice at Tombs. The novelty here is that the procession includes an imagined post-Calvary return of the Three Magi also bringing flowers, which generates a discussion among the Virgin, the Magdalen, Longinus, and the Kings as to the most appropriate kind of plant to honor Him, leading naturally to roses and thorns. Yet the emphasis had musical symbolism. For the first time in the repertory, Draghi employed a tuono pitched on B-natural in cantus durus without prefatory sharps (i.e., not transposed up a second from tuono 3 on A, which would have been evident by the use of two sharps). The Virgin’s opening lament moves, at her mention of Joseph’s having performed the Entombment, to ever more durus realms (cadencing around C#), and Longino’s following penance returns to the opening tonality. Evidently the composer represented the underlying conceit of the Thorn via such choices throughout the piece, which necessarily involved the writing of many sharp signs. This same kind of symbolism seems to be at work in the 1678 piece on the Nails, I Tre chiodi, pitched on the sharpest home tonality in the repertory (F#/2#, possibly originally a tuono-3 piece transposed up a major second). Here the Nail relic is at the center not only because of its legendary rediscovery by Helena and use on Constantine’s helmet (thus a symbolic link to Habsburg military sovereignty and to Eleonora Gonzaga) but also because its ownership and veneration by the dynasty are specifically mentioned toward the end of the piece.30 As sacred as the other relics were, even they were outdone by the Cross particles. These were the only physical objects to generate two of Minato’s titles (1671 and 1697), and the Cross itself was mentioned multiple times in virtually every libretto. Eleonora’s own devotion was evident not only by imitating her patroness saint through her 1668 rediscovery of the relic but also by her foundation of her “Order of the Starry Cross.”

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Besides Bosio’s use of the cross as a heuristic key to nature, the number of Christian martyrs mentioned in the 1671 Trionfo as following Christ via their own crucifixions is striking. Perhaps the most unusual is an implied reference to St. Wilgefortis (Kümmernis), the bearded and crucified female martyr of medieval legend, named with a footnote in the libretto as among the many saints whose deaths repeated the Savior’s, as part of the underlying conceit of the triumphal progress of the Cross. There was a statue of her in the Prague Loreto church, probably erected in midcentury, and she was also depicted on an ecclesiastical vestment of the Order of the Golden Fleece held in the dynasty’s Burgundian Treasury in Vienna. It is possible that the implied reference in the 1671 sepolcro was also an anti-Ottoman gesture, since she was reputed to have been a medieval Portuguese princess whose father had had her crucified for her refusal to marry a Muslim. In this sepolcro, an angel prophesies other such future martyrdoms to the Centurione, while Sances gave the phrase “una regia figlia” a melismatic flourish and a repeat so as to underline Wilgefortis’s importance. Her inclusion as the only female figure among the others simply makes Mary feel worse for her inability to be martyred along with her Son.31 Of the relics not physically owned by the dynasty, Veronica’s Veil had a special aura, especially given characters’ desire to gaze upon an image of the now-inaccessible Christ in the Tomb. In a general way, tradition had placed the saint among the mourners on Calvary. But, in addition, medieval constructed Tombs often included her as well, and thus there was another link to popular practice.32 The saint, together with her relic, returns at a central moment in the 1670 Sette consolationi (cf. later in this chapter), but not until the 1689 L’Esclamare a gran voce did Minato use the legendary figure again, first as a member of a mourners’ quartet without mention of the Veil. Only when Mary asks her to show it does the reluctant Veronica comply, knowing that it will simply increase the Madonna’s sorrows. The relic in this piece, set on Holy Saturday night in the Cenacle and treating the mourners’ elaboration of grief, becomes a hidden symbol for the persona—and the presence—of Christ. But the most remarkable restructuring of Veronica’s character is found in the 1711 Il Sepolcro nell’orto, where Stampiglia gave her the dramatic voice of Jeremiah and his Lamentations. The saint herself sets this up by a self-referential mention of the Veil and is followed by the Magdalen, who moves from Christ’s pre-Passion lament over the daughters of Jerusalem to the scene on the Via Crucis.33 This allows Veronica

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example 3.1. M. A. Ziani, Il Sepolcro nell’orto (1711; A-Wn 19131), “Cieca Gierusalemme,” f. 36.

j r r j j j j j j j r j r j j j j r & c œ œ œ œ œ œj œj œ œr œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œr œ j . r œr œ œr œr #œ œ Veronica

?c

Cie - ca Ge - ru - sa - lem - me ec - cio vi - ci - ne quel - le gra - vi ruo - i - ne on - de s'u - dì

#˙

& œj œj ‰ œj b ˙ len - ti

l'af - fli

?˙

#˙

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-

to Ge - re - mi - a,

œ

6b

œ

4 - 3#

∑

&c

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6# 4 2

5

r j œ œr œ œ # œj œ ‰ j # œj . œr œj œj ˙ J œ

˙

ARIA

˙

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l'af - flito Ge - re - mi - a

#˙

n˙

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6

7

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ bœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ?c œ œ œ œ œ

Co - me, co - me
I
o Dio con as - pra

2

6b

6

j j j j j j & œj œ b Jœ œ œ œ # œ œ ?

œ

Dio

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con as - pra

œ

pe - na

so - la

c

4 - 3#

c

w

j j j j j j j œ œj b œJ œ œ œj œ œj # œ œ Œ Œ œ # œj

∑

staccato

6b

∑

sciol - to
I
in la - men - ti:

b˙

6 4#

con la - gri - me do -

2

2

œ bœ œ œ œ œ œ œ

pe - na,

4# 2

co - me
I
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7

j œ œj b œj œj œ œ œj Œ

gia - ce

sen - za

pa - ce

bœ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ

to present Jeremiah’s foreshadowing of Christ’s suffering by citing the prophet’s initial despair over his city: “Blind Jerusalem, see how near are those ruins which were heard: [aria, paraphrasing Lam 1:1:] O God, how the pitiable city lies alone, in sharp pain and without peace.”34 Here the librettist must have been guided by previous knowledge that the famed alto castrato Gaetano Orsini was to sing the part, thus creating far more weight for the character than might be expected from a strict hierarchy of biblical mourners.

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Ziani set this moment as an aria over a transposing descending tetrachord starting on D, with no reference to the Gregorian chant formula for the Lamentations readings, and thus differentiating this moment from the citation of the recitation tone found at the first paraphrase of Jeremiah’s words in the 1706 Ottoboni/Scarlatti oratorio Per la Passione (example 3.1). A generation later, Orsini would sing a similar poetic reworking of Lamentations, this time as Jeremiah himself, in Zeno and Caldara’s Viennese oratorio Sedecia in 1732.35

the meaning of number Several of Minato’s libretti combine the material relics with numerical symbolism, as the prime numbers permeate a good deal of the repertory. After its initial duet between Redeemed Humanity and Catholic Piety on salvation’s price cited earlier, I Tre chiodi of 1678 continues with the former’s desire to kiss Christ’s Wounds, frustrated by His inaccessibility in the Tomb. As Humanity moves to embrace the ground, she discovers the Nails instead, and this sets off a long series of parallels to other threesomes: the Furies, the sensual qualities of the Apple in Eden, the scholastic triad of corporeality, the memory-intellect-will complex, and even a brief insider reference to the three women of Paris’s Judgment, the subject of the 1666–68 Il Pomo d’oro. The numerical associations then turn to Passion events: three prayers in Gethsemene, three Apostles with Christ there, three tribunals judging Him, Three Hours on the Cross. Finally, in a tropological sense, Catholic Piety concludes by opposing the Nails to the three enemies of the soul: the world, the senses, and the Devil. In the 1679 Il Titolo posto, number interacts with linguistic universality to convey the transcendent Cross. Supposedly the original trilingual tablet (“Titulus Crucis”) placed over the crucified Christ (Lk 23:38 and Jn 19:19–20) had been rediscovered by St. Helena and brought to the Roman basilica of S. Croce in Gerusalemme, there to be authenticated in the late Quattrocento. This prehistory both made the piece appropriate for Eleonora’s chapel and suggests the identification of the dowager empress with the Magdalen, at least in this piece, although in 1679 it would also have resonated with Eleonore Magdalene’s name and patronesses. Although this piece opens with Tomb-specific arias for the Virgin and the Magdalen, separated by a duet reference to Christ’s cries (this latter anticipating L’Esclamar a gran voce of a decade later), it quickly adds a

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penitent Centurion.36 This threesome mourns, and then paraphrases the Credo of the Mass in dialogue fashion (perhaps another pedagogical gesture for Maria Antonia), leading to the Magdalen’s discovery of the title; in the printed libretto, the original scripts appear.37 In numeric response, three generic passersby appear (Il Greco, L’Ebreo, and Il Latino) to read them (there is also an implicit reference here to the Lamentations verse “O vos omnes, qui transitis per viam”). Draghi set the Greek and Hebrew, transliterated, as a prolonged sonority on D, although the only purely spoken moment in the whole repertory occurs as the first two characters begin by declaring their intention to read the inscriptions. Finally, Il Latino closes the section by singing the Latin title and cadencing on A. The discovery of the inscription leads to a disputation on titles in general, their language, and their meaning among the three generic characters plus the mourners. As L’Ebreo is confuted, the tonal spectrum wanders far afield from the A/durus passage, to E-flat (possibly a representation of L’Ebreo’s “errors”), until the recurrent mourning of the Virgin and the Magdalen returns to the original A of the discovery. Here the universality of Christ’s real Kingship is shown both by the different languages and by the presence of “three” as numerical symbol. Eleonora Gonzaga’s piece for the Five Wounds from two years earlier is even more constructivist in its approach. Le Cinque piaghe starts with Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus searching for each other in the darkness; it continues, as noted previously, with not one but two extractions of Christ’s Body from the Tomb: first the two buriers shroud the corpse, and then it is removed again for veneration by the other pairs of biblical mourners. As the Magdalen—who has a prominent role in this piece, perhaps because it was the very first sepolcro that Eleonore Magdalene would have heard in her life—adores the Dead Christ, she “discovers” the Five Wounds, as Draghi had her again singing in sharp areas around A. This moment inaugurates the central section, in which recitative setting various kinds of number symbolism alternates with lyricism (arias and duets) mourning the Wounds. The Madonna reacts to the Magdalen by remembering the five leaves on Gabriel’s lily, and John then iterates the number of letters in Jesus’s name (another veiled reference to the Name devotion). The Magdalen’s first lament aria, unusually extrovert in its vocal demands, again starts in A, touching the extremes of tonally sharp regions (C# and F#), followed by a drop back to D as Peter recounts his sins. In recitative, Joseph and Nicodemus recall the four elements of the universe (thus a link to Il Lutto) and Eden’s four

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rivers, and the women revisit flat tonal areas and outdo the quadripartite phenomena by introducing the Wounds, followed by five-part numerology related to creation and salvation: the five spheres of the universe; a pun between five ancient Roman feet constituting a pace (passus) and the Five Wounds opening the passage (passo) to Heaven; the five fish and two loaves of the Miracle of the Fishes outdone by the Wounds and the three Nails; and finally David’s five stones that killed Goliath. Given its incorporation of Eucharistic, penitential, and Passion symbolism—plus a series of duets for various pairs of characters—it is perhaps no wonder that the piece was repeated for Eleonora’s Holy Thursday devotion in Linz in 1681 on the court’s way back to Vienna from Prague. From the perspective of Minato’s poetics, though, the fascination with number was simply the continuation of the conceits found in Marino’s Dicerie sacre.38 The hidden connotations of “seven,” found in the 1670 and 1694 pieces, had been adumbrated in the earlier poet’s “Diceria seconda: La musica,” based on Christ’s Seven Last Words. Starting with the 1670 work, number plays a generative role in the libretti of the next two decades, and ultimately these conceits reflect the search for universal knowledge as manifest in Passion symbolism. A related issue to the numerical manifestations of Christian truth is the concern with science thematized in libretti from 1676 through 1683. This interest, especially in mathematics and astronomy, went well back in Leopold’s life, as it had been part of his education. The German Jesuit pedagogue and polymath Gaspar Schott had dedicated his textbook Cursus mathematicum to him in 1661, and other issues of scientific erudition cropped up in the emperor’s correspondence with Kircher. In a lesser-known side of his patronage, Leopold was also a major supporter of Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–87), the Jesuit astronomer, mathematician, and occasional music teacher working at the Chinese court, and hence such questions were present in court intellectual life.39 The various partial solar eclipses of 1661, 1664, 1666, 1668, and 1674 had most recently recurred early in the morning on 23 June 1675 in Vienna and might have been the occasion for the 1676 Thursday sepolcro on the theme of the obscured sun at the Crucifixion, Il Sole eclissato.40 After a Pharisee opens by noting the solar darkening and wondering why, Vain Superstition and False Science arrive in a kind of antidialogue of recognition, each claiming to know the reason. In a moment of direct Neoplatonic representation, Superstition’s aria in sdruccioli “Tinniti e crepiti” is introduced by an “artfully dissonant and

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confused” ritornello, as she attributes the phenomena of eclipse and earthquake (quoting Pliny’s Natural History, bk. 2, ch. 12) to the “fainting” of the planetary spheres. Science mocks her, linking everything to a simple solar eclipse, and the three continue the argument. Draghi’s sonorities include diminished fifths, augmented sixths, and major sevenths that never resolve, all in a texture of five-part string tremolos that seems to correspond to Minato’s demands (example 3.2). Infallible Faith then arrives and, quoting pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite against the allegorical duo, endeavors to show that the Friday eclipse was supernatural. The dispute occupies some two-thirds of the libretto, probably some forty minutes in performance, and is taken up again by the three beneficiaries of Christ’s miracles (the Blind Man, the Leper Healed, and the Widow’s Son Revived), in a foretaste of the characters to appear in the 1684 sepolcri discussed in chapter 4. Their personal testimonies quickly convince the allegorical figures.41 The Pharisee, however, raises the objection (with a specific citation of Aquinas) that miracles, if worked on the heavenly bodies, destroyed their essence. Faith responds by using the same article from the Summa theologica on the subjection of the elements to God, and, together with the three New Testament figures, this finally moves the Jewish character to belief in the supernatural nature of the eclipse and to metanoia. Still, the technical discourse of the libretto is quite high, on the level of an academic disputation, and it is also testimony to Eleonora Gonzaga’s interests in astronomical thought and possibly in the practice of religious conversions. Analogous cosmological issues recurred quickly in other texts: the 1680 Il Vero sole, the 1682 Il Terremoto along with the same year’s Sig des Leydens (with its character of Joshua and the arrest of the sun’s motion), followed by the 1683 L’Eternità soggetta al tempo, with its references to the stoppage of time and solar motion. In a wider sense, the pieces all partook of a debate on true and false science that continued through the 1710 La Sapienza umana discussed earlier in this chapter. The 1680 piece refers in its apparato to celestial mechanics, as Joshua’s stoppage of the sun on the zodiac was depicted in it. Given the presence of only New Testament mourners here, the libretto works out the metaphors and parallels of the sun’s arrested motion (obviously, in a geocentric system). Two years later, Il Terremoto was “scientific” in its discursive modality, as the two Lights of Faith and of Science argue here with another Pharisee on the reasons for the earth’s trembling; in order to stage the earthquake, this piece imagines Christ still on the Cross and only comes around later to the Entombment. After

example 3.2. A. Draghi, Il Sole eclissato (1676; A-Wn 16878), Sinfonia, f. 5.

Sinfonia

#˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ #˙ ˙ #˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ &3

˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ #˙ ˙

˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙

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∑

#˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ #˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ #˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙

B3

∑

#˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙

˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙

˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙

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∑

∑

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? 3 w. &

#˙

( n ?)

w.

#w . ˙ ˙

& #˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙˙ B #˙ ˙ ˙ ˙

˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ #˙ ˙

˙ ˙ #˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ #˙ #˙ #˙

#˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ #˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙

( n ?)

˙˙˙˙ ˙ ˙

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˙ ˙ #˙ ˙ #˙ ˙ #˙ ˙ #˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ #˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ #˙ ˙ n˙

B #˙ ˙ #˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ #˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ #˙ ˙ ? #˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙˙

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˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ #˙ ˙

( n ?)

˙ ˙

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˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ #˙ #˙ #˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ #˙ ˙ #˙ ˙

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this moment, though, the issue of science as a heuristic guide to the Passion receded, in favor of the more mystical and experiential themes.

the power of memory For all that number and science pointed to the Passion, the issue of individual perception was also key to meditative trajectories. Since most of Minato’s texts are located in devotional time after the Entombment, the role of memory in the facultative triad along with intellect and will is crucial. For all the various acts of remembrance in the repertory, no other piece employs recollection as does the 1678 Le Memorie dolorose. This relatively short but large-scale work flanks the Virgin with four groups of mourners: Giuseppe d’Arimatea with Nicodemo; the Three Marys; the three Apostles of the Transfiguration and Gethsemene; and two singing angels. The piece opens “in the solitary place where Mary went to grieve after the Crucifixion” with another inconsolable Madonna and the angels, plus an inaudible (to the audience, but not to her) heavenly choir. Its eleven singers work through some ten conceits, narrated by the Virgin, of negative parallels between sequential Passion events and past joyful ones, each former happy memory now generating only sorrow. Mary uses the apostles’ occupation as fishers and Peter’s mention of his “Di lagrime un mare” (my sea of tears) as a transition to her first recollection, the story of Christ’s finding a coin for the temple tax (Matt 17:24–27) in a fish, which she compares to Judas’s betrayal of Him for silver. This specific inversion of the Gospel story does not occur in the exegetical literature available in Vienna and might well be Minato’s invention. The rest of the polarized series (the angel of the Annunciation compared with the one on the Mount of Olives; the Dispute with the Doctors versus Christ’s silence in the tribunals, and so forth; the piece’s metric and tonal choices are discussed in the next chapter) culminates in the contrast between Lazarus’s resurrection and the Entombment. In between the various comparisons, the buriers, the Three Marys, and the apostles all recall other parallels between the Cross and other biblical passages. Thus all the characters, like Jorge Luis Borges’s Funes the Memorious, are caught in the labyrinth of their own memories, the Madonna most of all. A decade later, in the 1689 L’Esclamare a gran voce, excessive recollection leads the Virgin to a crisis of mourning. At two days’ distance from the Entombment, and as part of a quartet of biblical grievers each

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remembering the Passion on his or her own (this time not in a “lonely place” but in the Cenacle), Mary reacts bitterly to all the others’ stories. The accounts had begun with a memory of the Cenacle, John’s retelling in technical language of the institution of the Eucharist and the foot washing of the Apostles, to which the Madonna retorts that of all the apostles, Judas was washed with the greatest love. This leads her immediately to more reproaches of the others: “If [all] I find around me are painful memories [a recall of the 1678 sepolcro] suitable to make me suffer, does it seem to you that I do little by simply weeping and sighing?”42 This would have taken on particular meaning for the royals, given that Archduchess Maria Anna Josepha (1654–89; Leopold’s half sister) was dying of tuberculosis, as her passing took place the following Thursday. As at the beginning of other sepolcri, there is a communicative gap among the mourners, and its eventual bridging is one of the piece’s tasks. In line with his essentially antimimetic approach, Draghi’s score avoids two obvious musical possibilities: there is no motivic repetition around the recurring recollections, and, in a piece based on the idea of the speech act that was Christ’s cries, there is little unusual vocal display in the musical setting. In this piece, the Entombment is present only in Joseph of Arimathea’s memories.43 But the Madonna’s words did resonate strongly with phrases that the royals would have heard twice on that Friday, 8 April. If the sepolcro had staged recollected mourning, the homiletic literature addressed the immediacy of the Entombment, thereby having the messages cover both present and past grief. At the Adoration of the Cross ceremony on Friday morning, the Roman Franciscan preacher (previously the librettist for a 1674 Viennese oratorio on Mary’s Sorrows) Ignazio Savini gave what would turn out to be his last sermon to the court, so appreciated by the royals that he had to repeat it later that day, probably before the sepolcro’s performance. La Solitudine e la speranza, ultimi tormenti del cuore di Maria Vergine placed its listing of Mary’s “last torments” at the Tomb in the context of social class and duty, specifically using a staging metaphor for the Sepulcher: The Blessed Virgin had to close the last act of this tragedy with the most exquisite sorrow and the ultimate pain. She enacted and experienced everything that a truly loving heart, tormented by loneliness and transfixed by hope, could suffer. The Tomb which enclosed her loved one was the stage set. . . . Mary’s heart was wounded in the Wounds of Christ, and when

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Christ was placed in the Tomb, Mary’s heart was separated from her, so let all of you measure the quality of her pain: living without a heart, and living with a wounded heart [this echoes a well-known amatory poem by Marino]; as St. Augustine says, the sparrow [i.e., who found his nest; Ps 83:4] was Christ, Who found the house of His rest in His Tomb. . . . So what shall we do? That which the season, and even the hour counsel [us to do], giving a proper burial to the dead Redeemer, following the Virgin’s example, especially you princes and knights of the Holy Roman Empire. You know well that Christ was tortured and killed by base [vile] people, but more vile in their habits and despicable for their vices. He was then taken down, claimed, embalmed, honored, and buried by the nobles Joseph and Nicodemus. This teaches us that, just as it is the nature of vile and sordid people to mistreat Christ, so is it proper for Christian knights to honor Him in virtue. . . . If the last office of pity was given to Christ by nobles, it is your duty to do the same this evening, finding an appropriate burial for Him. . . . Bury Him, then, where Mary buried Him: in her heart, thus showing what the Song of Songs says: Fasciculus myrrhae dilectus meus mihi [Cant 1:12]. . . . So bury Christ, as did the Virgin, in your hearts. The Virgin buried Him with a permanent memory of His Passion, taking from [her memory], for her own good, the loving flames of devout appropriateness.44

Savini thus invoked noble behavior as a model for mourning, castigating lower social classes as the seed-ground for Christ’s sufferings—even if, in reality, popular Tomb devotion was well evident in city and country churches outside the Hofburgkapelle’s performances. Far from a class-transcending universal devotion, here “Austrian piety” revealed its antiplebeian edge.

the grieving of genders In Augustine’s synthesis of the Gospel accounts, the sole entombers of Christ were Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, although the latter appears only in John’s narration.45 The former had greater symbolic weight, given the parallel roles of the two Josephs at the beginning and end of Christ’s life, while the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, and his greater prominence according to John’s Gospel, provided different possibilities. Both men appear in Sbarra’s 1665 Inferno deluso, and later in Ferri’s 1674 Thursday text (the characters of which latter are largely taken from John 19, and which imitates the opening of Minato’s 1670 piece by using sleeping guards at the Tomb). The presence of the two together is normative, except for the 1671 Thursday text and the 1680

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and 1699 Friday works. The characters are used jointly in the last works for Leopold and Joseph, respectively, in 1705 and 1711; Nicodemus never appears by himself. The opening of Draghi’s (text and music) 1669 L’Humanità redenta, which features the two buriers, is striking for its combination of gender and vocabulary. Amid the shadows and earthquake of Good Friday, they begin with a refrain lament, as noted of operatic flavor: “My God is dead, my Deity perished; O my eyes, born to weep, pour forth my miserable heart in sorrow.” They mourn together with Simon the Cyranean, until Hope appears, bringing the possibility of redemption, and then all four encourage Humanity to repent, without further mention of the Tomb. But local sanctoral tradition is evident in Sbarra’s L’Inferno deluso of 1665. After an opening duet of characters deciding to go visit the Tomb—but here sung by Lazarus and Martha, not the Virgin and another biblical figure—scene 2 consists of a solo aria for Nicodemus, not Joseph (the rich man according to Matt 27:57), denouncing Judas’s greed, a theme that would recur in the arguments later in the piece against Interesse and Tradimento. Only in scene 3 does Joseph arrive with the news of Judas’s suicide, but this is followed by a two-stanza aria in settenari condemning Ragion di Stato as the real villain. The strophes are apportioned first to Nicodemus and then to Joseph (anticipating the similar division between Invidia and Interesse in scene 5 discussed earlier). The two buriers then leave for the Sepulcher, setting the stage for the entrance of the evil allegorical trio. Given Sbarra’s introduction of these latter characters taken from his operatic output, the prominence of Nicodemus as their foil seems odd— until we consider the tradition of the sculpted Crucifix, known as the Volto Santo, preserved in the cathedral of the poet’s hometown of Lucca. This image was considered to have been crafted by Nicodemus himself, then brought miraculously to Italy; it generated a small local cult of the burier, certainly known to the poet.46 In 1685, Savini would preach a Lenten sermon in Lucca that commented on Nicodemus having originally come to seek Christ in the dark, then burying Him also in the Tomb’s blackness, only later to sculpt his face and bring it into the light of public viewing.47 Thus the Volto Santo was an analogue to the Body of Christ encased in the Viennese Tomb, and Sbarra added his own local touch here. The dynastic factor that highlighted Joseph of Arimathea was the massive Habsburg devotion to St. Joseph the father of Christ, the puta-

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tive cause for the successful birth and survival of the future Joseph I in 1678. It would be hard to overestimate the cult of Christ’s stepfather, especially after 1680.48 The seventeen Lenten performances of Minato and Leopold’s oratorio Il Transito di San Giuseppe between 1675 and 1702 (normally around the feast day on 17 March) bear musical testimony to the veneration. Thus Joseph the burier shared in his namesake’s sanctoral cult, and the best representation of the parallelism is sung by Mary at the opening of the 1675 Corona di spine: “Thus He has the same fate, when He dies and was born; one Joseph held Him in swaddling clothes, and another one buried Him.” This also resonated with Augustine’s equivalence of womb/Tomb. Another male pairing was that of Peter and John as Apostles, only the latter placed on Calvary according to all the Gospel accounts. Most notably in the seemingly arcane conceit of La Trasfigurazione (1695; again no score survives), by which Christ’s Transfiguration is rendered as a prefiguration of the Crucifixion, James the Greater joins this duo on Calvary, since he had been present at the earlier event and on Mount Olivet. The contrasting role of the two main disciples is almost invariable, as Peter rings all possible changes on the theme of penance, while John consoles the Virgin and recounts the details of Christ’s suffering. In the court context, though, this plethora of lamenting men onstage was notably different from the actual lack of males in the immediate family. For the first few years, Archdukes Leopold Wilhelm and Karl Joseph would have been present at performances, but from 1664 to 1686 (Joseph I’s reaching the age of reason), Leopold would have been the only male capable of sin, and thus of penance, among the royals. Although the monarch’s self-perception as principal sinner suggests identification with Peter (or with L’Huomo Penitente character in other texts), the other figures might have been models for the nobility listening in the chapels, as with Savini’s audience in 1689. After 1693, all three dynastic males would have been at the sepolcri, except for Charles VI’s absences in the War of the Spanish Succession. Thus gender was not entirely determinative for the lexical field of lament in the sepolcri, as can be seen in one of the discrepancies in Federici’s Gli Affetti pietosi of 1666. Here the believer’s desire to move from the reception of the Eucharist to the actual consumption of Christ’s Blood is allotted in the print text to the Magdalen, but—with greater correspondence to the Gospel account—is put in the mouth of John in the manuscript libretto: “O my mouth, which yesterday received Paradise at [the Last] Supper, how can you today receive death’s gall?

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Yesterday you tasted the nectar of His living side; today you want to drink the Blood from His dead side. . . . O stone, open up to me, for I am thirsty for His Blood.”49 How this might have related to the longstanding Habsburg desire for personal Communion under both species, technically forbidden since 1565 and banned in the empire by Ferdinand II himself in 1621, is not clear. The other standard pairing was that of the Madonna and the Magdalen, present in the texts from the 1661 Il Pentimento onward. As noted, the presence of the grieving Magdalen took on even more relevance after Leopold’s 1676 marriage to Eleonore Magdalene.50 In contemporary Italian hagiography, and in the Mantuan tradition, the saint had a prominent role. The two versions of Giovanni Battista Andreini’s La Maddalena were known in Mantua (1617 and 1652) and Vienna (a 1629 performance of the earlier text), while Anton Giulio Brignole Sale’s sacred prose romance (1636) Maria Maddalena peccatrice e convertita was held in the imperial collections. Still, her mourning at the Tomb omitted the circumstances of her conversion and of her later life, the most picturesque aspects of her legend. These other parts of her story were treated in two different oratorios performed at court, Alessandro Scarlatti’s (1693 and 1703) along with Giovanni Bononcini’s (1701), and the Viennese density of the subject matter suggests a link to the empress, in her new status after the death of Eleonora Gonzaga and her crowning as queen of Hungary (1690). Although the Magdalen is prominent throughout the sepolcro repertory from beginning to end, the most striking portrayal is in the one text in which she—not the Madonna— appears as the principal female mourner, discussed in chapter 4. No issue in contemporary devotional controversies came as close to the sepolcri’s thematics as did that around Marian veneration and her qualities. The flash point during Leopold’s reign was the Jansenist tract Monita salutaria B. V. Mariae ad cultores suos indiscretos, published in Ghent in 1673 and probably written by Adam Widenfeld. This print, downgrading both Mary’s co-Redemption and her material cult, enjoyed a reprint as close as Munich in the very same year but was attacked internationally and immediately, not least by the Prague Jesuit Maximilian Reichenberger (1613–76), whose posthumous Mariani cultus vindiciae (Prague, 1677) was dedicated to Leopold himself (in the tome, the emperor was also mentioned as the institutor of a new feast of the Addolorata on the Fourth Sunday after Easter).51 Certainly the Austrian court was at the forefront of the countercharge against these Jansenist views, reiterating their sense of the Virgin’s role as co-Redemptrix and

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the importance of elaborate Marian devotion. Yet the Habsburg insistence on her “martyrdom” beyond that of any other human suffering, not least in the sepolcro libretti, underscored her work in the project of salvation, as a figure with her own “Passion.” This idea would be the initial conceit of the 1705 Le Due passioni, in which the Virgin is overcome by grief while finishing her opening aria and swoons, in line with a long but contested account of Mary’s behavior at the Cross ultimately dating to the apocryphal Acts of Pilate.52 Although she is eventually convinced by the other biblical mourners to leave the Tomb and return to Jerusalem, a good deal of Bernardoni’s text is spent on the Virgin’s reproaches of the Magdalen, John, and Joseph of Arimathea, who are unable to grasp the depth of her sorrow. As much as this might seem a reaffirmation of Habsburg maximalist Mariology, the text also allowed for new devotions, notably the Sacred Heart cult that flashed through late seventeenth-century Europe.53 This 1705 piece would have an unexpected revival in mid-twentieth-century Italy (noted later). As the main mourner after the Crucifixion, Mary was ubiquitous, even in the roughly fifteen texts in which she did not figure as a character, and even if she was placed at the Sepulcher only by tradition and exegesis. The only human present for many events of His life, she had a privileged place in the recounting of Christ’s actions. Along with Peter, she continued to provide material for “second-order” characters (e.g., “L’Afflizione della Beata Vergine” in Cupeda’s 1703 Tempesta de’ dolori). Indeed, Marian subjectivity was central to most of the repertory, however it played out in any given piece. For the theme of Mary’s suffering, the most striking parallel text is that of Minato and Leopold’s Lenten oratorio L’Amor della redentione, performed some sixteen times between 1677 and 1705. This musical reenactment of the Virgin’s canonical Seven Sorrows offers a different Passion trajectory, complete with a narrator (“Testo”), three allegorical figures, and the Virgin plus Christ. At the end of the work—the Entombment is the final Sorrow—Mary asks for a last view of the Body, and although her grief is massive, she is finally consoled, unlike the 1670 sepolcro discussed presently, by the thought of Christ’s Harrowing of Hell. With its quotations from medieval and early modern authorities, the piece ends with its eponymous title character “The Love of Redemption” proclaiming the doctrine clearly: “Suffer, Mary; thus you also contribute to saving humankind.” Leopold evidently never tired of listening to his own music, one tribute to the presence of the Virgin’s pain in the court’s collective imagination.

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the ubiquity of death Beyond the generally high mortality of the dynasty, especially among the children, several royal deaths occurred in proximity to Holy Week or Lent. This had started with Ferdinand III’s demise in spring 1657 and recurred in the deaths of the male infants in 1668 and 1670, along with Margherita’s passing in Lent 1673 and that of Claudia Felicitas in 1676 (on Easter Tuesday). The 1705 sepolcro was the last major piece that Leopold would hear, and thus Bernardoni’s depiction of Joseph of Arimathea entombing Christ oddly prefigured Joseph I burying his father six weeks later (at least the Roman nuncio did not think that Leopold was in bad health that Holy Week; the exact circumstances are discussed in the epilogue to this book). Stampiglia/Ziani’s Il Sepolcro nell’orto would have been the last music heard by the infected Joseph himself in 1711. These dates also meant that the anniversary exequies for previously deceased royals might have fallen close to the sepolcri performances and been in the royals’ consciousness. On one hand, the texts invite their audience to transcend any human death in comparison to that of Christ, a possible goal of the 1668 and 1670 works. Still, six other infants died between 1672 and 1691, and thus the mortality of Leopold’s eight children, two wives, stepmother, sister, and one half sister in this time span meant that there were royal funerals on the average of every eighteen months (normally, there were Viennese services for Spanish Habsburg deaths, as well).54 Then or now, it seems difficult to escape the role of Christ’s exequies in expressing and overcoming individual grief. For all the possible personal meaning, the dynasty conceived its earthly role as being that of Christ’s sovereigns, even in its mourning.

margherita’s view: sette consolationi di maria (1670) Around the young empress and her Spanish Hofstaat, winter 1670 was not a good time, even before the death of the newborn Johannes in February. The fighting between her German and Iberian entourages, which had been present from her arrival in late 1666 but was temporarily stilled during the festive period of 1667–68, had now reached the point at which Leopold himself had to intervene, and the quarrels around precedence and rank left their written traces in the ceremonial papers. Some of them even resulted in physical attacks and

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injuries.55 The court intrigues around the dowager empress did not help, and in addition, Margherita’s senior Spanish lady-in-waiting, Ana María de Toledo, died of measles on 5 March just before returning to Spain for her own wedding. The hopes for a male heir to the throne seemed more remote than ever after the newborn’s death, and it is thus not surprising that someone came up with the dual program of the Seven Sorrows/Seven Consolations of Mary for the two pieces in that Holy Week, the first (and only) year in which Passion theater was enacted solely in the personal thematics of the Virgin. The nuncio Pignatelli (later Pope Innocent XII) wrote back to Rome about the court’s shattered state after the death of the premature infant, now the second heir to have died.56 Even the normally stoic Leopold was shaken by the loss. For the first time, Ferri was assigned a libretto, the Thursday drama on the Seven Sorrows for Eleonora’s chapel. Minato then had the more important Friday work, although the origin of its theme is unclear. The seven consolatory aspects in the latter piece are not the “Seven Joys of Mary,” nor the topos of the Virgin as the consoler of sinners. Rather, they are all the results of the Atonement redirected so as to comfort the Madonna: (1) God the Father placated, (2) divine justice satisfied, (3) the souls in Limbo freed, (4) humankind redeemed, (5) Christ’s Face on Veronica’s veil, (6) the institution of the Eucharist, and (7) the Cross as symbol of triumph, this last a prefiguration of the following year’s Il Trionfo della Croce, and a thematic connection across successive years. There seems no precedent in any medieval or early modern devotion for this lineup of solace, nor was there any sequel to it in the oratorio repertory of Italy or Austria. Still, the idea might not have been entirely invented, and its hidden antecedents reveal suggestive connections. One of the results of Italian Quietism was an interest in previously marginalized medieval mystics, among them Angela of Foligno. The Venetian priest Michele Cicogna—whose later publications would fall afoul of Roman rigor, not least for his association with the devotional writer and cardinal Pier Matteo Petrucci—published a selection of Angela’s writings (Venice, 1669), which included the passage from her Liber recounting her own seven consolations in dialogue with the suffering Christ, revelations that moved her closer to the Savior.57 Although the soteriological substance of Minato’s text is different, he could have remembered the basic connection of “seven consolations and Passion,” as Cicogna had dated his dedication to the French-born (and hence

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presumably closer to heterodox devotion) Bavarian electress Henrietta Adelaide, from Venice on 1 April 1669, before the poet had left Italy for Vienna. Cicogna himself was no stranger to Tomb piety. In his 1681 Ambrosia celeste, o cibo suave dell’anima contemplative, a series of reflections with images and poems for each day of any given month, the Venetian priest came to the Deposition, Entombment, and the Virgin’s return to Jerusalem in his meditations for the twenty-ninth through thirty-first.58 For the thirtieth, Cicogna included a poem by Cardinal Petrucci on Christ buried (“Al fin deposto”), and then an engraving of the Madonna, the (other) Three Marys, and John at the Tomb. His address to the devout soul for the last day of the month centered on the Addolorata’s pain after returning from the Tomb to Jerusalem, as the Madonna asked not for penance but for compassion. Along the way, Cicogna included examples of Passion visions by the thirteenthcentury Margherita Colonna, Angela of Foligno again, and a more recent Austrian Habsburg, Margherita of the Cross (1576–1633). However, for his pains, almost all of Cicogna’s original works were placed on the Index between 1683 and 1711, in the wave of Roman anti-Quietism. This nexus of unusual devotion, gender, and Tomb meditation raises the possibility that the Friday 1670 piece had been crafted in a rush after the birth/death on 21 February, to remind Margherita Teresa of the Virgin’s ineffable sufferings and thus to assuage her own personal grief. In this, his first sacred product for the court, Minato had to poetize a conceptual project. Ferri’s Thursday text on the Madonna’s Seven Sorrows had been anything but systematic, as, again in the rappresentazione tradition, three of its first five scenes are laments for Christ starting with solos and leading to duets (the Virgin and John, the Magdalen and Martha, Peter, and Longinus, in another gesture to Mantuan devotion), in which the characters interact only at the ends of scenes. The seven characters do not map onto the traditional Sorrows, which latter (e.g., Simeon’s prophecy of Christ’s future, the Flight into Egypt) are not even articulated, as each figure in the sepolcro simply recounts his or her own sin or grief. Only in the final scene, composed of two solo laments for the Virgin each followed by tutti sections, do the Thursday characters even recognize Mary’s suffering. Possibly Ferri produced this problematic text under time pressure, but the results do not speak well for his capabilities. The libretto did

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give Draghi the opportunity to write multiple solo and duets, including one for Lazaro (scene 3) over a descending tetrachord, unusual in the repertory. And the Virgin’s extended grief in the last scene returns to the sharp regions on E in which the piece had begun, complete with her melismas and dissonances. Minato’s preface to his Friday text recognized his own background in opera and newness to sacred literature: “Neither Calliope nor Clio inspired these verses in me [i.e., neither the mythological nor historic basis for opera libretti, a claim not entirely borne out by the sepolcro’s text], but rather the muse who dictated harmony to David’s harp. . . . I dispense ink, you break forth in tears, and, if you wish to live happily, live for Christ, Who died to give you life.” The Virgin opens with deictic recitative addressed to the stone, tracing Christ’s womb/Tomb trajectory, leading to an attempt to prostrate herself in kissing the rock, just as the Habsburgs themselves were wont to do on their visits to city Tombs. But in the first of many departures from tradition, she is rudely shoved back in a stage fight by two awakening guards sleeping at the Tomb, and the action reveals this piece’s kinship to opera. Mary’s plea to be wounded with the Nails and Lance (an extreme imitatio Christi, or, in psychoanalytic terms, a sort of substitution in grief) is rejected by the guards as madness. Minato cast her desperate but unavoidable state in a two-stanza aria in the unusual novenari, evidently the first use of this meter in the entire repertory: “Maria vive, e morto è Christo, / Potea pur con una morte / A due alme tor la vita / Chi con forma già inaudita / Sparse a l’acqua il sangue misto? / Maria vive . . . //Mary lives, and Christ is dead. Could He Who, in an unprecedented way, shed His Blood mixed with water, also take life from two souls with a single death? Mary lives. . .” The parallel to Margherita’s own situation must have been quite clear. Minato’s Virgin starts the piece by picking up directly from the conclusion of Ferri’s libretto of the preceding day, in which Mary had ended her part with a plea: “Laments, torments, destroy me night and day; [recitative:] and, if my heart cannot die, let it always live in pain.” On Thursday, her words had been followed by the other biblical mourners empathizing with her grief, and then their closing madrigale: “O mortal, to this remembrance consecrate your heart as a victim, and your tears as a tributary.” In Minato’s text, it is the recitative following the aria in novenari that pushes beyond the normal bounds: “Eternal Father, forgive me, I almost

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regret having said ‘May God’s will be done,’ if I, with my miserable fate, conceived God only to give Him over to death.” The Father promptly appears in a blaze of light from the clouds for the first consolation, but Mary resists, asking why God had to die for a single human’s sin. Again, the royals in the Hofburgkapelle’s gallery would have been quite close to the singer performing the Father. Sances’s score employs some startling juxtapositions of local tuoni and mollis/durus systems. These do not necessarily line up with the procession of the various consolations (in essence, miniature scenes). If the entire sepolcro is on D/durus (tuono 1 untransposed)—which is the tonal space for the first fight scene between Mary and the Tomb’s guards—her first lament aria and her regret for the Annunciation suddenly shift to C/mollis, before the Father appears to declare His appeasement, back in sharp sonorities. Divine Justice then arrives with the second consolation, the Atonement. Still, in the face of the Father, Justice, and two angels, the Virgin insists on her inconsolability (“There is no more consolation for me now that my Jesus is dead”). Minato moves to mortal interlocutors for the third solace, as two souls freed from Limbo appear to announce their liberation to the Virgin, but to no avail. Mary rejects their choral pleas (“Deh Maria, non pianger più,” another novelty in the repertory) with her dismissive reply “Ah, ch’invano consolarmi pretendete.” Returning to C/durus, the Father brings in Redeemed Humankind (consolation 4), who asks in a two-stanza aria to take over Mary’s grieving with a sudden sharpward shift, tracing a trajectory from A to B and reaching an E/durus tonality. The cutting dialogue employs sharp/flat contrasts, as Humankind tries to return to E, only to be met with Mary’s reproaches, which fall inexorably to E-flat and B-flat (example 3.3). The harsh opening of this passage juxtaposes Humankind’s E cadence with the Virgin’s C/mollis reply; and even Humanità’s effort to meet her halfway tonally in a two-stanza aria on G/mollis ends in failure, as she shifts ever more flatward in her recitative response. The move also sets the first mention of the Hypostatic Union in the entire repertory. This recitative, accompanied by viole (parts not present in the short score), leads to her memories of the Passion, and ends on a major-seventh sonority, as the E-flat tonality clashes with her vocal line cadencing on D (example 3.4a–b). The conflict is momentarily resolved by the Father’s intervention, swinging back to E/durus, but then we return to another reproach aria for the Virgin, on a ciacconalike bass and firmly in C/durus, aimed at the Redeemed Human.

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example 3.3. G. F. Sances, Sette consolationi di Maria (1670; A-Wn 16912), “Si, consolati,” f. 11.

œ Œ ‰ œ j. r Œ œ œ œ œ œ j j j r œ Vc Œ J œ œœ J J œ œ œ . œ œ œ Œ œJ J J J Huomo [in print]; Anima [in score]

Si,

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con - so - la - ti

w

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w

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mor - te
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j & b Œ b œ Œ œ b œj œr œr œj œj œ œj œ œ œ b ˙ ?b w

ah

pre - gia - ti pu - re, Huo - mo fe - li

˙

& b œj œj œj œr r œ œ œ ?

fra - gil mo - le di pol - ve

b w

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ce,

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j j j r r bœ œ œ œ œ œ œ

se per te po - ca ter - ra,

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‰ j bœ œ . œ œ œ œ œ

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un Dio ri - sol

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a.

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&

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By this point, the theology has begun to crowd out the parallels with Margherita’s state. The fifth consolation is Veronica with her Veil, the image if not the reality of Jesus. Before finally being able to kiss the simulacrum, the Virgin again complains to both Veronica and the Father of its insufficiency as a substitute for her Son. After all the gyrations, Minato provided a lyrical moment here, and Leopold himself, in line

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example 3.4a–b. G. F. Sances, Sette consolationi di Maria, “E si rende soggetto,” f. 13.

&b c

23

∑

∑

j j j r & b c œ œ œ œ n Rœ œ œ 23 Ó B. V.

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violino piccolo

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with his practice of inserting arias into others’ scores since Il Pomo d’oro, took the time to compose it. To underline the uniqueness of the relic, Minato gave a one-stanza aria to the saint as she displayed the image, which the emperor set with ritornelli for violino piccolo and a “lira cetrata,” possibly one of the first parts ever for an early viola

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example 3.4 (Continued)

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d’amore (it is notated in untransposed C3 clef), thus timbrally reinforcing the unique nature of the Veil.59 Again, an overview of the intersections among consolations, poetic lines, and pitch gives a sense of this middle section’s symmetries and juxtapositions: sette consolationi : consolations 4 and 5 Incipit

Poetic Meter

Pitch Center

Huomo: Lascia dunque il pianto BV: Omnipotente Padre . . . E si fa, con stupor . . . . . . per redirmirlo tanto ci vuole Padre Eterno: Si, che’l crear mondo BV: Hora dimmi, ch’io non pianga Sonatina [for Consolation 5] Veronica: Dolente Maria

9t-p versi sciolti versi sciolti versi sciolti versi sciolti 8p-4p 6p-t+11

E/durus E-flat C/durus E-flat/D E/durus C/durus E/durus E/durus

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As witnesses to the Last Supper, Peter and John then temporarily quiet Mary with some six minutes’ worth of recitative considering the Eucharist and its institution in quite technical terms: transubstantiation, the accidents of the two species, and the omnipresence of the sacrament even though Christ’s Body was not divided, all this constituting the sixth solace.60 While briefly recognizing the Eucharist’s benefit, the Virgin rejects its comfort in four shockingly quick lines—at best an example of brevitas to epitomize her grief—unable to overcome the memory of her crucified Son. Even the two angels who descend from a sudden cloud in the heights of the Hofburgkapelle cannot appease her with the Cross and its triumph as the ultimate consolation. There is no lyrical moment in this scene, and the seraphic messengers leads her to recall the moment of the Annunciation, noting bitterly, “For me, the celestial embassies with angelic voices begin with lilies and end in Crosses.” Without her involvement, Redeemed Humanity finally turns to the Cross in penitence with two different arias, the latter of which (sung as he beats his breast) paraphrased the Vexilla regis, a liturgical link that must have been quite evident in performance. While Mary is silent, the other six characters summarize the Atonement and her role in bearing Jesus. She then repeats the consolations as listed over the course of the piece, and admits comfort, but refuses to stop grieving; she also literally has the last word, as she responds to the others’ “Take comfort” with “I take comfort, but Christ is already dead.” At long last, the final madrigale cycles back to the D/durus of the opening, and the piece ends with the parallelism between this weak tonal return and Mary’s continuing inconsolability. Minato’s stage directions end by calling for the Father to retreat into His light, the Cross to be covered by a cloud (evidently another stage effect), the biblical mourners to leave with Mary weeping (presumably to return to Jerusalem), and the Souls to exit on one side and Redeemed Humanity on the other, leaving simply the Tomb in an empty theatrical space. To gauge the unusual nature of this libretto, a brief comparison with a later oratorio is helpful. Carlo Innocenzo Frugoni’s 1723 I Conforti della Vergine addolorata for Bologna’s confraternity of S. Maria della Morte (G. A. Perti’s score, in I-Bsp, is entitled L’Amor divino) featured three divine allegorical characters (Amore, Giustizia, and Sapienza) in dialogue with a grieving, if not completely inconsolable, Mary.61 This church often hosted a Holy Week Tomb, although apparently not that year. For all that Frugoni’s Virgin opens by recognizing the placated Father and the redemption of humanity, her first aria concentrates on her grief. The

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ensemble ending part I of Frugoni’s text addresses Mary’s internal pains and her suspicions of any possible solace, and not even part II’s vision of the souls redeemed from Limbo is enough to quiet her, just as in consolation 3 of the Viennese work. In the 1723 piece, Amore (with an extraneous aria based on an anti-Jewish interpretation of a Tenebrae Responsory) and Sapienza combine to end her mourning. Without mentioning the Resurrection, Frugoni combines a more rational piety with standard post-Arcadian poetic language in the service of consoling the Virgin. Viewed only from a Marian perspective, the theology of the 1670 libretto seems extreme. Mary’s fixation on the Dead Christ to the exclusion of all else obviously mimics Margherita’s own obsessive grief. And her self-imprisonment in the fortress of her memories prefigures the 1678 Memorie dolorose. Her second thoughts on the Annunciation flew directly in the face of early modern Mariology, starting with Francisco Suárez and continuing in the later theologian G. B. Novati, according to whom her assent to Gabriel had already contained her foreknowledge of the Passion and Crucifixion.62 Although she did not actually die on Calvary, she was considered to have suffered more than any martyr, and in that sense, even without theological basis, her refusal to admit consolation is a kind of parallel death to Christ’s, and a foretaste of the 1705 sepolcro discussed later. What Margherita might have made of all this in 1670 is not clear. She had lost not only Johannes but also in the previous five years her beloved father, her firstborn Ferdinand Wenzel, and Ana María de Toledo (probably something of an older sister). Meanwhile, the ongoing internal fights in Vienna over status showed no signs of abating. Leopold himself had been quite ill in January 1670 (hence his composition of Veronica’s aria must have happened in late winter), and she had spent most of the last weeks of pregnancy in reclusion. The new empress’s youth in Spain had evidently not included Tomb theater, although her overall enthusiasm for drama and music was evident from early childhood.63 As part of the 1659–60 Madrid wedding festivities for her half sister María Teresa, she would have seen something like midcentury Florentine-style opera with slightly old-fashioned Italian stage design. Carnival plays, loas, and comedias ran at the Madrid court at least from 1655 to the end of such stagings in 1662.64 At Corpus Christi from the mid-1650s through 1665, she would also have viewed the yearly autos sacramentales performed in Madrid. In the roughly twelve datable (plus two other possible) pieces by Calderón in this time at court, the link to the sepolcro repertory was of course that of

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the Eucharist. But the Madrid works also featured other parallels: the intersection of allegorical and human characters, the underlying generative conceit of a text, as well as the foregrounding of music at lyrical moments, evident in Calderón’s 1663 version of El divino Orfeo, in which the divine singer (=Christ) goes to the Underworld to save La Naturaleza Humana (=Euridice), and to emerge with the Cross and the Eucharist as his symbols on his watery passage of the Styx back to earth.65 Because of the allegorical visual content of their carros, these Madrid autos would also have trained her to interpret Burnacini’s stage sets. Calderón’s texts from Philip IV’s last decade include themes that appear in the Viennese repertory: the Spheres of the Four Elements (like the 1668 sepolcro characters) in the 1657 La Cura y la enfermedad; El Primero y Segundo Isac (?c. 1657) on the Abraham and Isaac story; and the 1664 La Inmunidad del Sagrado, which portrays Divine Mercy and Justice as judges over sinful humanity, like Tricarico’s 1661 work and 1668’s Il Lutto. El Árbol del mejor fruto (dating unclear) is perhaps Calderón’s piece closest to the means of sepolcri, since it proposes conceptualist enigmas, the solution to which is the wood of the Cross, even if the play is cast as a dialogue between Solomon and the queen of Sheba and thus invokes the Song of Songs and its “ascendam in palmam” (~Cross) verse. What else Margherita’s Passion devotion might have included before leaving Spain is less clear.66 Many of the Spanish devotional books now in A-Wn seem to have been acquired in 1670–75 and thus postdate her arrival, although she could have read some in the final years of her life. Still, the 1658 Año Santo: Meditaciones para todos los días by the Spanish cleric Aquiles Napolitano was in the Vienna library; it mentioned the Harrowing of Hell from the Tomb in its thoughts for Holy Saturday evening, and linked the Eucharist to the Sepulcher in its considerations for Tuesday after Easter.67 Thus Margherita might have been surprised by the entirely musical projection of the sepolcri—as indeed the operatic repertory as a whole—and by the Tomb’s centrality, but overall the allegorical method would have been familiar to her. The literally spectacular (if unsuccessful) deployment of all seven consolations in the 1670 piece simply heightens Mary’s incomparable pain, and thus her role as co-Redemptrix noted earlier. For Margherita, the piece’s (for modern sensibilities, almost masochistic) tone would have been aimed at suffering not only past but also future losses, as indeed would happen with a miscarriage in 1671 and her next delivery in February 1672 (Maria Anna Antonia).

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Minato’s innovations in 1670 are best seen in the context of his other secular texts of 1669–70, especially the role given to female protagonists. Indeed, Pirrotta noted in Minato’s last Venetian and early Viennese secular production precisely this recasting of roles, as well as the metrical versatility of the libretti. This was evident in his first text, written between his arrival in late summer 1669 and the November celebration of Eleonora’s birthday, the opera Atalanta that evidently replaced Pierelli’s version of the story. Here the title character, a clear representation of the dowager empress, has important agency in the killing of the boar that threatens Caledonia (I.13, and recognized in the homage to her from Altea and Oneo in II.1). She also turns down her suitor Meleagro twice (I.8 and II.6), before finally losing the contest of the thrown apples and thus marrying him. This complete transformation of traditional female roles continued in the next year’s operas: Le Risa di Democrato, Iphide greca, and Penelope. In the first of these, Rosinda (the sister of King Lisimaco) switches her identity with the shepherdess Olinda in order to win her lover Cosmiro, while the eponymous heroine of Iphide (based on Ovid) has been brought up as, and is publicly known as, a male prince for most of the piece. Her real gender is revealed only at the end, at which point she feigns that the intervention of the goddess Isis has made her a woman in order to gain marriage to her desired Trimegisto and to secure the succession of her father, Ligdo.68 The Homeric story of the last piece is enriched by the character of the princess Orisbe, again cross-dressed as a man (“Olmiro”) for most of the opera in order to reunite Odysseus and Penelope, and to win her own beloved Acrisio, while saving him from the fate of Penelope’s other suitors. In addition to the standard mixing of literary registers, these texts together with the sepolcri outline new trajectories of female agency inside the conventions of theatrical music. Sette consolationi was no exception, as the Sorrows and consolations pieces were meant to restabilize her, and the operas to provide positive models for women taking matters into their own hands. In terms of Margherita’s state, portraying the grieving Madonna also ran the risk of perpetuating the empress’s depression. Minato’s next libretti took up the themes more subtly: the Thursday 1671 Epitaffi di Christo begins again with a sobbing Virgin in dialogue with the burier Joseph (taking up directly from the end of the 1670 piece), before the five epitaphs for the Savior are sung by different allegorical characters. Here the first one is entrusted to “Il Dolore,” who begins in recitative: “There is no circumference, line, circle, or element, where mourning

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does not reign.” The final solace from the 1670 piece was made to work again in the Friday 1671 Trionfo della Croce, in which Mary ends by adopting the Triumph as her emblem. In 1672, Il Paradiso aperto would open with the Madonna singing a florid two-stanza aria en route to the Tomb: “O sepolto mio Tesoro, / O defonto mio Giesù, / Perche, misera, non moro, / Quand’estinto già sei Tu?//O my buried treasure, O my dead Jesus, why do I (miserable one) not die, when You have already perished?” But both the latter pieces finally provide recognition on Mary’s part of the necessity for Christ’s Passion. These three Friday sepolcri, with their large casts (plus a chorus in 1672), detailed set designs, and vertiginous tonal shifts discussed in the next chapter, mark a new kind of large-scale theatricality, scenic and musical, in the repertory. Margherita’s own death in Lent 1673 laid to rest the question of whether the works had helped her to internalize consolation.

chapter 4

Music and Its Affects

The staging and the libretti were meant for modern music. Some of their projection—the timbres of individual singers, the exact coordination of tonic shifts with scenic symbolism—is hard to retrieve. Yet it was the combination of topic with the poetic text, the effects of musical pitch and rhythm, and their place in Holy Week ritual that lent the sepolcri their unique place in cultural expression; music was more than mere delectatio. Understanding the trajectory of these factors over the course of Leopold’s reign also gives a sense of formal stasis versus change in the repertory.

the production of drama According to Müller’s travel account in 1660, some forty musicians could fit on the ground floor of the Hofburgkapelle.1 Even allowing for Burnacini’s set design to be placed in the sanctuary, the largest Friday cast of twelve singers (some coming and going) plus some eight instruments could have squeezed in. The offstage effects—for example, the voicing of Christ’s “Sitio” in the 1683 La Sete and other moments— might have been sung from behind the Tomb or the set. In Eleonora’s chapels, as noted previously, the Thursday performances seem to have been more intimate, thus emphasizing her personal relationship to the works. In cases of absence from Vienna, such as 1684 in Linz discussed presently, her services probably shared the same church with the Friday 119

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sepolcro.2 This might explain why there is no stage set for that year’s Thursday Le Lagrime più giuste, since Burnacini’s Friday construction (stairs leading to the Bronze Serpent) for Il Segno della humana salute was being erected in the court chapel of the Schloss, possibly another limited space.3 No matter how cramped the quarters, the testimony of the Roman nuncio around these performances, discussed later, makes it clear that the dowager empress insisted on a rarefied public. The issue of exactly when the text and music were written was also part of the process. The preface to the 1698 libretto of L’Esclamare, probably penned by Cupeda, noted that this piece, originally from 1689, had been repeated that year because no new work was available, given Minato’s final illness and death in midwinter. This commentary was also a kind of epitaph for the poet, noting his service and his production of dramatic texts over the years.4 His will was dated 26 February and his burial 2 March, while his last court opera, Sulpitia, had been staged on 27 November 1697. Ash Wednesday of 1698 fell on 12 February and Good Friday on 28 March, and there seems to have been no Carnival opera, perhaps due to Minato’s health. This all suggests that the librettist’s normal practice was to start working around the New Year, and composers to begin soon thereafter, and in collaboration; Draghi’s death on 16 January 1700 must have also forced the repeat of L’Ingratitudine rimproverata that year, even though Cupeda was available to provide a libretto.5 The cast lists in the manuscript scores provide a sense of singers’ vocal personalities and their value to the court as expressed by their salaries.6 They also give some sense of the labor of singing. Although there are few such examples, and all for Friday pieces early or late (1660, 1668, 1674, 1682, 1692, 1694, 1697, 1704–11), they show which singers were picked, how voice types and the entire vocal timbre of the repertory might change over time, and even how much annual salary was apportioned to the cast. For some pieces, characters seem to have been costumed; unfortunately, it is not immediately evident how this would have worked for the allegorical figures. To begin, the large cast of twelve roles of the 1660 Il Sagrifizio was taken by eleven unequally paid musicians (the castrato Domenico Sarti covering both Ubbedienza and the First Sinner), whose total yearly salaries were around 10,200 florins. Among them, the highest earners included the tenor Giovanni Paolo Bonelli (Abramo) at 1,320 florins per year, and the two sopranos Adam Franck (Isaac) and Sarti. The castrato Filippo Vismarri, like Bonelli at the beginning of his long Vien-

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nese career, made an annual wage of only 900 florins, even though, as noted, his role of Penitenza included most of the virtuoso singing in the piece’s second part. With its seven high voices and five tenor/basses, this was a balanced timbral group, with two violins, five gambas, and two cornetti muti to provide instrumental somberness. The casting of Il Lutto over fourteen years between 1668 and 1682 also shows singers’ continuity. In all three performances, three roles were sung by the same individuals: the soprano castrato Vincenzo Oliviciano, salaried from the court’s chamber accounts and not from the regular Hofkapelle budget, as the Virgin, paralleled by the alto castrato (and post-1700 chapelmaster) Antonio Pancotti (L’Aria) and Donati (bass; Pietro). In 1674 the bass G. A. Lesma took over La Terra, which, as noted, Antonio Cesti (deceased in the meantime) had premiered. This use of the composer—paid 1,400 florins per year in 1668, more than any other singer until the 1690s—underscores the importance of the role in the sepolcro, as well as its link to operatic styles. Vismarri switched from Humanità to San Giovanni in 1674, evidently as his voice ranged lower, while Bonelli sang L’Acqua.7 Later rosters can be compared with the similar lists for operas, these latter starting with the unperformed August 1690 La Chioma di Berenice, even if this decade’s repertory, sacred and secular, survives haphazardly. Thus one can begin to map singers onto the affect of a given part: for instance, the tenor Giovanni Buzzoleni, remembered by the lexicographer E. L. Gerber as “empfindsam,” did such “sensitive” sepolcri roles as the 1694 “Il Dolor del Cuore Più Addolorato di Ogni Cuore” as well as “Amor a Dio” in 1697. He must have been an important figure, as he did one of the two title characters in the 1690 Venice performance of Scarlatti’s Pirro e Demetrio. Buzzoleni was paid outside the normal chapel/HZAB accounts, as was the tenor Antonio Borosini, who took the second-order allegorical parts of “Lo Sguardo di Cristo verso Pietro” in the former year and “Il Timore della Divina Giustizia,” the character with the last aria in the 1697 sepolcro. Both these figures had independent, simultaneous careers in north Italian opera, and both came with Gonzaga connections to Mantua.8 Their absence from the midwinter court performances and their arrivals in Vienna in time for the sepolcri suggest a performance style for the hermetic pieces of the 1690s that was shared between opera and sacred music theater, as well as a renewed emphasis on lower voice types.9 This also intimates that important roles were not learned until mid-Lent.

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The other development in the last years of Leopold’s reign was the introduction of two women in 1704’s Il Mistico Giobbe, Kunegonde Sutter von Rosenfeldt as “L’Ostinazione” and Anna Maria Lisi Badia as “La Consolazione”; the former had been hired into the court ensemble in 1700 and the latter two years later. With 1705’s Le Due passioni, Badia took the first female role (Mary) sung by an actual woman; just before this, her annual salary of 1,440 florins put her at the top end of the wage scale among the singers.

the fixing of texts Some evidence for performance decisions is found in the discrepancies between libretti and scores, or between manuscript and printed texts. Partially these must represent last-minute changes based on the experience of rehearsals or from the rereading of sometimes hastily produced poetry, but they also show how important the words were, while removing the pieces further from improvisatory practice. Because of the lack of manuscript libretti in all but two cases, many differences involve printed libretto versus manuscript score, but one case of purely literary variants might shed light on now-lost music. The two versions of Federici’s 1666 Gli Affetti pietosi reveal some confusion: the piece begins with a lamenting Sun, thus suggesting Good Friday’s darkness, and this would be confirmed by the manuscript libretto (A-Wn) indicating its destination for Leopold’s chapel.10 But the print, which the librettist must have sent back to his hometown of Fano, gives a Thursday performance, and there is a slight difference in the title, as well.11 Following on the literary register of Sbarra’s 1665 texts, Federici’s piece opens indexing the highest levels of the rappresentazione tradition along with Gonzaga theater, by having its Adam paraphrase G. B. Andreini’s sacred play L’Adamo (famed for its influence on Milton’s Paradise Lost), linked to Mantua. It also cited, silently, a discourse of Emanuele di Gesù Maria from the preacher’s volume dedicated that year to Eleonora Gonzaga.12 Its use of sdruccioli for the Sun’s opening aria and a later one for Adam invokes standard operatic gestures. As a mark of its distance from biblical decorum, this piece features an attempted suicide by Giovanni, as well as numerous literary references ranging from Petrarch through Tansillo and Tasso. The text starts with scenes for one threesome of imagined characters (the Sun, Adam, and Sin), then contrasts a standard biblical trio (Mary, the Magdalen,

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and John) in a separate sequence. As the Madonna seems intent on dying, Adam, Life, and the Sun rush in to dissuade her. Vita’s long consolation of Mary is present only in the manuscript libretto, the case also for a later dialogue between Vita and Adamo. If the print reflects the final performance, then her part was trimmed, possibly because of less time on Thursday, or perhaps for issues with the singer. Still, the music likely continued the more operatic styles already suggested by the texts of 1665. Similar shortenings affect almost every character in Ferri/Draghi’s 1672 Il Limbo aperto, with several two-stanza arias reduced to one in the score and various omissions of recitative sections from libretto to musical text. Another aria stanza cut in Minato’s 1679 Il Titolo posto again suggests that length was sometimes a problem in the Thursday pieces, as both these works were for Eleonora’s chapel.13 Notably, no Friday work seems to have been trimmed. The issues are more complex for the last sepolcro that Margherita Teresa would hear. Il Paradiso aperto (1672) features a large cast of fourteen, a combination of “second-order” allegorical characters together with biblical mourners; this performance also included costumes for the singers, and thus fits into the new emphasis on spectacularity evident from 1670 onward. It stages the assumption of the Good Thief into Heaven after the Entombment (“Today you will be with Me in Paradise,” a promise of eternal life), with a large-scale middle section for the allegorical characters who interact with a choir of devils attempting to stop the Thief’s salvation. This episode includes scenic effects from the set design, and two arias by Leopold himself. Although no copy of the 1672 libretto survives, but only that of Minato’s collected texts of 1700, the score probably reflects the only performance. The music places its instrumental ritornelli differently from the print libretto. It is not clear if Minato changed the literary text later, or if staging needs led to musical repositioning. The patterns of score preservation are not entirely clear. The largest gap is that of the 1660s, with no works between 1662 and 1667 transmitted; this includes the whole output of P. A. Ziani for Eleonora’s chapel (the case also for several works by Pederzoli in the 1680s), and probably Friday pieces by Bertali or Sances. Finally, the keeping of the materials around 1700 seems to have fallen apart, with only four out of fourteen survivals from the repertory of 1690–1703, including the first contributions of M. A. Ziani; this may have had to do with sloppy custody of the scores by Draghi’s son Carlo Domenico. Not

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until 1704 does the transmission resume. Only some gaps of the 1660s are explicable, while the most traumatic year was that of Margherita Teresa’s death in early 1673, which shut down all court cultural production, including the Holy Week drama. But Eleonora Gonzaga held to the practice of having a new annual piece on Holy Thursday, no matter what. Why the genre, in its traditional form, came to an end during the unexpected transition from Joseph I to Charles VI also demands explanation. The financial and military issues around the unexpected 1711–13 succession resulted in a cutback of all theatrical efforts, and the scholarly justification for this hiatus has been the partial reorganization of court life. The two creators of the 1711 work, Stampiglia and Ziani, remained active for court opera but did no more pieces for Holy Week. The next piece recorded as performed at the Tomb was the oratorio, with a common two-part structure, by Pietro Pariati and J. J. Fux, Il Fonte della salute (1716), which takes up the dialectic of Blood and water from Christ’s Side, with its three allegorical and three generic characters.14 But the departures from generic norms (e.g., the onstage presence of Christ in the 1708 and 1709 works) during Joseph’s reign had already displayed a crisis, presaged even earlier by the heuristic explanations that Minato had had to add to his texts in the 1690s. In addition, Charles VI’s early reign featured not only reorganization but also a shift toward a more rational piety, one associated with what would later be called the “regulated devotion” of the imperial ally and scholar Ludovico Muratori. This moment also seems to mark the end of new Tomb construction in the court chapels. A generation later, Francesco Fozio and Antonio Caldara’s 1724 oratorio Morte e sepoltura di Christo restricted itself to biblical figures on Calvary: a female pairing of the Magdalen with Mary the mother of James; the male duo Giuseppe and Nicodemo; and the Centurion. The first part of this piece is post-Deposition, and the characters address only the dead Christ, not each other, while its second half begins with the Entombment, reversing the character pair order, and its last four arias are directed to the Sepulcher, again without any character interaction. By this point, Tomb devotion showed the influence of Muratori’s regulated and individualized piety. In this framework, the allegorical and conceptualist textual strategies—not to mention the flexible musical projection—of the seventeenth-century genre were fated to fade. The last important Tomb piece of any kind was Ferdinando Paër’s Il Santo

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Sepolcro (Vienna, privately on Good Friday 1802, later repeated in Habsburg-influenced Dresden).

the condition of authors The librettists’ personae stood at some remove from the texts. Pierelli’s literary production—operas and sepolcri along with lyric verse—for Vienna was gathered by genre in his La Sampogna, but his only later work, after he returned to Italy at some point after 1670, was an epic poem on the 1683 siege, Vienna diffesa ([sic]; Modena, 1690). The entire “Il sepolcro” section of La Sampogna is prefaced by a verse from a neo-Latin poem by the sixteenth-century Protestant Georg Fabricius: “E[x] nostris aliquid spiret vitale sepulchris” (May something living breathe from our tombs). This hermetic motto was also found in a Catholic missal of the late sixteenth century, illuminated by Joris Hoefnagel for the Tyrolean court and available in the Vienna library, at least after 1665, so that Pierelli could have seen it.15 In the liturgical book, it was affixed to the Requiem Mass, but its application to these rappresentazioni is more puzzling, unless the author meant “sepulchris” in the literary sense of his sepolcro texts. Besides his secular libretti that he claimed were staged in Vienna, the “Scherzi” section of La Sampogna includes a poem addressed to a catamite and another to an adulterer, hardly the kinds of verse to be expected from a court literary figure.16 Ultimately, Pierelli’s choice of a general title attempted to rival Marino’s famed eponymous collection, but its contents must have already been discredited when he stopped producing libretti. There are no other known dramatic texts—or even other literary works—by Caldana or Scarano. Federici was certainly an intellectual but seems to have largely given up writing when made the imperial ambassador to Venice—a position from which he could have recruited Minato for service at court—in 1667.17 Perhaps the most inglorious end was that of Ferri, the Italian-language secretary of the powerful general Count Wenzel von Lobkowicz; after having written three sepolcri for Eleonora between 1670 and 1674, he was directly implicated in the treason charges brought by the Council of State against his employer in the autumn of the latter year.18 According to the deliberation records, he had already had a bad past in his native Ferrara and in Rome (an “illreputed” man), and upon deposition, his lover and accomplice “Serafina” immediately accused him of passing secret papers to the French as

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part of Lobkowicz’s plan—real or imagined—to sabotage imperial war efforts in the Rhineland. After torture, Ferri was thrown in jail, probably until his employer’s death in 1678, and then quietly allowed to return to Ferrara, whereupon he wrote another oratorio libretto, perhaps as a sign of penance.19 Finally, Cupeda was yet another general’s Italian secretary, this time to the powerful, cruel, and uncultured Antonio Carafa (1642–93). The poet had had a minor literary career in Bologna; after 1693, he took over smaller works at court and then the sepolcri, plus some operas, from 1699 to 1704. He evidently wrote the prefaces to his own libretti and, as noted, probably edited the 1700 complete edition of Minato’s oratorio and sepolcro texts. This volume, however, survives in only two copies: one in the imperial collections (now A-Wn) and one in Venice (I-Vnm), the latter bearing the ex libris of the Italian court librettist Rocco Maria Rossi (and listed by the library as then having belonged to Apostolo Zeno, who must have brought it to Italy). For all that Cupeda was a member of the Accademia dell’Arcadia, his production after 1700 looks back strongly to the “antiquated” style of Minato’s works of the 1690s: four pieces with only allegorical characters, and all based on Old Testament verses cited directly in the poetry. Including Sbarra and Minato, none of these authors seem ever to have written a single sacred literary text before embarking upon sepolcri.20 In the early years, this might have been due to the vagueness of the instructions (perhaps the librettists were told to produce “a sacra rappresentazione for music to be played at the Tomb”), but as a generic tradition was formed, the discrepancy still stood. For all the semiprivate nature of the performances, there was one far-flung appropriation. The curate of Palmanuova Cathedral in Friuli, one Giovanni Antonio Lombardini, must have gotten a copy of the printed libretto for the 1671 Il Trionfo della Croce (Minato/ Sances) and evidently set the text to music all over again, publishing the libretto with no mention of the original context (or authorship). The performance in Holy Week 1676 at the Tomb in Palmanuova was evidently seen by the local nobility as well as the Venetian governor of the small fortress-town, to whose wife the libretto was dedicated. Although the original libretto’s set indication was included (“si vede l’Apparenza del Calvario”), there is no evidence for a constructed Sepulcher in this reworking of the piece; still, this performance fits into a wider tradition of setting up Tombs in the region.21 Eleonora seems to have ignored politely any efforts from noncourt outsiders to

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furnish her texts, but this makes it clear that Viennese practice was known in Italy.22

the meters of mourning As noted previously, the condition of music in the repertory is both central and, to modern ears at least, difficult to differentiate. After the initial works of 1660–61, the pieces from 1668 to 1697—essentially works by Sances, Schmelzer, Draghi, and Pederzoli, largely on Minato’s texts— come off as remarkably similar, at least at first hearing from the page.23 Still, the importance of the music, even above the complexity of the texts, can be seen in such details as the salary differential between Minato and Draghi, the former far better known in Europe both then and now, but paid about half the composer’s wages. Although a few libretti circulated independently, at court it was precisely the sonic components of performances that conveyed meaning. Clearly, the scores—which did not circulate outside Leopold’s Schlafkammerbibliothek—had a special role in getting the texts’ messages across. Understanding their poetic and pitch structures takes on special import. From Sbarra to Stampiglia, the librettists used meter to signal discursive shifts, delineate characters, and deploy dramatic tension. Augmented by the phonetic content of passages, these choices conditioned composers’ musical gestures. Looking at some of the striking metric moments mentioned in the preceding chapters underscores the complex relation among these rhythmic projections. One of the most straightforward examples comes from a surprisingly late work by Minato/Draghi: the 1692 Il Sacrifizio non impedito. The opening duet (structurally like that of 1697’s La Virtù) for Il Rito della Chiesa and La Commemorazione della Passione clearly explains Burnacini’s apparato for the piece as portraying the Sacrifice of Isaac (figure 9). This obvious stage ekphrasis suggests that the work was partially crafted for the seven royal children present, who would have been particularly attentive to (and perhaps upset by) the set of child sacrifice. Musically, it begins (and ends) on F with two flats, an unusual tonal choice, and evidently a downward transposition of tuono 8 (originally on G/durus).24 The opening refrain (“Della morte di Giesù”) of these two allegorical figures is in ottenari tronchi, and their explanation starts in versi sciolti and ends in hendecasyllables. Then, in a casting move reminiscent of pieces a generation earlier, two anonymous sinners appear to weep, singing a symmetrical section entirely in settenari: Refrain a-Solo 1-Refrain

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figure 9. L. O. Burnacini, The Sacrifice of Isaac. (Permission by KHM-Museumsverband.)

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a-Refrain b-Solo 2-Refrain b. Of this, the refrain is set musically in triple time and the solos as declamatory common-time recitative, using two different modules for the same poetic meter. The sinners end on C, and the pitch center then shifts to G/mollis for Commemorazione’s response, followed by her listing of the contradictions of the Passion, again largely in settenari with closing endecasillabi. Il Rito introduces a numerical analogy (the Trinity as comparable to the single Cross and the three Nails), and Commemorazione’s two-stanza aria, “L’ineffabile clemenza,” moves both to poetic ottenari and to the new pitch center of B-flat, as it reiterates the Trinitarian concept of “one essence in three.” Its instrumental ritornello both divides the stanzas and sets up a dialogue of recognition, in versi sciolti, now pitched around D, between these four singers and La Fede, who arrives escorted by L’Interpretazione della Sacra Scrittura (“The Interpretation of Holy Scripture”). This marked turn away from flat tonalities shapes the piece’s middle section on sharp regions, ranging from A, E, and even to B-natural. It features more sinners’ arias, variously treating the immensity of Christ’s Sacrifice, paraphrasing the Miserere, and explaining the real motivation for penance, namely, the offense of God. This reason surpasses the desire for eternal life and the fear of Hell, both of which concepts are other allegorical characters in this piece. It is only with Commemorazione’s long aria on weeping, “Meste pupille,” set by the emperor himself, that the mollis system returns. Here also, Minato’s mixture of meter (4/6t/4/4/4/5t) underscored the affective change. This combination of pitch and poetic line opens the door for the two sinners’ selfrecommendation, encouraged by Commemorazione and Il Rito, to the Crucified Christ. Thus this piece traces not generic penance but the stages of a deeply Christological and Passion-centered remorse, using various citations, poetic meters, and tonal designs. Overall, changes in line length do not necessarily generate shifts in musical meters, and neither do they govern the motion of temporary pitch centers. Rather, all three of these parameters work in ongoing ways to set off affect and characterization. If the meters in the Sacrifice piece contrasted pairs of characters, a moment in the 1678 Memorie dolorose metrically differentiates among the Three Marys (the Magdalen, Cleofe, and Salome) at the Tomb and their recollections. This piece goes through the Madonna’s paired happy/sad memories with a series of changing vocal ensembles: Mary and two angels (whom she initially does not hear); then the Virgin in

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example 4.1. J. H. Schmelzer, Le Memorie dolorose (1678; A-Wn 16915), recitative by Leopold I, “O quali mi destate, memorie dolorose,” f.10v. B. V.

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dialogue with the three Apostles of Gethsemane; and her colloquy with the three women. The Apostles’ moment recounts the first two painful memories, while the next four remembrances are detailed in the following exchange. In this trajectory, Leopold himself set a long recitative in which Mary explicitly introduces the theme of the memorie dolorose via a preliminary paradox of the apostles being picked from work on the sea versus Christ’s death in a sea of pain (example 4.1). The apostles’ following praise of the Cross is in versi sciolti, and Peter’s first penance aria, “Miei lumi / dolenti,” again composed by Leopold, is cast in the unusual trisillabi/senari combination, which serves to set off both its affect and the imperial musical contribution, anticipating the shifts in poetic meter of Commemorazione’s aria in 1692. With an aria cast in settenari, James comments on the first memory of the coin in the fish from Matthew, and Mary narrates her second recollection in versi sciolti, that of the angel of the Annunciation versus

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the one of Gethsemane, as she switches abruptly into D/durus regions. John’s reaction to this finishes in an unusual chiastic (abcdba) twostanza aria, set on A/durus in settinari tronchi, thus providing metric contrast just before the entrance of the Three Marys. The women’s dialogue with the Madonna, before the next memory is retold, consists of their refrain and one stanza for each character, interspersed with the Virgin’s grief, and all in different forms of quinari: piani and tronchi. Here and elsewhere, Schmelzer’s vocal trio writing comes off as particularly effective. The Virgin then recounts her next four memories in versi sciolti, with interspersed commentary arias, one for each Mary plus the Madonna herself, turning the tonal cast to flat areas (D/mollis for Christ’s childhood speaking in the Temple dispute, as compared to His silence before Pilate [Matt 2:12ff. vs. 27:12–14]). These arias are subtly differentiated by meter, but not as strongly as Peter’s in the previous section. Here Maria Cleofe’s is in ottenari/quarterni; the Magdalen’s in ottenari piani and tronchi, and Maria Salome’s in settenari/quinari, with the Virgin’s closing lament in straight quarternari, this one again set by Leopold. Unusually, the emperor employed the traditional operatic markers of grief for this moment, starting with a descending tetrachord. The motion toward mollis regions here arrives at G, while the acceleration in the arias’ poetic macrorhythms (ottenari through settenari, then ending with quarternari) underscores the intensity of the Madonna’s final aria in this section. A new passage begins as the two “nobili pii” Gioseffo d’Arimatea and Nicodemo (as Savini would later explain in 1689), who have just entombed Christ, arrive to sing a two-voice aria in ottenari piani and tronchi on His predestined death, reversing the metric accelerando, and turning from exclusively flat regions to sharp inflections, all around D. Evidently Minato allotted this rather abstract concept to the two buriers (“He Who was born but not created, always existed and can never end, made into a mortal, came into the world only so as to die,” a further subtle hint at the Womb/Tomb pairing) so as to contrast the musical moment of intense grief with which Mary’s aria had ended. As she asks them about their removal of His Body during the Deposition, the thought of the Wounds moves her to a seventh memory, that of the three Magi versus the three Nails; this is also a subtle citation to the Kings’ presence in the 1675 Corona di spine. Indeed, the libretti sometimes contain insider references to previous stage repertory (not just sepolcri) performed at court.25 The interaction of poetic and musical structures with character and affect, then, works in this piece not only to differentiate a

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potentially long succession of devotional moments and ideas but also to build trajectories of speed/relaxation in and across scenes. Again, taking arias and longer recitative sections together reveals internal patterns of symmetry not immediately evident from a first hearing.

the deployment of pitch The pitch shifts in Le Memorie dolorose underscore how important tonal structures could be for devotional and dramatic moves inside any given sepolcro. Since three generations of composers set the libretti—the oldest, Sances, was born around 1600 and the youngest, M. A. Ziani, in 1653— clearly there are subtle differences in the overall approaches across the repertory. Still, the various seventeenth-century systems of tuoni and their transpositions—if one will, “church-keys,” or combinations of pitches with octave species—were fundamental for all these musicians, and indeed the structural pitch centers of any given sepolcro can be understood in such terms. Perhaps the most flexible church-key arrangement, insofar as it admits of multiple transpositions, is that of Angelo Berardi (1689 and 1693), and appendix 2 applies it to the thirty-six surviving scores in the repertory up to 1705; given the north Italian provenance of many court composers (Bertali, Draghi), it is helpful to use also the tuono list (1687) of the Bolognese organist G. B. degli Antonii.26 Because of the relationship between Kircher and the Viennese court, the cantus mollis/ durus construct of “system,” explained in the polymath’s Musurgia universalis, also seems applicable for more localized passages, and the discussion of pitch centers here employs all these constructs; tuoni on the scale of pieces as a whole, and sharp/natural/flat motion in internal sections. Looking at the overall range of organization, the prevalence of flat tonalities in the corpus—especially C/2 flats and G/1 flat—is no surprise. Still, these two represent different downward transpositions of the same tuono primo. The thirteen sepolcri in sharp tonalities begin in 1670 (in both works; another sign of the novelty of that year’s pieces) and include the Nails and Thorns texts from that decade, as well as the Friday 1678 work on memory. The possible links between the pitching of these latter works and their thematics have been explored earlier. The other pieces centered on extremely sharp regions include the 1694 Apocalyptic Libro con sette sigilli and Ziani’s 1704 Il Mistico Giobbe. In descending order of sharpness, the other works in durus tonalities are Il Sole ecclissato, Le Memorie dolorose, Il Trionfo della Croce, Il Paradiso aperto, and Il Segno della humana salute.

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What happens on local levels, though, is often not as clear. One indicator is a pitch center for a given aria that lies at the furthest remove (sharp or flat) from the tonal construct of a whole piece (e.g., an internal aria cadencing on B-natural, with its many necessary sharps, in a work based on F/2 flats). The dramatic and devotional moment in the libretti at which these tonally distant sections are placed is often essential to understanding the sepolcro’s entire trajectory. In many cases, especially in dialogue recitative, one can only trace cantus mollis or durus shifts around given local pitch centers. In Sances’s Sette consolationi, the local switches noted earlier do not coincide with the trajectory of any given Consolation, as they tend to happen inside a given scene (consolation) and not between them. Mary’s disjuncture of E-flat against D cited previously (see example 3.4) is emblematic for the piece, as it represents the superimposition of the flattest pitch area in the work on top of its home tonality. The piece also exoticizes its E-flat sonorities because of the necessary mean-tone tuning discrepancy with the D-sharps necessary to cadences elsewhere on E. Sances used this same home tuono of D/durus for the two pieces that he composed for Friday 1671–72; along with their spectacle-like nature, this is another unifying factor for his sepolcri. As the poetic conceits and combination of meters provided semi–stock choices for the librettists, the pitch motion sometimes seems to function analogously. Il Trionfo also shows the overall tonal lability evident in the 1670 work. The four prophets’ recitative, after they emerge from Limbo, is largely in sharp or neutral areas, like the angels’ discussion of crucified martyrs (including Wilgefortis). Lucifer appears first around G/mollis, but his aria in ottenari, “O miei scorni troppo amari”—accompanied by the somber cornetti muti—moves quickly to the distant E/durus. Such tonal tensions continue into the final scene, as the Eternal Father appears from above, and only with the Centurion’s last weeping aria in quinari, “Stillate, stillate, / mie ciglie dolente”—at the same juncture at which the biblical citations cease and give way to the language of pure emotion—is there a final return to the home tonality. In that sense, the pitch manipulations work like the deployment of scriptural loci in the production of affect. Sances’s approach to the 1672 text also offers parallels in pitch structure, notably in its first allegorical interlude for Il Merito di Christo and L’Humiltà di Maria. Again, the opening lyrical moment for the Virgin, invoking the Tomb (“O sepolto mio Tesoro”), and her dialogue of recognition with the Penitent remain in the opening sharp areas. The

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enactment of “paradise opened” sung by Divine Mercy and the Soul of the Good Thief continues this pitch spectrum, and only the irruption of a devils’ troupe into the scene derails matters into flat sonorities. Sances waited until the last aria, L’Huomo Penitente’s plea for protection from the demons to the Immacolata (“Intatta Maria, proteggimi tu”), to restore the original tonality. In all three pieces of 1670–72, the widest internal tonal range is between those sections on E/durus and the ones on E-flat, and such is the case no matter who (Sances or Leopold) composed the arias. This suggests that the flat/sharp dichotomies go beyond the agency or decisions of any one individual; that is, they were an understood and audible cultural construct. Schmelzer’s 1678 piece on memory shows its subtle but real differences from older procedures; even in the central sections, there is some presence of the home tonality A/durus (e.g., the lament of the Three Marys about two-thirds through), and many of the final memories are set to music on the sharp side of the pitch spectrum. One clear turn to flat sonorities occurs early in the piece, as the apostles bring their recollections, and Peter his tears, to the Tomb, moving to C and then G, both in mollis. Schmelzer avoided the immediate half-step juxtapositions of the 1670–72 works; he also cast larger subsections in more closely related tonalities than did Sances, without the semitonal dichotomies of the earlier pieces. And there is no clear pitch-center connection among the ten memories that the piece adumbrates. Draghi’s early procedures also differ in some regards from those of his elders. One immediate contrast is found in his 1670 Sette Dolori, pitched in highly sharp realms (E/durus). That the manuscript libretto gives scene divisions also helps clarify Draghi’s approach. Instead of Sances’s quick shifts among different kinds of tonal centers, Draghi’s music is cast in large chunks on one side or the other of the divide. After exploring B and F-sharp in scene 2 (for the Magdalen and Marta), Lazaro’s long aria of lament in the following scene is based on D/durus. It is only the onstage eruption of Pietro’s despair (“scena quinta” in the libretto, but actually scene 4) that employs the “Neapolitan” relationship of F/1fl to the home tonality, without superimposition of the two pitch centers as Sances would do in the next day’s piece. This first introduction of flat areas governs pitch relations up to the middle of scene 6, including Longino and Peter’s contest of guilt in scene 4, the former’s takeover of scene 5 (another gesture to Gonzaga devotion to Longinus) in self-abasement, and even the Magdalen’s opening of scene 6. Still, Lazaro’s memory of the Incarnation in the middle of this scene returns

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to G/durus, and his call on humanity to weep (“E non piangi, humanità / per amore?”) is set, for the first time since scene 1, back on E. Draghi then cast Mary’s reentrance, followed by her lament and that of the other mourners, with tonalities less (C/durus) and more (B/durus) sharp than the home pitch construct on E. Two works by Draghi from the 1690s show the range of his sepolcri employing unusual pitch centers. Il Sacrifizio non impedito’s placement on F/2 flats stands at the furthest tonal remove from Il Libro con sette sigilli’s setting on B/durus. The former piece begins and remains in flat regions through a dialogue of recognition between La Fede and L’Interpretazione della Sacra Scrittura, cast in D/mollis. Then an aria on weeping for the latter character, set by the emperor (“Piangete, piangete gli strazi”), moves suddenly to sharp areas, again involving a semitone contrast against the home tonality (here E/durus versus the “tonic” F; in the earlier repertory, this had been found in Sances’s, but not Schmelzer’s, pieces). After a flattonality aria for the Second Sinner, L’Interpretazione repeats the switch to durus territory, now to even sharper regions (B/2 flats notated), for an aria with strings on the Hypostatic Union (“Che fù Christo e huomo e Dio è infallibil verità//That Christ was man and God is infallible truth”). A synoptic look suggests that Minato, Draghi, and Leopold might have collaborated in their metric and tonal decisions in order to combine poetic regularity with pitch-center changes: il sacrifizio : tonal shifts around leopold’s aria Incipit

Poetic Meter

Pitch Center

Interpretazione/Fede: Piangete, Peccatore 2: Per me peccatore Interpretazione: Che fu Christo (Leopold) Commemorazione: Ne mi uccide

6p-t 6p-t 8p-t 8p

E/durus D/mollis B/2 sharps G/mollis

This use of E and B recurs later in another dialogue, this time with a clearer cause. For the entrance of the allegorical characters Il Desiderio della Vita Eterna, Il Timor dell’Inferno, and La Verità Evangelica—the three starting to sing offstage before being seen—Draghi returned to sharp regions, a move whose textual motivation becomes clear when Gospel Truth explains that penance is possible, since Christ has opened the path to Heaven with the three Nails. In a way that recalled the overall “sharpness” of the 1678 Tre chiodi, here too the Nails generated pitch choice on a local level.

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example 4.2a–b. A. Draghi, Il Libro con sette sigilli (1694; A-Wn 18943), “Divino libro (è ver) . . . Dato in luce a mezza notte,” f. 48v.

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The Apocalyptic piece of 1694 might have had its unusual tonality justified by its subject matter, lending it a novel sheen. In contrast to the opening pitch stability of the 1692 sepolcro, in Il Libro con sette sigilli Heart’s Pain and Christ’s Love move to flat regions already by the end of their opening duet scene; after an opening two-stanza aria split between them, they call on humanity to weep with a quick turn to D/mollis. This sets up a long internal section in these pitch areas, with the greatest distance from the original tonality found in Heart’s Pain’s aria concerning weeping, set on E-flat/2 flats, “Non farete questo core / dalle lagrime astenere//Do not make this heart abstain from tears.”27 Matters return to sharp sonorities only with the Cyrenian’s aria, “O spettacolo fiero, ed atroce” (with Dantean echoes) in 6/8, employing the unusual novenario lines, perhaps justifying the rare musical meter. Still, the entrance of what might be considered the title character for this sepolcro, the allegorical Vision of John on Patmos, swings back

-

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example 4.2b. (Continued)

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again to D/mollis, followed by Pietà’s unveiling of the central enigma/ emblem, “Quel libro divino / sei tu, / mio Giesù//You, my Jesus, are that divine book.” Much of the rest of the piece is set, contrary to Draghi’s earlier practice, around immediate sharp/flat swings, as the discourse around the mystical meanings of the Book continues.

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The first of these tonal contrasts is a section on A/durus, starting with Visione su Patmo’s mention of the Apocalypse as an actual book, “Da quell’apocalittico volume,” and her aria “Divin libro (è ver) fù Christo; / scienza eterna in sè coprì//Truly, Christ was the divine book, containing eternal knowledge in itself.” This is followed by Pietà and Aiuto’s duet, which compares Christ’s life to the commercial publication— printing and displaying for sale—of a volume: “Dato in luce a mezza notte / ed esposto al nostro acquisto, / su’l Calvario, a mezzo dì//He was brought into the light [with a pun: “published”] at midnight [i.e., on Christmas], and put out for sale to us on Calvary at noon”; example 4.2a–b). For all the audacity of the metaphor, Minato would have known the frantic Venetian book trade well from his earlier days. Pietà’s following recitative treating the Book/Christ’s writing on the inside and out, the cover and contents, also stays in sharp regions until her aria “Divin libro! non ha parte / che di doglie resti vuota//This divine book has no section empty of pain” on Christ’s sufferings that fill the entire Book, which closes this section with a return to D/mollis. The symmetry of this section of the sepolcro is evident from a view of poetic meters and tonalities: il libro : tonal spaces around d Incipit

Poetic Meter

Pitch Center

Pieta: Quel libro divino / sei tu L’Aiuto: Infelice chi peccò Visione: Divin libro . . . fu Christo Pieta: Divin libro! non ha parte

6p-t 8t-4p 8p-t 8p

F/durus D/mollis A/durus D/mollis

Il Dolore then quotes Bernard of Clairvaux on the seven mysteries of Christ’s life, ending with His burial, and reinvokes the idea of pain, leading to a two-stanza aria set by the emperor, “Vuol patire, vuol morire /. . . L’increato è humanato//He wants to suffer and die. . . . The noncreated has been made human,” with the strophes separated by Amor and Dolore’s interjection. This important introduction of the “humanato” topos moves further flatward to C/mollis, at another distant semitonal remove from the B/durus tonality of the piece. Only La Visione’s recitative explication of seven arcane contradictions in Christ’s life sets up another tonal switch. Here, in the middle of a phrase in the list (the fourth being “absolute poverty in Him Who is Lord of all”), Draghi suddenly deviated from the flat sonorities in effect since “Divin

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example 4.3. A. Draghi, Il Libro con sette sigilli, accompanied recitative “Si spezza’l suolo,” f. 69v.

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libro,” using durus cadences on A and E, and this prepares the entrance of the second-order allegorical figure of Malchus’s Ungrateful Hatred. This new personage, for whose nature Minato’s possible sources are unclear, moves so far sharpward as even to touch the home tonality of the piece on B, continuing with his aria voicing the usual Roman/Jewish sentiment of “Why did His Father not save Him on the Cross?” in ottenari and on E/durus.28 The following accompanied recitative, with trombones and dulcians depicting the earth’s swallowing him up (complete with stage directions), is quite long and perhaps predictably in sharp regions (example 4.3). But just when matters seem fixed tonally, the moral drawn by the remaining characters—namely, that those who do not understand the Book/Christ should expect the same fate as L’Odio’s—returns unexpectedly to flat sonorities (L’Aiuto’s “Quel volume divin / chi non intende”), again in a semitonal relationship to the home tonality of B (here a use of B-flat/mollis). This continues through further descriptions of Christ’s sufferings, and the adoration of the Book by the other remaining characters (Dolore, Visione, Pietà, and Sguardo). What is missing, of course, is personal penance, and only with Amor di Christo’s sudden discovery of the allegorical equivalence between the Seven Seals and the Seven Deadly Sins do we return to sharp areas. L’Aiuto, here standing in for the normal sinner, pleads with the Book/ Christ for forgiveness (“Deh, se scritte di fuori hai le mie colpe, / scritta da dentro sia la mia salute”; i.e., Christ’s wounds show the outward effects of sin, but His bodily fluids bring redemption) around E, and the

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return to the closing sonorities on B natural thus comes from less sharp pitch areas. Not for nothing, after all this tonal instability, did Draghi set the final madrigale of this long and complex piece, “Libro che, senza menda, emendi il mondo//O book, you without blemish correct the world,” with the reinforcing weight of a fuga a due soggetti for the two verbal phrases in the home tonality.

the anatomy of lament In a certain sense, all the texts are about mourning. Generally, the female biblical characters tend to bewail Christ, but some male figures (John and the Centurion) do so also; others (Peter and Longinus) often rue their sins. The allegorical personages, especially second-order ones, employ lyrical topics based on their nature, not on their nominal gender. Many of the markers of Venetian operatic laments—descending tetrachords, epic interruptions—are often not present in the sepolcri. Why this was the case might be related to issues of literary register and thematics. Clearly grief for Christ surpassed all other kinds of grief, and so the repertory’s laments had to distinguish themselves by other means. Mary’s initial plaint in Sances’s 1670 Sette consolationi is the first opening lament with surviving music, and it found a parallel more than a decade later at the start of Draghi’s 1682 Il Terremoto. The 1670 scene begins with the Virgin’s address to the Tomb, in versi sciolti, without striking dissonances, and built over a simple scalar (D-G) return in the bass. Her entire scuffle with the guards takes place on G, and it is only the turn to C/mollis that highlights her first complaint: the paradox emblem aria in two short stanzas, “Maria vive, e morto è Christo//Mary lives, and Christ is dead” (example 4.4). This is set in ottenari and introduced by a chromatic bass transition, but the brevity of the dramatic moment also reflects the dramatic need to start the unfolding series of consolations that is the piece’s real subject. The 1682 Terremoto (preserved only in short score) opens as Christ is dying on the Cross, with a brief Marian outcry in ottenari, again expressing her regrets for bearing the Savior only to watch Him die. Passer’s description of Eleonora’s Tomb decoration that year in her own chapel noted that the simple set design given by Minato’s libretto (Calvary with the Crucifixion) was flanked and outshone by a spectacular Sepulcher with an angel bearing the Host, jewels, an inscription (“Exsurget Deus et dissipabit inimicos suos,” probably a reference to the Ottomans), an ornamented statue of David on his throne with the Habsburg

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example 4.4. G. F. Sances, Sette consolationi di Maria “Maria vive, e morto è Christo,” f. 4v. B. V. con viole [missing]

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eagle, and a golden Cross.29 This also suggests that some of Burnacini’s Eucharistic designs, as conveyed by his other drawings, could have accompanied sepolcri stage sets, and that the sketches sometimes give only part of the actual decoration. In this piece on F/2fl, Draghi repeated the last line of the opening double quatrain’s (“la tua gratia m’è un martir . . . ed io vivo ed Egli muor//Your grace is my martyrdom . . . I live and He is dying”), first on E-flat with minor thirds, then swinging back to F, tracing the extremes of flat sonorities. This is interrupted by the trio of other grievers, listing Christ’s Wounds and reproaching the Jews, in settenari and with a series

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of musical cadenze in mi (“half cadences”). Again, Mary does not listen to them, repeating her last distich, only to be interrupted by the mocking Scribe and Pharisee, who report Christ’s thirst (although, unlike the piece of the following year, His cry is not actually sung here). They hold to the settenari but move the pitch center to C. The Virgin recounts the details of the Passion in straight senari, and only then, some ten minutes after the piece’s opening, returns to her first quatrain of regret and to F, thus tonally rounding off the whole beginning. As the piece goes on, the other mourners express their grief in quinari, interrupted by the Virgin’s hearing of Christ’s last cry and His passing; the overall shortening of the lines (eight to five syllables) contributes to the tension. At Maria Cleofe’s plea, set on a high and unexpected e’’-natural, to the darkness to hide Christ’s Body and her own sorrow (“O [tenebre] pietose al mio duolo”), the system switches to durus, and a long double descent from F to E in the continuo line wrenches the whole pitch spectrum into E/durus, even as the quinari continue. There is a sad sinfonia, a moment of silence as all weep, and then follows Mary’s lament for Christ’s accomplished death, also in quinari, “Viscere mie, / caro Giesù,” interrupted yet again by the mockery of the Scribe and Pharisee. For dramatic effect, Minato and Draghi used a two-part instrumental sinfonia at this moment, on the B/durus, to represent Good Friday’s earthquake and to bring all characters to a halt. The Centurion enters shaking, with the recognition of “Truly this was the Son of God,” and even the mockers are led quickly to belief. With the dramatic action over, much of the rest of the piece is an epistemological reflection, as the Lights of Knowledge and Faith illuminate the literal and cognitive darkness over the mourners. A different kind of lament tableau is found in the opening of the 1689 L’Esclamare a gran voce. The standard figures—Mary, the Magdalen and John plus Veronica (for her relationship to the Veil)—are set out as a double duet (Mary/John; Magdalen/Veronica), in the C/2 flat tonality. As noted earlier, Burnacini’s (evidently lost) set design placed this piece in the Cenacle, with Mary and the others, and the text underscores its temporal placement on the night of Holy Saturday. In addition, the citation of (pseudo-) Gregory of Nazianzus’s Christus patiens as an authority for the set adds the weight of unspoken Euripidean verse to viewers’ expectations. Although Robert Bellarmine and other Catholic scholars had challenged this ascription, Leopold’s librarian Peter Lambeck had recently reaffirmed Gregory’s (probably spurious) authorship.30 Whoever wrote it, this poem/play includes some three laments

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for Mary: at the Deposition, at the Entombment, and in the Cenacle on Saturday night. It is this last plaint that frames Minato’s opening in media res, as the Virgin begs to be allowed to weep. For all that her opening “Lasciatemi piangere,” cast in senari with changing line endings and set in 3/2 time, might recall Ottavio Rinuccini’s Arianna in its vocabulary, it also picks up on a passage from Paciuchelli’s Lezioni morali sopra Giona that discussed the therapeutic value (and even voluptas, with a nod to Ovid’s Tristia) of tears.31 Indeed, although the royals would never have admitted it, the entire phenomenon of sepolcri was a kind of pleasure in penance, also part of the dynasty’s post-1660 reshaping of piety. Even if it was formally a two-stanza form, Minato and Draghi treated “Lasciatemi piangere” as one of the first da capo arias to be heard in the entire repertory, although only the second stanza (here a musical B section) indexes lament by its unusual use of a descending tetrachord opening. In another gesture of poetic flexibility, Minato separated and interrupted the sections by Giovanni’s narration in versi sciolti, which places the dramatic moment on Holy Saturday’s night. This is a parallel to Christus patiens, in which Mary’s final lament is interrupted by the news, brought to the mourners in the Cenacle, of the posting of the guards at the Tomb; thus, for the sepolcro’s audience, the Sepulcher was indexed indirectly. Remarkably, in the 1689 work Minato used the lexical field of Draghi’s 1669 L’Humanità redenta for his own continuation in quinari, as the earlier “È morto il mio Dio, / estinto è il mio nume//My God is dead, my deity perished,” sung by Giuseppe and Nicodemo, was here transformed into “È morto il mio Dio, / estinto è Giesù//My God is dead, Jesus perished,” shared by the Magdalen and Veronica, another testimony, like that of the 1666 Gli affetti pietosi, to gender flexibility in lament. In the middle of all the characters’ grief, Giovanni pauses for an explanation of the institution of the Eucharist (the set, after all, was that of the Last Supper’s locale), moving to D/mollis, which is echoed tonally but not thematically by the Virgin’s long recitative with another formal gesture shared with opera: the short aria-like distich mentioned earlier (“Non vi par, ch’io faccia poco / solo a piangere, e sospirar?//Do you not think that I do little by only weeping and sighing?”) in settenari. This functions as a refrain to the recitatives but also limns Mary’s inability to do anything but weep, and her theatrical difficulties in achieving a full-fledged lament, even though Savini’s sermon earlier that Good Friday 1689 had pointed to how she had closed the tragedy.

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Minato continued his metric experiments with two two-stanza arias, one for the Magdalen (“Sì, sì fugga dal nostro seno/il sereno; 8/4/9t/9t) and one for Giovanni (“Havrebbe il mio duolo”; 7/7/7/5/6), moving slightly flat (G/mollis with strong inflections of E-flat). Although the Beloved Disciple makes a unique reference to the upcoming Resurrection (“Ma in questo mi console / che’l terzo dì lo vedrem risorto”; we are, unbeknownst to the characters, at the first Easter Vigil), Mary rejects this hope with a return to her opening C/2 flat tonal system, and a singlestanza aria in straight settenari that now comes as a surprise (“E se’l ben, che s’è smarrito”) after all the metric experimentation. Veronica then breaks in with a recitative and two-stanza aria with strings describing universal weeping as in 1668 (“Fino gli angeli versan pianti, / gli elementi / stan dolenti//Even the angels weep, the Elements are pained”), with another unusual metric plan (8/3/3/9) along with a tonal shift to D/mollis. This last is also the most vocally difficult aria in the entire piece, a musical emphasis on a seemingly minor character. The larger issue of which character pairs mourned, and how, is also evident in those sepolcri that separated the laments of Mary and of the Magdalen, or omitted one or the other.32 One of their most remarkable deployments occurred across the two texts of 1684, a Lent that turned out far more charged—at least temporarily—than the normal sobriety of most Holy Weeks.

magdalene’s view: il segno della humana salute (1684) The moments of crisis in sepolcri production highlight, in a microhistorical fashion, the sinews of court culture. One such juncture was the aftermath of the August–September 1683 siege of Vienna, and for all the difficulties of the royals’ inglorious flight from Vienna, their sojourn in Passau, and their eventual untriumphant reentrance the following summer, few could have predicted that the Passiontide pieces held in Linz Castle’s chapel would become a protocol scandal. This was due to what seems an unplanned dustup between Eleonora Gonzaga and the papal nuncio, the veteran diplomat Cardinal Francesco Buonvisi (1626–1700). Since there was no appropriate space in the castle, both the birthday celebrations and Carnival opera were drastically curtailed. Indeed, there had been no fall and winter like this in court life, not even after Margarita Teresa’s death in 1673. The repertory includes brief dance pieces in November 1683 and January 1684; a one-act opera for Eleonore

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Magdalene’s birthday; and a short two-act piece for Carnival. In terms of theatrical music, this shifted the emphasis to the four Lenten oratorios— two premieres (including Leopold’s own piece on St. Anthony of Padua) and two repeated works—and to the two sepolcri of Holy Week. The situation might also have dictated the reduced number of singers, only four for the Thursday piece and six for Friday; the former, Le Lagrime più giuste di tutte le lagrime, is called “Breve rappresentatione” in the score, which did not prevent Pederzoli from writing a long opening sinfonia, with a fugal central section. In the immediate political context, the ongoing negotiations with Poland and Venice to form the Holy League still allowed Leopold to contribute an aria and trio to the Friday work composed by Draghi, Il Segno della humana salute. As in the 1668 stay at Wiener Neustadt, the reduced Carnival—and probably less occasion for his other favorite pastime of hunting—would have given him time to compose; presumably Pederzoli and Draghi were with the court in Linz.33 The standoff between Eleonora Gonzaga and the Italian prelate had begun earlier that year, possibly aggravated by the cramped local quarters. During his days as nuncio in Warsaw in the 1670s, Buonvisi had met Eleonora when the empress’s daughter Maria Josepha had married Michael I of Poland and her mother had traveled to Warsaw for the occasion.34 The 1684 spat arose around Eleonora’s preference for Maria Josepha’s second husband, Charles V of Lorraine, ahead of what Buonvisi considered his rightful place—literally and figuratively—in court ceremonies. Already in a missive of 11 January the prelate had complained to the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Alderano Cybo, about Eleonora’s treatment of him. But it was the seating for the Thursday sepolcro that provoked Buonvisi to boycott the performance and to vent his feelings in an eleven-page letter, some sort of record for length among his weekly reports back to Cybo: Although I am ready to end my days here [Buonvisi was a healthy fifty-eight and would live another sixteen years], I must defend my [cardinal’s dignity] with vigor against the attacks of the [dowager] empress Eleonora, who repeats them with the tacit consent of the emperor. . . . Father Navata told me that the empress was displeased that I boycotted her chapel services . . . but I responded that it was one thing to go to them and another to be able to go to them. . . . for it would have been far too improper that the public should on one occasion see higher treatment for a prince [Lorraine] and on others lesser treatment for the nuncio, especially when he is a cardinal. . . . Finally, last [Holy] Wednesday the empress wrote me a new invitation and gave it to the maggiordomo to show it to me, but he did not. On Thursday she asked him again and I finally received it later in the day, when the royals were out visiting the ailing Venetian ambassador. . . . And now once again

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the empress has given a higher place to [Lorraine], for at the oratorio [i.e., Le Lagrime più giuste] on Holy Thursday they [the royals] were up front next to the Tomb, and he was only two steps behind, with a chair, kneeler, and I believe even a cushion, and if I had gone [to it], I would have been placed on a side bench.35

Buonvisi’s outrage did not let up into the summer, as in July, still in Linz, he rejected the mediation of none other than the erstwhile sepolcro librettist Vito Lepori. In another ten-page missive to Cybo he complained that “the dowager empress always demands more ostentatious homages than does even the emperor.”36 The entire affair was a minor scandal for the other ambassadors, especially those who did not want to offend the cardinal, but they seem to have gone to the Thursday sepolcro anyway. Presumably Eleonore Magdalene showed solidarity with her husband and her stepmother-in-law; after all, Lorraine was the commander in chief of the imperial army. Despite the spat, Buonvisi helped mediate a truce with France later that year, rose again in the imperial graces, and remained as nuncio until finally returning to Italy in 1689. What the cardinal missed by avoiding the pieces on Thursday—and presumably on Friday—was a two-day trajectory of tears and healing.37 Although it might seem that these texts did not receive Minato’s full attention—on 1 January 1684 he had written to the emperor from Prague while on an unspecified but evidently delicate political mission—the two libretti are quite unified. They both use minor New Testament characters healed (Friday) or resurrected (Thursday) miraculously by Christ, with the only Passion figures being the Madonna (Thursday) and the Magdalen (by herself in the Friday piece). At this moment both the male heirs, the archdukes Joseph and Leopold Joseph, were alive and well, even if the latter would die later that year. Leopold and Eleonore Magdalene were in good physical health, the latter pregnant with the future archduchess Maria Theresa (although the hopes of spring 1684 for another son would not be realized until the following year).38 Why the theme of healing/resurrection should have been so central at this point is not clear, unless it were a kind of thanks for the dynasty’s own survival after the failure of the Ottoman siege the previous autumn. Pederzoli’s piece survives in full score, while Il Segno comes down only in short score, without the string parts or the inner voices of vocal ensembles. The emphasis on the Magdalen in the Friday piece suggests that this sepolcro also had something to do with Eleonore Magdalene’s own piety. On the basis of her youth in Neuburg and Düsseldorf, she came

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from a different tradition compared with the festival and theatrical cultures of Margherita and Claudia Felicitas.39 Given the Jesuit influence on her childhood court in Bavaria, her first Holy Week experiences were probably centered on prayer and private devotion, rather than music in or out of liturgy. Still, she would have heard the Roman chapel singers in Düsseldorf whom her father’s chapelmaster Giovanni Battista Mocchi had hired for the Wittelsbach court chapel there. The 1672 instructions for her education mention devotion only generally, and there is little on Holy Week practice at the Palatinate court, which did not seem to have a tradition of Tombs.40 Her own austerity was legendary, although perhaps overstated in terms of her distaste for theater music. Her self-identification with Teresa of Avila—along with Loyola, the least musical saint of early modern Catholicism—steered her in other directions.41 During her first Holy Week in Vienna (1677), she would have had access to performances of three sepolcri, and by 1684, she would have been accustomed to the genre, and probably have polished her Italian in order to follow the subtlety of Minato’s texts. In addition, as the daughter and granddaughter of converts to Catholicism, she took special interest in conversions, and thus in the dramatic enactment thereof.42 How her Passion devotion might have been different from that of her predecessors is equally hard to ascertain. Compared with the frequent dedications of devotional works to Eleonora Gonzaga, and even with those inscribed to Claudia Felicitas, there are few to the new empress, even in her native German. Her crowning as queen of Hungary in 1681 contributed to her slowly rising prestige at court.43 But after Eleonora Gonzaga’s death, the emperor—and not she—seems to have taken over the patronage of Lenten oratorios. The two 1684 sepolcri begin with an uncharacteristic inversion of the attributes of the major female mourners: tears for Mary on Thursday and lamenting for the Magdalen on Friday.44 The Thursday piece opens with the Madonna (a soprano) singing to herself in ottenari tronchi, again unaware of Jairo’s presence onstage, as she contrasts the sun’s return after Calvary’s darkness to her own continued tears: “Mesto Sol, quando penò / sul Calvario il mio Giesù, / il tuo lume s’oscurò, / ma seren tornasti tu, / et io sempre piangerò//O sad sun, when my Jesus suffered on Calvary, your light was darkened; but then you became serene, while I will always weep,” echoed by Jairo out of her hearing. This leads to a dialogue of recognition between the two and the Virgin’s reproaches of Jews.

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The Friday sepolcro opens with the Magdalen’s (unusually in this piece, also a soprano) return to Calvary after the Entombment, together with the Paralytic Man healed by Christ in Capernaum according to the Synoptic Gospels. As noted, Burnacini’s design featured a staircase leading to the Bronze Serpent of Numbers 21, and a cross deployed on the stairs leading to it. There is no opening lament aria, and the colloquy soon shifts poetic meters, as the two are joined by the Samaritan Woman (healed of her past life, as opposed to physical ailments, in Jn 4:7–29), and the Man Born Blind (perhaps the one of Jericho in Lk 18:35–43). These last two characters begin with an unusual two-stanza aria for two simultaneous voices. Later, the Widow of Nain (Lk 7:11–17) and the Leper (Mt 8:1–4) from the Sermon on the Mount both arrive, again characters paired by gender. Even if it occupies only a short part of Il Segno’s conclusion, a single final phrase receives extensive emphasis and thus underscores an emblematic combination of text and music. After five of the characters narrate their healing by Christ, the last half of the piece begins with the reflections of the Leper, in versi sciolti and on F/mollis, turning to His sufferings. This leads to the deictic invocation (relatively early in the piece, by the genre’s standards, and always a moment of heuristic insight) of the Christological meaning for Burnacini’s set design of the Bronze Serpent (“E, se Egli è il Figurato / del serpe del deserto//And He is the person represented by the serpent of the desert”), as the image comes to play a role in the piece’s trajectory. This is followed by a two-stanza aria with trio refrain sung by the Magdalen as she recognizes Christ’s love, a moment on A/durus that initiates an extended section in sharp realms. Another ensemble denunciation of the Jews is followed by the arrival onstage of the bloodied Cross, with a reference to Vexilla regis. The Widow’s praise of the Cross, a two-stanza aria in ottenari tronchi (like the opening of the Thursday piece that year), features two internal refrains echoed by the female and male cast members, respectively. The Widow’s solo moment opens with her “Duro legno, sei quel tu / Ove morto un Dio pendè//O hard wood, from you did a dead God hang,” followed by a first refrain beginning “Il tuo frutto dolce fu//Your fruit was sweet,” a clear reference to the “Fruits of the Cross” theme and thus anticipating its mention in the 1691 sepolcro. Set by Leopold himself, on B/durus, the words of this passage suggest that it was meant to be sung on behalf of the only widow present among the royals in Linz, Eleonora Gonzaga (less likely the widowed and remarried Maria Josepha). And its use of durus pitch realms points directly to the hardness and suffering associated with the “duro legno.”

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example 4.5. A. Draghi, Il Segno della humana salute (1684; A-Wn 18914), “Altro non posso far io,” opening, f. 39v.

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Each of the six characters then links her or his own healing (Jesus had expelled demons from the Magdalen according to Lk 8:2) to that of all humanity via Christ’s death. In short solos, they list some nine of its results (a sort of “Seven Consolations” parallel) for human salvation, again echoed with a refrain by the others: Widow: “A battle, in which death is life, Magdalen: In which Hell’s captain, the fearful serpent, was defeated. A3: But His own Blood was worth more than Christ Himself,”

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example 4.6. A. Draghi, Il Segno della humana salute (1684; A-Wn 18914), “Altro non posso far io,” ending, f. 43v. Maddalena [inner parts missing]

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another gesture to the dynasty’s Blood relic as well as a mercantilist paradox. Tonally, these solos move vertiginously from the Magdalen’s opening around F-sharp, through E/durus, C/durus, and finally G/mollis, the pitch center for this final trio line of “But His own Blood . . .” With a long-delayed return to C/2 flats, and sudden turn to quinari, the Magdalen then introduces the final reflection in a solo, taken up by the others and made into the concluding ensemble (example 4.5): “I can do nothing other than weep, and I will weep. Paralytic: Nothing, other

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than pour out my heart in tears, and I will pour it. A2: I know how to do nothing, other than to beat my breast. Widow and Leper: for the most bitter death of my God, Who saved me. A6 [the final madrigale]: I can do nothing other than weep, and I will weep” (“Altro, che piangere, / non posso far io / e piangerò”). Although earlier the piece had featured both characters’ sufferings and some ugly anti-Judaism, here the final ensemble ends in triple time, lyrically and softly, with the Magdalen’s top line simply rocking back and forth between d’’ and e’’-flat (example 4.6). Perhaps Buonvisi was right in wanting privileged seating in the chapel to hear such subtleties. In any case, the thematics are unified by poetic meter even against the striking shifts in tonal centers: il segno , second half: christ’s wounds + cross + weeping Incipit

Poetic Meter

Pitch Center

Vedova: Cinte fur d’acute spine [arrival of Cross fragment] Leproso: O vessillo glorioso Maddalena: Chi ti segue Samaritana: E che fate / mie pupille Vedova: Il tuo dire Maddalena: O ineffabile amor Vedova: Duro legno, sei quel tu Maddalena & tutti: Altro che piangere

8p

D/durus

8p 8p-t 4-8p 8p 8t-4p 8t 5p-t

A/2 sharps C/2 flats A/durus F/mollis A/durus B/durus C/2 flats

This fixation on weeping had been previously expressed not only in Paciuchelli’s sermons on Jonah but also in the same preacher’s “Discorso XII: The Lord’s Passion Brings Tears and Devotion, and Should Be Contemplated with These Sentiments” in book I of his 1664 Passion discourses cited earlier.45 After listing biblical examples of tears, and quoting Thomas à Kempis on their value, the seventeenth-century Dominican continued in his own voice: “Let no one attempt to console me, or bring me comfort, for I want only to mourn for my Lord, crucified for me. . . . I would speak further, but I can only mourn.” Once again the goal of the sepolcro, and especially of this closing scene, was to silence speech—but not singing—via tears, here linked to the experience of salvational healing. That the Magdalen should have been given to a (male) soprano, and that she as a character led so much of the weeping, suggests that the whole piece was ultimately someone’s effort to afford Eleonore Magdalene her own place in the royals’ division of mourning’s labor.

Epilogue The Power of the Cross

Some of the norms for sepolcri in the 1690s continued into the new century, although clearly there was devotional and musical change in Leopold’s last years, before the genre faded into obscurity. Much later, whatever it was that Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono were seeking among the early music holdings of Venice’s Casa Goldoni in 1949, their choice of the score for Bernardoni and M. A. Ziani’s sepolcro Le Due passioni, una di Christo nel corpo, l’altra della Vergine madre nell’anima—the last stage work of any sort that Leopold would have heard, three weeks before his death in 1705—would have seemed an unlikely candidate. They took a working title for the piece from the opening sinfonia in the manuscript, which reads “Introduzione al Sepolcro,” although clearly the two tracked down the original printed libretto and made other notes on the contemporary Viennese repertory. The public performance of their selections in 1950 called it “Il Sepolcro,” and Maderna stuck with the sobriquet, even for his 1957 recording of the excerpts.1 What might have attracted them would have been the richness of Ziani’s composition. Maderna selected what he must have considered the best arias, changing the order of some numbers, and made them into a thirty-five-minute piece (entitled “cantata”) performed under Mario Rossi’s direction at La Fenice on 12 September 1950 on a concert, together with world premieres by G. F. Malipiero and Mario Labroca, as part of the Venice Biennale that autumn.2 Evidently work on it had 152

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been proceeding for some time, given two letters in spring 1950 from the conductor Hermann Scherchen to Maderna inquiring as to its progress for the purposes of publication and a possible performance in Turin.3 Along with Keldorfer’s 1917 reworking of the 1682 Sig des Leydens, this project seems to have been the only post-1711 revival of any sepolcro until the 1970s, and Maderna’s later recording also the only one until around the same time.4 How the excerpts from Ziani’s piece might have fit on the Biennale program with Malipiero’s setting of Vergil’s Georgics or Labroca’s three moments in the Passion story according to John was not clear, although possibly the sepolcro was programmed in order to form a contrast with the latter. Certainly the varied scoring in the arias—including solo trombone, solo violin, and organ obbligato—must have added to its appeal, even if not all these numbers wound up in the final transcription. The selections (now largely in Basel, with Nono’s materials in Venice) give a partial impression, as Ziani’s original score is, if not a composer’s holograph, very close to the original in its performance notations and deleted measures and evidently not the work of a court copyist.5 The 1705 manuscript must have escaped inclusion in the imperial collections in the wake of Leopold’s death, as the Schlafkammerbibliothek was packed up, and perhaps Ziani sent his score back to Venice, where it remained since. As noted earlier, Bernardoni’s text begins with a Virgin who swoons at the end of her first aria (hence foregrounding her own “Passion”) and is then pitied by Giovanni and the Magdalen before she returns to consciousness, angry at Giovanni’s claims (at Christ’s behest, it will be remembered) to be her “son.” After the entrance of Simone Cireneo, whose consolation is also in vain (thus echoing Minato’s 1670 text), Giuseppe d’Arimathea and Nicodemo arrive to recount the Deposition and Entombment. The Magdalen asks for the extraction of Christ’s Body—another violation of ritual space around the constructed Tomb—and after a final viewing, all return to Jerusalem with an aria for Giovanni that turns into the closing madrigale (“Oh, ungrateful human heart, do not increase the suffering of your God”). For their purposes, Maderna and Nono chose the Virgin’s opening accompanied recitative and aria, followed by Giovanni’s compassionate response to her fainting. They also included the trio recitative in which Mary reawakens, and her following aria. Possibly Bernardoni’s dramatic reproaches throughout the piece—Maderna also inserted, out of context, the Magdalen’s scornful query of Simone if Christ’s Cross had

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been too hard for him to bear—also caught the attention of the two composers. One aria originally for Giuseppe was moved into the Magdalen’s voice, and another to Giovanni’s. Maderna then returned to an earlier moment in the piece for a recitative by the Magdalen and ended the piece with a duet (on the devotion to Christ’s Heart) for her and Giovanni, originally placed halfway through, concluding with the opening sinfonia repeated. In 1705, this text, “Cor del mio Giesù, sei più pietoso-clemente//O Heart of my Jesus, you are more pious-merciful,” was a clear gesture to the new devotion around 1700, taken from Naples and France, to the Sacred Heart, a mark of how changes in piety had immediate musical reflections. The 1950 adaptation excised the parts of Simone, Giuseppe, and Nicodemo but made the piece performable by soprano, alto, and tenor, without even the concluding madrigale. The only traceable reaction to the performance was the devastating aside by Massimo Mila (“the pallid cantata of a Venetian epigone”), but Maderna cared enough to record it with different forces in Milan seven years later, although he never returned to it thereafter. Only in the 1970s, with the first stagings in Vienna, would the genre be revived.6 There are transcription sketches in both Maderna’s and Nono’s materials for Mary’s da capo aria “Alme ingrate, / deh imparate / ad amar ed amar bene,” which occurs about halfway through (f. 27 of Ziani’s manuscript), although this item did not make its way into the recorded version. But in the original score, there are two different settings of this aria next to each other, one with strings on C in flat regions, and one with solo trombone in sharp realms. Both are preceded by the Virgin’s recitative meditation on Christ’s goodness and willingness to die by shedding His Blood, “Si che immensa, infinita / fù sua pietà,” and this entire section in the manuscript begins with the annotation of the emperor’s composition (“Di S. M. C.”). If the sovereign did indeed set the aria text twice—his last musical effort in his life, as it would turn out—the personal meaning seems evident, even if in the voice of the Virgin (and in the literal one of Anna Maria Badia singing the part): “Ungrateful souls [a foretaste of the entire sepolcro’s final lines], ah, learn to love and to love well; [B section:] whoever loves well knows how to encounter even death, and does not tire in suffering pain. Ungrateful souls . . .” Whether this was Leopold’s final paternal reproach of his difficult, thankless heir Joseph I, or a presentment of his own death, is not clear. The nuncio Gianantonio Davia reported at Easter that the royals had done Holy Week in their normal intensive way,

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although the ongoing War of the Spanish Succession had necessitated a meeting of the Imperial Council on Holy Tuesday. Leopold’s mortal illness began just thereafter, on Easter Saturday, 18 April.7 Leopold’s string-accompanied setting of the aria is fairly retrospective, while the trombone obbligato is far more virtuosic in both instrument and voice. But both share unusual emphases at the end of the B section (“ne si stanca a soffrir pene”), at the mention of “never tiring in suffering”: the string one with a chromatic anabasis in the highest vocal register, while the version with obbligato brass features vocal flourishes and Neapolitan inflections around its temporary pitch center of A. Whether or not Leopold knew that he was not long for this world, his final message to his family and court was clear.

the marking of ritual For all that Le Due passioni might have functioned as a sign of the Venetian musical past around 1950, the meanings of such works in their time, and from the perspectives outlined in the opening of this study, thus point wider. Besides the social need of reminding the nobility as to how to “bury” Christ (evident in Savini’s 1689 sermon and L’Esclamare of that year), the emphasis on staged penance in every performance was a theatrical enactment of the royals’ own remorse. The increasing amounts of money spent on all the Tomb “decoration,” after the addition of the piece-specific sets around 1670, also underscore the Habsburgs’ duty to provide a worthy—and musical—grave for the Savior. Indeed, given all the mentions of mercantilism in the texts, the emperor’s compensation of musicians, composers, and set designers perhaps unconsciously reflects his own payment for his self-perceived sins via the Tomb rituals. Eleonora Gonzaga’s insistence on their performance, no matter what the circumstances, reveals their centrality to her devotional identity, and Leopold’s own contributions at the end of his life again highlight the genre’s place at the core of the sinner/sovereign’s persona. These factors also show the use of sepolcri in dramatizing a new devotional-political world, one tailored to the taste of the royals, and necessary in a changed Europe after 1660, in which universal Catholic piety and Botero’s anti-Machiavellianism were no longer reliable. In the wider meanings of the Week, though, the pieces also represented a social glorification of Christ’s Body, one echoed in the other Eucharistic devotions and in the Maundy Thursday foot washing and feeding of the elderly. The links to the Holy Sacrament—whose liturgical enactment on

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Thursday was the necessary prelude to all the performances—were clear in both texts and Burnacini’s designs; in essence, the double presence of Christ’s Body in the Tomb and the “buried” Host on the reposition altar was commemorated by the music and staging, underscoring how essential the Sacrament was to the ritual moment. In addition, sepolcri allowed for the musical display of the relics. Thus the genre’s meaning was more than just personal, and this stands in contrast to traditional historiography that perceives all the spectacle only as the manifestation of individual desire. The care and expense put into the libretti and their German translations, as well as their distribution, also testify to this sense of the genre’s function as part of ritual social cleansing. And in a nastier way, the anti-Jewish and antiplebeian sentiment evident in Tomb culture points to the royals’ self-differentiation from an impure Other. Thus the spending on sets and singers—as well as the mercantilist discourse of the libretti—responded not only to Isaiah’s verse but also to dynastic reimagining in a new political world after 1660. The externalization of corporeal display was aimed at the renewal not only of the royals’ souls, but of the whole Christian polis, and—evident in such a piece as Il Lutto—that of the perceptible world. For this reason, infinity—as in the 1677 piece—needed to be confined and represented on the “stage” of the various chapels, making its appearance every Triduum via music. The creation of the repertory, one could argue, also provided structure and expression to mourning. The conceptual scheme of each piece allowed an intellectual trajectory from the Incarnation to the Tomb that led, however, to the inevitably recurrent emotions of penance and Christological self-dedication. Within this variegated yet static trajectory, the more difficult or recondite conceits could be expressed in recitative, while the arias provided paired reflections thereon via their two stanzas. In that sense, then, each work was a kind of ever-changing sonic Tomb, complete with its set design, poetic plot, and dynastic/relic references, and even its tonal design (evident in the sepolcri of 1670–72, or those works on extremely flat or sharp regions).8 The issues of vocality—with virtuoso arias slowly seeping into the repertory—thus became increasingly foregrounded. In addition, a close look at the poetic and tonal choices of specific sections, essayed in the previous chapters, suggests the equilibrium of symmetry and juxtaposition. Some of the other devotional elements—the presence of the Nuremberg and Vienna relics, the images of Marian grief, and even the grow-

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ing role of Joseph—are found elsewhere in Habsburg cultural production. Not everything in the repertory makes a perfect fit: the sense of overwhelming human sinfulness, experienced most vividly (even if least justifiably) by Leopold, coexists uneasily with the Christian optimism onstage from the end of Il Lutto through the opening of La Virtù della Croce. Similarly, the royals’ close brush with the pleasures of weeping at sepolcri walked a tense line between “appropriate” mourning and the indulgence of melancholy. But the flourishing of the genre also provided a forum for modern piety and intellectual discourse to be represented, under conditions of utmost sacrality, as an unpredictably new element inside the extremely prescribed Holy Week rituals, doing so with texts that not only refreshed popular Passion narratives but also bent orthodox formulations of Mary’s grief or Peter’s tears. For this reason, the liturgical quotes take second place to scripture and the Christian/classical heritage. To the degree that Minato’s texts added the character of an intellectual disputation over any given piece’s conceits (number symbolism, science, salvational theology), they mixed logical labor with direct emotion. With all the scriptural citations present, the concepts of Sbarra’s and Minato’s texts resonated with the devotional literature familiar to the royals, and with some—not all—of the sermons they would have heard. The texts gave them a musical outlet for weeping in the chapels, and it must be presumed that the royals, young and old, complied during the performances, moving them to socially acceptable tears in ways not likely during the regular liturgy. Finally, the possibilities for individual mystical experience adumbrated in I Frutti dell’albero show the transformative power of the text and its musical setting. The addition of music drama to all the other Holy Week rituals, and specifically inside the Triduum, was a solution to both the externalization and internalization of the Entombment: a theater both of the Passion and of human passions, a process of mourning and of metanoia. Despite their omission of any mention of the Resurrection, the pieces also staged personal hope for eternal life, evident in the closing trajectory of La Virtù della Croce of 1697, whose opening is familiar from the introduction.

the wounds of life and death At first, the dramatic layout of the 1697 sepolcro is no surprise for works of the 1690s: the paired entrances of allegorical characters, then

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the arrival of a protagonist soul-like figure (here “L’Amore a Dio”) encapsulating subjective experience. Yet the precise circumstances of the performance were, in retrospect, quite charged: this would be the septuagenarian Minato’s last text for Holy Week, and almost his last dramatic piece overall. Draghi, too, would die within three years, while Burnacini would produce sets for another decade. As noted, loss, in the person of Job, would have been onstage as well as in Leopold’s own consciousness, since the 1696 passings of Mariana of Austria and his daughter Maria Theresa, although with the maturing of Joseph and Charles, and the military successes against the French, the political situation was relatively stable. All these factors could have led to the sovereign’s remarkable participation in the music, composing five of the ten arias and encompassing all the major singers in the cast. The series of Leopold’s contributions starts early on, with a two-strophe moment for L’Amore a Dio, asking for a second soul to adore God better; a bit later, one for La Speranza focusing on the Cross; then one for Il Timore della Divina Giustizia, also desiring an infinitely large heart; a recitative and onestanza aria for L’Horror del Peccato abhorring sin; and a final Christological one for La Fiducia in Christo, discussed later. Draghi must have done everything else. In addition, the singers would have been familiar, as four of them had just been featured in L’Adalberto, the January birthday opera (Cupeda/ Draghi; the choice of librettist might have indicated Minato’s worsening health) for Eleonore Magdalene. Among the full-time court singers, Günther, who had been the “female” lead (Adaleide) in the opera, did Speranza; the low-paid castrato Bruti, who had done the young secondo uomo part of Lidolfo in January, was La Consolatione Angelica; the better-compensated Mellini, previously Osmanda in the opera, was La Fiducia in Christo; and the well-salaried Borrini, who had had the minor confidant role of Bleno, was L’Horror del Peccato, a more substantial part.9 Three of the sepolcro’s voices (Buzzoleni, Borosini, and Masselli; L’Amore, Il Timore, and La Conversione, respectively) had not been in L’Adalberto, probably because they were doing Carnival operas in Italy.10 As Mellini had the last aria by the emperor in the sepolcro, and Borosini the final aria overall, the closing of the piece was emphasized by the entrusting of the arias to the most esteemed singers. Where Leopold’s music is placed is also significant for the devotional trajectory of the piece. After the opening duet discussed in the introduction, L’Amore and Fiducia elucidate Passion number symbolism in rec-

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itative, before the sovereign’s first aria for the former character. Speranza and Timore then arrive as a pair, leading to Leopold’s second aria, followed by Horror and Conversione, who also split two-strophe arias by Draghi along with dialogue recitative. These blocs of duets then break for Leopold’s aria for Timore on the topic of the infinite heart. This is followed by a high-voice (clefs: C1/C1/C1/C3) angelic choir from the set construction, which exalts human consolation over even seraphic bliss, introduced by a heavenly sinfonia with violin (Leopold’s instrument, it should be remembered) and lutes. Yet Minato seems deliberately to have placed this momentary solace of the individual soul too early in the piece’s devotional trajectory, and only Speranza reacts well to the angelic entrance. For all that Consolatione attempts to return to the piece’s meditative beginning by listing Old Testament prefigurings of Christ—including Job and Isaac—as evidence for divine love, still Horror, with Leopold’s music, concentrates on the wish to flee sin, and is followed by Amore’s doubts as to the price of salvation, in one of the final mercantilist touches in the repertory.11 A further colloquy on the mechanics of redemption is ended only by Consolatione’s display of the Cross with another inscription of the “In hoc signo vinces” motto already present in the set, and the opening character pair bows to its power: “[Amore:] Now my love increases, / [Fiducia:] Now my faith becomes joy.” They are joined by Speranza and Horrore in what seems like a final four-voice madrigale, as the power of the Cross has been shown to be effective, distantly echoing the piece’s opening: “Love and hope, and in loving you will rejoice; in hoping, you will have heaven, if in loving and sighing you please God.”12 But the most remarkable feature of this sepolcro is that it does not end here. There follows Leopold’s last aria, a rounded piece for Fiducia, turning to the Crucified Christ in a literary register deliberately lower than the preceding ones: “My crucified love, my sweet Jesus,” with another violin ritornello. Next comes angelic conversation framing a solo seraphic aria that recounts the reversal of Paradise’s tree of sin into the fruits of salvation and the Cross, and thus recalls the 1691 libretto (“Nel terrestre Paradiso / su la pianta della vita / nacque il frutto della morte / E Giesù, che miglior sorte / ha per l’huom ristabilita, / sovra’l legno della morte / pose’l frutto della vita//In the earthly paradise, on the plant [Tree] of life, there was born the fruit of death; and Jesus, who reestablished a better fate for humanity, placed the fruit of life on the wood of death”). Timore then begins his last aria by paraphrasing Crux fidelis (which would have been sung earlier on that Good Friday; here

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example 5.2. A. Draghi, La Virtù della Croce, ending, f. 91v.

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“Fida croce, in tua virtù / volgo al ciel i miei sospir”), only to have the single stanza of the aria change into the Augustinian desire for living and dying in Christ’s Wounds: “Ne le piaghe di Giesù / viver bramo, e vò morir//In Christ’s wounds I wish to live and die.” Indeed, this moment by Timore moves the piece, just at its end, in the direction of being a theatrical ars moriendi, or even forced Leopold— and us—to reinterpret the entire sepolcro as an exercise in the contemplation of death. This last-minute shift of theme to dying in the Wounds had been anticipated toward the close of the 1695 La Trasfiguratione,

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in which the Spirit of Moses had pointed to the Five Wounds (“Now [O mortal], try to improve your fate in Christ’s Wounds”), and was echoed at the end by the Madonna’s advice: “Happy human, what more do you want? Security from God’s infinite wrath you will find in Christ’s Wounds” (with a citation to Denys the Carthusian). The Imperial Library also owned a copy of the Jesuit Tommaso Auriemma’s devotional tract Stanza dell’anima nelle piaghe di Giesù (1651), a long Passion meditation using the soul’s rest in the Wounds.13 This wish to live in the Wounds then takes over the 1697 text, framed by a ritornello for violin plus lute in the heavenly set. This must have been a timbral recall of the consolatory moment, with reference to Leopold’s own instrument, earlier in the piece. Draghi used antiphonal effects in the violin band on the Hofburgkapelle’s floor and had the “viver bramo” textual phrase sung alternately by different trio ensembles: Consolatione plus the two angels (example 5.1); Fiducia, Amore, and Horrore; and Speranza, Conversione, and Timore. The entire sepolcro ends, for the first and only time, not with a madrigale but with an antiphonal textless fade-out, as the two groups of ritornello instruments echo each other (example 5.2). This ultimate personal desire for Minato, Burnacini, and Leopold thus closes in unexpected and rarefied theatricality. The piece’s closing takes us back meditatively—via the Wounds— to its beginning, the starting place also for this study.

appendix 1

Checklist of Sepolcri, 1660–1711

163

?Tricarico Leopold Tricarico Bertali Tricarico ?Bertali ?P. A. Ziani ?Ziani Ziani Bertali ?Ziani Sances Ziani ?Ziani Leopold Draghi Sances Draghi Sances

Pierelli Sbarra Sbarra Federici Sbarra Federici Pierelli Sbarra Draghi Draghi Ferri Minato

1660-T 1660-F 1661-T 1661-F 1662-T 1662-F 1663-T 1663-F 1664-T 1664-F 1665-T 1665-F 1666-T 1666-F 1667-T 1667-F 1668-T 1668-F 1669-T 1669-F 1670-T 1670-F

Il Sepolcro, ovvero il trionfo della vita eterna Il Sacrifizio d’Abramo La Gara della Misericordia e Giustizia Il Pentimento La Fede trionfante Le Lagrime della Vergine La Gara di pietà ? La Conversione di S. Longino ?[Leopold in Regensburg] Il Limbo disserato L’Inferno deluso Gl’Affetti pietosi Le Lacrime di S. Pietro Le Lacrime della Pietà ? L’Esaltatione del serpente Il Lutto dell’universo L’Humanità redenta La Morte debellata Sette dolori di Maria Vergine Sette consolationi di Maria Vergine

Music

Pierelli Caldana Scarano ? Draghi Lepore Pierelli

Year/Day T=Thursday F=Friday Rep=repeat Libretto

Title

7+ch 10 6 8 7 12

8 9 7 5 7

6+ch

6 12 7 6 7 6+ch 6

1 7 2 4 0 2

0 3 3 0 0

0

3 3 3 2 1 0 4

N Y Y N Y Y

N N N N N

N

N Y Y Y N N N

N N N N N Implied

N N N N N

N

N N N N N N N

Total Characters Allegorical Score Set Indications (ch=chorus) Figures Preserved in Libretto

1671-T 1671-F 1672-T 1672-F 1673-T, F 1674-T 1674-F (rep) 1675-T 1675-F 1676-T 1676-F 1677-T 1677-T/F? 1677-F 1678-T 1678-F 1678-F 1679-T 1679-T 1679-F (rep) 1680-T 1680-F

Epitaffi sopra il Sepolcro Il Trionfo della croce Il Limbo aperto Il Paradiso aperto [death of Margherita] La Pietà contrastata Il Lutto dell’Universo La Corona di spine L’Ingratitudine rimproverata

Il Sole ecclissato L’Ingiustizia della sentenza di Pilato Le Cinque piaghe di Christo

Stärcke der Lieb L’Infinità impicciolita I Tre chiodi di Christo Thron der Gnaden Le Memorie dolorose Il Titolo posto sulla croce di Christo Erlösung des menschlichen Geschlechts L’Ingratitudine rimproverata

La Sacra Lancia Il Vero sole fermato in cielo

Minato Minato

? Minato Minato ? Minato Minato Rudolph Minato

Schmelzer Schmelzer Draghi Schmelzer Schmelzer Draghi Leopold Leopold? Draghi? Draghi ?

Draghi Leopold Draghi Leopold? Draghi? Draghi Sances Draghi

Ferri Sbarra Minato Minato Minato Minato Minato

Draghi Sances Draghi Sances

Minato Minato Ferri Minato

9 9

6 10 6 7 11+ch 6 6 8

7 10 6

8 10 7 8

7 11 7 10+2 ch

7 0

1 7 6 5 0 0 2 5

3 8 0

0 7 0 5

5 1 0 8

Y N

Y N Y N Y Y Y N

Y N Y

Y Y Y N

Y Y Y Y

N Y

Y Y N (but darkness) N Y N Y Y N N Y

N N N Y

N Y N Y

1681-T (rep) 1681-F 1682-T 1682-F (rep) 1682-F 1683-T 1683-F 1684-T 1684-F 1685-T 1685-F 1686-T 1686-F 1687-F (rep) 1688-F 1689-F 1690-F (rep) 1691-F 1692-F 1693-F 1694-F

Le Cinque piaghe di Christo

? [court in Linz] Il Terremoto Il Lutto dell’Universo Sig des Leydens La Sete di Christo L’Eternità soggetta al tempo Le Lagrime più giuste Il Segno della humana salute La Bevanda di fiele Il Prezzo della humana redentione La Sorte sopra la veste Il Dono della vita eterna Il Terremoto La Vita nella morte L’Esclamare a gran voce Il Vero sole fermato in Croce I Frutti dell’albero della Croce Il Sacrifizio non impedito Il Sangue e l’acqua Il Libro con sette sigilli Minato Sbarra Rudolph Minato Minato Minato Minato Minato Minato Minato Minato Minato Minato Minato Minato Minato Minato Minato Minato

Minato

Year/Day T=Thursday F=Friday Rep=repeat Libretto

Title

Draghi Leopold Leopold Pederzoli Draghi Pederzoli Draghi Pederzoli Draghi Pederzoli Draghi Draghi Draghi Draghi ? Draghi Draghi Draghi Draghi

Draghi

Music

9 10 5 5 10 4 6 5 7 7 9 9 8 6 9 8+ch 9 8 7

6

2 7 1 0 10 0 0 0 3 0 8 2 6 0 0 4 7 8 7

0

Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y N N Y Y Y Y N N Y N Y

Y

Y N N Y Y N Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y

N (but darkness)

Total Characters Allegorical Score Set Indications (ch=chorus) Figures Preserved in Libretto

1711-F

Il Sepolcro nell’orto

note: As noted in the text, the datings of Pierelli’s texts are hypothetical.

Minato Minato Cupeda? Minato Cupeda Cupeda? Cupeda? Cupeda Bernardoni Bernardoni Bernardoni Bernardoni Bernardoni Ancioni

1697-F 1698-F (rep) 1699-F 1700-F (rep) 1701-F 1702-F 1703-F 1704-F 1705-F 1706-F 1707-F 1708-F 1709-F 1710-F

Draghi Draghi Draghi Leopold? M. A. Ziani Ziani Ziani? Ziani Ziani Ziani Ziani Ziani Ziani Ziani

Draghi Draghi

Stampiglia Ziani

Minato Minato

1695-F 1696-F

La Trasfiguratione La Passione di Christo, oggetto di meraviglia La Virtù della Croce L’Esclamare a gran voce Il Secondo Adamo L’Ingratitudine rimproverata Il Fascietto di mirto Le Profezie adiempite Tempesta de’ dolori Il Mistico Giobbe Le Due passioni La Morte vinta sul Calvario Il Sacrifizio d’Isaaco La Passione nell’orto Gesù flagellato La Sapienza umana 5

7+ch 6 8 8 8 7 7 7 6 5 5 5 5 5

8 7

0

7 0 0 5 8 7 7 7 0 3 0 0 0 5

0 7

Y

Y Y N N N N N Y Y (I-Vmc) Y Y Y Y Y

N N

N

Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y N N N Y Y N

Y Y

appendix 2

The Preserved Repertory, 1660– 1705, and Its Possible Tonalities

Title (in Chronological Order)

“Tonic”

degli Antonii, Tuoni

Berardi, Tuoni + transposition

Il Sacrificio d’Abramo La Gara della misericordia Il Pentimento Il Lutto dell’universo L’Humanità redenta Sette dolori di Maria Vergine Sette consolationi di Maria Vergine Epitaffi di Christo Il Trionfo della Croce Il Limbo aperto Il Paradiso aperto La Pietà contrastata La Corona di spine Il Sole ecclissato Le Cinque piaghe di Christo Stärke der Lieb I tre chiodi di Christo Le Memorie dolorose Il Titolo posto sulla croce di Christo Die Erlösung des menschlichen Geschlechts La Sacra Lancia

G/1H G/1H>AJ C/1H C/1H C/1H E/J D/J

2 untransposed 2-3 untransposed — — — 4 untransposed 1 untransposed

1↓P5 1↓P5 7↓P5 7↓P5 7↓P5 3 untransposed 1 untransposed

C/2H D/J F/H D/J BH/H B/J E/J F/2H E/J FG/2G A/J D/H

1↓M2 1 untransposed 6 untransposed 1 untransposed — — 4 untransposed — 3-4 untransposed — 3 untransposed —

1↓M2 1 untransposed 5 untransposed 1 untransposed 5↓P5 — 3 7↓M2 3-4 untransposed 3↑M2 9 untransposed 9↓P5

G/1H

2 untransposed

1↓P5

C/2H

1↓M2

1↓M2

168

Title (in Chronological Order)

“Tonic”

degli Antonii, Tuoni

Berardi, Tuoni + transposition

Il Terremoto Sig des Leydens La Sete di Christo L’Eternità soggetta al tempo Le Lagrime più giuste Il Segno della humana salute La Bevanda di fiele Il Dono della vita eterna La Vita nella morte L’Esclamare a gran voce Il Sacrifizio non impedito Il Libro con sette sigilli La Virtù della Croce Il Mistico Giobbe Le Due passioni

F/2H C/1H C/2H F/H D/J G/1H C/2H G/1H C/2H C/2H F/2H B/J C/2H B/2G C/2H

— — 1↓M2 6 untransposed 1 untransposed 2 untransposed 1↓M2 2 untransposed 1↓M2 1↓M2 — — 1↓M2 3↑M2 1↓M2

7↓M2 7↓P5 1↓M2 5 untransposed 1 untransposed 1↓P5 1↓M2 1↓P5 1↓M2 1↓M2 7↓M2 — 1↓M2 9↑M2 1↓M2

appendix 3

Possible Burnacini Drawings for Sepolcri

Call Number in Vienna, Theatermuseum, all “Min.” Existing Title 29/5 29/29/b1

Details

Possible Identification

“Diluvio” “Rubus ardens”

2 ships, 1 lost Santissimo/Moses/ Burning Bush Palm tree/Santissimo Sacrifice of Isaac

“Kreuzerhöhung mit Theater”

Ecce Homo on balcony

Tempesta de’ dolori 1703 La Passione di Christo 1696 (upper set only) Il Fascietto di mirra 1701 Il Sacrifizio non impedito 1692 Gesù flagellato 1709

29/29/b2 29/36 29/58/b1 Speculative 29/38a

29/39/b1 29/58/b2

170

Camp, figures falling over

“Cetus deglutit Jonam”

Jonah cast overboard 2 crosses being lowered; Eucharist; 3 soldiers sleeping on Tomb and 10 others around

?L’ambizione punita 1667 (oratorio; no set description) or ?Erlösung des menschlichen Geschlechts 1679 ?La sorte sopra la veste 1686 (motto missing) ?La pietà contrastata 1674 (libretto gives 3 soldiers “a pie del sepolcro” rebuffing Mary

Notes

1. passion and theater 1. Many of J.-M. Valentin’s writings on Jesuit theater in the empire have concentrated on a somewhat earlier moment, and especially on the imperial dramas of Niccolò Avancini in the 1640 through 1650s; cf. Valentin, Les Jésuites et le théâtre (1554–1680): Contribution à l’histoire culturelle du monde catholique dans le Saint-Empire romain germanique (Paris, 2001; a reworking of a 1978 monograph), 648–87. 2. The performance of prose comedies by G. A. Cicognini, as well as Spanish spoken drama for Margherita, occurred in the first decade of Leopold’s reign, but largely not after 1670. 3. For the 1687 battle pitting Ludovico Burnacini, on the side of cost cutting (possibly because he was paid less, according to the HZAB records, than the others), against Minato and Draghi, in favor of high expenses on opera, see the diary note of Ferdinand zu Schwartzberg on 26 July, in R. Smíšek, ed., Das Tagebuch Ferdinands zu Schwartzenberg aus den Jahren 1686–88 und 1696–97 (České Budějovice, 2015), 192; on factionalism in general at the court, ibid., 111–23. It should be noted that this strife emerged only after the death of Eleonora Gonzaga. 4. On the representation of hegemony at the court, see R. Pons, “Wo der gekrönte Löw hat seinen Kayser-Sitz”: Herrschaftsrepräsentation am Wiener Kaiserhof zur Zeit Leopolds I (Egelsbach, 2001), with ample mention of operas and even the two 1680 sepolcri for Prague, esp. 198–220, and M. Goloubeva, The Glorification of Emperor Leopold I in Image, Spectacle and Text (Mainz, 2000), 49–51 and 145–46. I am deeply grateful to Gianvittorio Signorotto for his thoughts on the refashioning of Habsburg self-understanding and devotion in the crucial decade of the 1660s, after Westphalia and the Franco-Spanish peace of 1659–60; see his “Il declino dell’Europa Cattolica e il cammino della modernità,” Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica 1 (2011): 5–38. 171

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5. Giuseppe d’Arimatea: “Al suo sepolcro / [citation to Isaiah] veranno un dì, veranno / supplici i duci, e pellegrini i regi,” ll. 344–46. This is all the more striking since the character had previously dispatched his Entombment work in a brief mention of a line and a half (ll. 188–89). 6. For the devotional literature mentioned, I assume that the major librettists had access to the imperial library collections, which are largely preserved in A-Wn. 7. The Holy Week reports to Rome for 1659–61, written by Cardinal Carlo Carafa (the nuncio from 1658 to 1664), all mention the royals’ attendance at sermons and services and their visits to Tombs, but no music drama (e.g., ASV, Segreterio di Stato, Germania, 165, no. 245 [12 April 1659]; 167, no. 228 [28 March 1660]; 169, no. 300 [16 April 1661]). 8. On the 1654 timings, see ÄZP, vol. 1, p. 154: “am Mitwoch ambt die Vesper, aind nach mittag das Matutinum, p hor. 4. bis an 7.” I am grateful to Marc Vanscheeuwijck for his ideas on the dating of Colonna’s Lamentations. 9. Any work on sepolcri and their dating is profoundly indebted to H. Seifert, Die Oper am Wiener Kaiserhof im 17. Jahrhundert (Tutzing, 1985), as updated by the author, “Ergänzungen und Korrekturen,” in his Texte zur Musikdramatik im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 2014), 263–79; this latter volume also includes his important essay “The Beginnings of Sacred Dramatic Musical Works at the Imperial Court of Vienna: Sacred and Moral Opera, Oratorio and Sepolcro,” along with “Das Sepolcro—ein Spezifikum der kaiserlichen Hofkapelle,” ibid., 765–90. The modern literature began with R. Schnitzler, “The Sacred Dramatic Music of Antonio Draghi” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 1971). Some of the eighteenth-century repertory is addressed by S. Wiesmann: “Das Wiener Sepolcro,” in A. Gier, ed., Oper als Text: Romanistische Beiträge zur Libretto-Forschung (Heidelberg, 1986), 25–31; E. Kanduth: “The Literary and Dramaturgical Aspects of the Viennese Sepolcro Oratorio, with Particular Reference to Fux,” and H. White: “The Sepolcro Oratorios of Fux: An Assessment,” both in H. White, ed., Johann Joseph Fux and the Music of the Austro-Italian Baroque (Aldershot, 1992), 153–63 and 164–230. There is a year-by-year overview of the libretti for sepolcri and oratorios during Leopold’s reign in A. Noe, Geschichte der italienischen Literatur in Österreich (Vienna, 2011), vol. 1, 225–61, and Noe’s contributions to Minato’s biography and bibliography are noted later. A helpful set of essays and illustrations for music theater is in A. Sommer-Mathis, D. Franke, and R. Risatti, eds., Spettacolo barocco! Triumph des Theaters (Petersberg, 2016), including Seifert’s “Oratorien, Sepolcri, und Ordenstheater in Österreich,” 135–42. Unfortunately, the Vienna symposium “Die Karwoche in Wien” (Vienna, 15–16 March 2018) took place too late to be included in the present text. 10. The work of Marko Deisinger has contributed enormously to our knowledge of Eleonora Gonzaga’s patronage along with Viennese ties to Rome; see his “Römische Oratorien am Hof der Habsburger in Wien in der zweiten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts,” Musicologica Austriaca 29 (2010): 89–114; “Ein Leben zwischen Musik, höfischem Zeremoniell, und Politik: Zur Biographie und Kompositionstechnik Giuseppe Tricaricos,” Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 55 (2009): 7–52; “Mäzenin und Künstlerin: Studien zu den Kunstbestrebungen der Kaiserin Eleonora II. am Wiener Hof,” Acta Musicologica 85 (2013): 43–73;

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and “Eleonora II. und die Gründung ihrer Hofkapelle. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des kulturellen Lebens am Wiener Kaiserhof,” Frühneuzeit-Info 18 (2007): 45–48. The pioneering stagings of this genre by Richard Bletschacher in the 1970s are summarized in his Rappresentazione sacra: Geistliches Musikdrama am Wiener Kaiserhof (Vienna, 1985). 11. On the Thursday ritual, shared also with the Spanish Habsburgs, and its associated meals for the indigent, see M. Scheutz, “Der vermenschte Heiland: Armenspeisung und Gründonnerstags-Fußwaschung am Wiener Kaiserhof,” in S. C. Pils and J. P. Niederkorn, eds., Ein Zweigeteilter Ort? Hof und Stadt in der Frühen Neuzeit (Innsbruck, 2005), 189–255. This important essay makes the link between washing and feeding the elderly poor as part of the imperial mission, on a human level thus replicating the divine nourishment of the Eucharist. 12. In Minato’s 1700 Tutte le rappresentazioni sacre, the two texts take up nine and nineteen pages, respectively. For the early start of services on Thursday and the visit to the Tomb in 1715, see the Ordnungsbuch, HHStA, ÄZA 26, f. 29, as Mass started at 8:30, and later in the day the royals “[sind] von der Gallerie gegang in die HoffCapele zu dem Grab.” 13. In 1668, when the court was in Wiener Neustadt, the Venetian ambassador Marino Zorzi reported that “la qualità della settimana ha fermato li negoti, et lasciato campo stretto alle novità; le funtioni ecclesiastiche, e divote, sono state così lunghe, et molteplici, che quasi dodici hore al giorno li fanno continuamente in palazzo; l’essemplarità del Prencipe riesce con rara puntualità, ed edificazione” (i.e., the royals spent almost twelve hours a day in court devotion, and nothing else got done; HHStA, Venedig, Dispacci di Germania 132, p. 339, 20 April). On 27 March 1660, the Modenese ambassador G. B. Giardini wrote home that “Qua in questi giorni santi non si può negotiare, essendo tutti li ministri inaccessibili e tutta la corte occupata nella devotione” (i.e., all the ministers were unavailable, and the whole court tied up in devotions; ASMod, Ambasciatori, Germania, 100). For the astonishment even of the papal nuncios at the royals’ immersion in churches during the Triduum, see ASV Germania, 173 (letter no. 197 of 24 March 1663) and 186 (letter no. 102 of 21 April 1669). 14. For the orders of the synod of Catania in 1668 demanding respect for the Gospel sequence of Passion events in their ritual reenactment, see C. Bernardi, La drammaturgia della Settimana Santa (Milan, 1991), 293. 15. I am indebted to the work of D. Baumann, Music and Space: A Systematic and Historical Investigation into the Impact of Architectural Acoustics on Performance Practice (Bern, 2011), esp. 159–61 on the acoustics of Gothic churches, and to her thoughts (personal communications) on the Hofburgkapelle as acoustic space. For issues around the Theater an der Cortina in the Hofburg, see A. Sommer-Mathis, “Das Theater auf der Kurtine,” in H. Karner, ed., Die Wiener Hofburg 1521–1705. Baugeschichte, Funktion und Etablierung als Kaiserresidenz (Vienna, 2014), 422–27. 16. This is explained in R. Holzschuh-Hofer and M. Jeitler, “Die Burgkapellen und die Kammerkapellen 1521–1619,” and H. Karner, “Die Burgkapelle und die Kammerkapellen 1620–1705,” in Karner, Die Wiener Hofburg 1521–1705, 420–45; Karner, ibid., 439, also identifies the “Franz Xavier” chapel later used by the younger royals; possibly this was a site for the German sepolcri for Maria

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Antonia. For Eleonora Gonzaga’s spaces in general, 1657–74, see Karner, “Die Neue Burg (Amalienburg); Witwensitz und erzhogliche Residenz, 1619–1705,” ibid., esp. 352–55, and, essential for understanding her chapel in the Trakt, Karner, “Der Leopoldinische Trakt 1660–1705,” ibid., 377–421, esp. 394–98. For the early eighteenth-century developments, see M. Weinberger, “Sakralräume,” in H. Lorenz and A. Mader-Kratky, eds., Die Wiener Hofburg 1705–1835 (Vienna, 2016), 422–34. The small chapel set up in 1673 for Claudia Felicitas in the Alte Burg, discussed by Karner, “Die Alte Burg (Schweizerhof),” in Die Wiener Hofburg, 1521–1705, 150, seems not to have been a performance site. 17. Eleonora’s chapel in the Trakt was completely rebuilt in 1772 and is today’s Josephskapelle, on which see F. Dahm, ed., Die Josephskapelle in der Wiener Hofburg (Vienna, 2017). 18. For historical and ethnographic evidence of Tomb theater in Italy, see primarily Bernardi, La drammaturgia, esp. 66–69 for traditional Tomb culture, along with 114–21 for Holy Week theater. For the relation between laments for the dead of communities and song at the Sepulcher in Sicily, see S. Bonanzinga, “Riti musicali del cordoglio in Sicilia,” Archivio antropologico mediterraneo 17 (2014): esp. 128. I am grateful to Dr. Vincenzo Corraro (Viggianello, Basilicata) for sharing his unpublished fieldwork, 1998–2004, on Holy Week singing in Pedali and elsewhere in the area. Perhaps the best-known polyphony from the Corsican confraternity repertory, imagined if not sung at the Tomb, is the “Lode di u sepolcru.” For other historical examples of Tombs in Italy, see C. Steffan, “Oratori senza sepolcri e sepolcri senza oratori: Su alcune consuetudini paraliturgiche della Settimana Santa nel Seicento italiano,” in E. Sala and D. Daolmi, eds., “Quel novo Cario, quel divin Orfeo”: Antonio Draghi da Rimini a Vienna (Lucca, 2000), esp. 324–29. 19. There is an exhaustive discussion of temporary altars around Sepulchers in German/Austrian Baroque churches in U. Brossette, Die Inszenierung des Sakralen: Das theatralische Ausstattungsprogramm suddeutscher Barockkirchen in seinem liturgischen und zeremoniellen Kontext (Weimar, 2002), vol. 1, 229– 355; the 1739 Tomb at Sonntagberg (Lower Austria) includes music stands (ibid., 193). Most of the surviving eighteenth-century Tombs in Bavaria and Austria (e.g., in Stift Zwettl) are onetime constructions hidden or stored the rest of the year outside Holy Week, in contrast to the evidently new annual structures at court. 20. The essays in N. Grass, ed., Ostern in Tirol (“Schlern-Schriften,” 169; Innsbruck, 1957), esp. A. Dörrer, “Heiliggräber, Grabandachten, Karwochenspiele,” at 204–11, give a thorough view. 21. A synopsis of the construction payment records over 150 years is in Karner, “Die Burgkapelle und die Kammerkapellen 1620–1705.” 22. J. J. Furttenbach, Newes Itinerarium Italiae (Ulm, 1627; rpt., Hildesheim, 1971), 81. 23. J. Riepe, Die Arciconfraternita di S. Maria della Morte in Bologna: Beiträge zur Geschichte des italienischen Oratoriums im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Paderborn, 1998), 328–29. 24. Indeed, the 1664–74 diary of the Austrian ambassador in Madrid, Count Franz Eusebius von Pötting, lists Mass, the Washing of Feet, Tenebrae, and

Notes | 175

processions for court Holy Week, with no mention of theater or Tomb ritual; M. Nieto Nuño, ed., Diario del conde de Pötting, embajador del Sacro Imperio en Madrid (1664–1674), 2 vols. (Madrid, 1990–93). 25. On the Vatican decoration, M. A. Kuntz, “Mimesis, Ceremony, Praxis: The Cappella Paolina as the Holy Sepulcher,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 54 (2009): 61–82. 26. The standard study of the repertory in the 1640s and 1650s remains that of S. Saunders, “The Antecedents of the Viennese Sepolcro,” in A. Colzani, M. Padoan, and A. Luppi, eds., Relazioni musicali tra Italia e Germania nell’età barocca (Como, 1997), 61–83, along with G. Gruber, Das Wiener Sepolcro und Johann Joseph Fux (Graz, 1972). There is a brief mention of Holy Week repertory under Ferdinand III in A. H. Weaver, Sacred Music as Public Image for Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III (Burlington, VT, 2011), 83–84, along with a longer following discussion of Jesuit drama as a whole. Not due to the author’s fault, we are still awaiting the basic study of J. Riepe, “Giovanni Valentinis geistliche Dialoge und Sepolcro-Dichtungen und das Entstehen der Wiener Sepolcro-Tradition,” in the Kongreßbericht Giovanni Valentini (1583– 1649), a volume that has been promised for more than a decade now. The fundamental study of overall Habsburg musical piety, especially the Cross devotion so central to this repertory, remains S. Saunders, Cross, Sword and Lyre: Sacred Music at the Imperial Court of Ferdinand II of Habsburg (1619– 1637) (Oxford, 1995), and this study is deeply indebted to it. 27. This account is available in an excellent edition by K. Keller, M. Scheutz, and H. Tersch, Einmal Weimar-Wien und retour: Johann Sebastian Müller und sein Wienbericht aus dem Jahr 1660 (Vienna, 2005), here 76. The papal nuncio Carlo Carafa also mentioned the pilgrimage to Hernals and the royals’ visits to Forty Hours’ expositions in city churches that year; ASV, Germania, 167, no. 228, 27 March. 28. A 1687 performance of the Stephansdom play is chronicled by F. Hadamowsky, Mittelalterliches geistliches Spiel in Wien 1499–1718 (Vienna, 1981), 112–14, according to the description in the “Testarello Codex,” A-Wn Hs. 8227; the second half of this work, including songs and other music, was played at the Tomb in the cathedral. 29. This score (A-Wn, Mus. Hs. 18874) places the scene precisely at the Tomb, as in the first aria of Duritia Cordis (“The Heart’s Hardness”): “Quae scena tristis! / Saxis in istis, / funesta dolore, acerba maerore, / plena panditur atrore//What a sad spectacle, unfolding in these rocks, with sad pain, bitter sorrow, full of gloom.” 30. On 13 April 1686, the Jesuits performed Reconciliatio naturae humani generis cum autore suo, a drama in three scenes, largely Latin prose with three arias per scene (music by Staudt), in the presence of Leopold. On Holy Saturday 1693, the play at their Tomb was the Conductus funebris Christo mortuo in quinque condolentibus sensibus sacra metamorphosi adornatus, based on a contrafactum of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (!), in five scenes, again each with three arias by Staudt (both libretti in A-Wn A.406743). J. K. Page, Convent Music and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Vienna (Cambridge, 2014), 155–73, cogently discusses the sepolcri for the Ursulines.

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31. This latter piece (A-Wn, 302.732-B.M.) features Mary, the Magdalen, and Maria Cleophe together with John; as the order had moved into the chapel in 1700/01, the work was likely done soon afterward. 32. The Innsbruck libretti (La Sete, Il Transito di San Giuseppe, and the enormously favored L’Amor della Redenzione, whose original setting was by Leopold himself) are in A-Imf. 33. These pieces have been reconstructed by R. Kubik and W. Horn and are available on a 2011 recording (Supraphon SU 4068-2). For suggestive ideas on music and staging at the later eighteenth-century Tomb in the Klementinum, see R. Hugo, “Ist es notwendig, ein Heiliges Grab für die Aufführungen der Karfreitagsoratorien einzurichten?,” Musicologica Brunensia 49, no. 2 (2014): 181–96. 34. B. Rahimi, Theater State and the Formation of the Early Modern Public Sphere in Iran (Leiden, 2012), esp. 230–34, 245–53, and 268–271, for the increasing amount of spectacle as opposed to battles, and the personal role of the Shah, between 1641 and 1704 during Muharram in Ishfahan and elsewhere. 35. The standard work on theater sets and royal self-expression in seventeenthcentury Europe is A. Jarrard, Architecture as Performance in Seventeenth-Century Europe: Court Ritual in Modena, Rome, and Paris (Cambridge, 2003), esp. 70–82 on the construction of the Modenese court theater as an Estense ideological gesture. 36. On the distinctions between court and city milieux for the manifestations of Viennese sacred culture, see F. M. Eybl, Abraham a Sancta Clara: Von Prediger zu Schriftsteller (Tübingen, 1992), 43–52 and 113–17, which illuminates far more than its nominal subject. 37. The essential recent work on Minato’s life and career in Vienna is A. Noe, Nicolò Minato Werkverzeichnis (Vienna, 2004); Noe, “Biographische Notizen zum Hofdichter Nicolò Minato,” Biblos 49, no. 2 (2000): 317–25; Noe, “Das Testament des Hofdichters Nicolò Minato,” Biblos 50, no. 2 (2001): 315–17. On Draghi as composer and librettist, see Sala and Daolmi, “Quel novo Cario, quel divin Orfeo,” and esp. therein M. Niubò, “Le cappelle imperiali e la stagione praghese 1679–80,” 291–320. On Federici, see L. Ferretti, “Musica politica nei libretti dell’abate Domenico Federici,” ibid., 433–58. In terms of religious orders, the Jesuit influence in this repertory is often overstated; the order’s own tradition of Tomb music, as noted earlier, was somewhat different, and the resonances of sermons in sepolcri libretti involved a wide range of preachers. 38. Pierelli’s letter of 27 March 1660 declaring his libretto’s success was first cited by Seifert, Die Oper am Wiener Kaiserhof, 662, and reads: “La sera del Giovedì santo tenne poi nella Ces. Cappella, non senza intiero aggradim.to di queste M. M. e di tutta la corte, la mia rappresentaz.ne per musica già commandatami dalla M.tà dell’Imper.ce che [Eleonora, not the sepolcro] in breve dovrà portarsi, com’accennai a V. A., a Saltzburg” (i.e., his piece was staged Thursday, to the complete satisfaction of the court [at least according to Pierelli himself]; ASMod, Ambasciatori, Germania, 100). His earlier letter of 8 February (ASMod, ibid.) had noted that Eleonora had commissioned texts from him for the final Carnival celebrations and “alcune altre per la prossima Quadragesima,” and he hoped in a letter of 26 July to receive a post as a secretary to someone at court.

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However, the professional Giardini had remarked sarcastically in an earlier (7 March 1660) report from Vienna back to Alfonso IV d’Este that “Il Sig.re Perellio parimente mi ha favorito, e mi favorisce ogni giorno con i suoi [componimenti]. . . . egli è un giovano garbato, e tanto in credito e stima qui, dove pure adesso è impiegato in certe compositioni di Musica per ordine della Maestà dell’Imperatrice, e con tutto che sia obbligato d’assistere alle prove di questa Musica egli tralascia tutto q.lo servizio di V.A.” (i.e., Pierelli overwhelmed him with his poetry for music, using which as an excuse, he did nothing for the Modenese court; ibid.). Pierelli was not the official Modenese ambassador but simply an agent (evident from the documentation in ibid. and pace Deisinger, “Eleonora II. und die Gründung,” 50). 39. On him, see P. Naldini, Corografia ecclesiastica (Venice, 1700), 288, who does not mention his libretto. 40. For rhetorical considerations of laments in general (not specifically for Christ) in our period, see M. Lepper, Lamento: Zur Affekdarstellung in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main, 2008), 101–17, with emphasis on the withholding of “excessive” emotion, the tripartite overall structure of orations (laudatio, lamentatio, consolatio) taken from classical rhetorical theory (Menander Rhetor), and the necessary amount of repetition in the genre. The renunciation of intense emotion seems not applicable to the sepolcro repertory. 41. The Perugia Laus de Passione de Cruce is in V. de Bartholomaeis, ed., Laude drammatiche e rappresentazioni sacre (Florence, 1943), vol. 1, 232–43, while de Vecchio’s Opus “super exclamatione,” with cues for music and dated 1568, is published in D. Coppola, ed., Sacre rappresentazioni aversane del sec. XVI (Florence, 1959), 174–88. 42. The Pia rappresentatione della Passione (Naples: F. Ricciardo, 1713), a reworking of Morone’s text, was dedicated to the wife of the Austrian viceroy, Camilla Barbarino Borromei, in Naples. 43. Nicodemo: “Se la Divinità che stava unita / A quel corpo Hipostatico.” 44. G. F. Priuli, Delle grandezze di Maria Vergine (Padua, 1676), pt. 1, 493. 45. “Sicut in Mariae virginis utero nemo ante illum, nemo post illum conceptus est; ita in hoc monumento nemo ante illum, nemo post illum sepultus est// As in the womb of the Virgin Mary no one was conceived before Him, and no one after Him, so in this sepulcher there was no one buried before Him, and no one after Him” (Tractates on the Gospel of John; Latin from Patrologia Latina 35; trans. J. Gibb. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ser. 1, vol. 7 [Buffalo, NY, 1888]). 46. G. Franchini, Bibliosofia e memorie letterarie di scrittori francescani conventuali (Modena, 1693), 567–73, describes Lepori’s preaching talents at great length, mentioning also his time in Vienna and relations with the later Franciscan court preacher G. B. Luti, but omits his two libretti and dismisses his overall literary production. Lepori’s 1662 Magdalen begins: “O sasso, anzi, o cielo, / Che ‘l Sol mi nascondi, / Da un seno di gielo / Tu fiamme diffondi,” which derives from Panigarola’s “O cielo, o terra, o mare, che fate? . . . O sterpo, o sasso; anzi, o huomo diabolico, o diavolo” applied to Judas; Panigarola, “Ragionamento decimo terzo,” from Cento ragionamenti sopra la Passione (I cite from the Venice, 1587 edition, 344).

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47. The standard formulation of this was Emanuele Tesauro’s dismissal of Panigarola’s sacred aesthetics in his discussion of “concetti predicabili,” Il cannocchiale aristotelico (I use the Venice, 1669, ed., 381–82). 48. G. Silos, Opere di misericordia overo sermoni di purgatio (Naples, 1660), 700–701: “Parli quell’unguento, ch’ella [the Magdalen] consecrò alla sepoltura, e ai funerali del Salvadore . . . elle fè, che s’anticipasse per Madalena l’Eucharistia.” 49. [G. Pierelli], La Sampogna del pastor Elpireo (Lucca, 1669); this print is not paginated continuously, and so the sepolcri constitute pp. 7–40 of the larger section entitled “L’Iride poetica.” The very first piece is called “Il Sepolcro, ovvero il trionfo della vita eterna,” but Pierelli seems to have meant “Il Sepolcro” to refer to the whole section of four pieces, just as his “La Scena” is the title for his opera libretti earlier in the book. I have therefore called the first sepolcro libretto “Il Trionfo.” 50. The surviving drawing for the 1709 work, Theatermuseum, Min. 29/58b1, emphasizes Christ’s figure in Pilate’s chambers, thus underscoring the generic novelty of the libretto, another sign of the changes in Joseph I’s reign. 51. On Bernardoni’s earlier secular libretti, see now F. Lora, Nel teatro del Principe: i drammi per musica di Giacomo Antonio Perti per la villa medicea di Pratolino (Turin, 2016), 143–45. 52. On Cambi’s book, and Canto 28 in particular, see E. Ardissino, “Visio, vita animae: meditazioni con figure e poesia,” in E. Ardissino and E. Selmi, eds., Visibile teologia: Il libro sacro figurato in Italia tra Cinquecento e Seicento (Rome, 2012), 203–19. 53. B. Cambi, Vita dell’anima desiderosa di cavar frutto grande (I cite from the 1614 Rome ed., 486–517). 54. “Precede sinfonia divisa in tre luoghi nel sito ordinario; nella Gloria; e nell’Inferno: d’Instromenti e concerti differenti.” Minato, RS, 703 (preface) and 705 (set description). 55. The recent work of Çiğdem Özel has questioned some of the sepolcri proposed for Burnacini’s set designs, preferring to assign them to Forty Hours’ devotions; see her “Inszenierte Eucharistiefrömmigkeit unter Kaiser Leopold I.,” in Sommer-Mathis, Franke, and Risatti, Spettacolo barocco!, 143–50. Her larger study, “Ephemere Ausstattungen für die Eucharistieverehrung unter Kaiser Leopold I.” (master’s thesis, University of Vienna, 2015), makes the case for many of the designs as used in sacramental devotions as opposed to sepolcri (48–57), while she also raises problems of set construction in the Hofburgkapelle (43–47). She was also the first to trace some six of Burnacini’s drawings (including some not for sepolcri) to Küsel’s illustrated Bible compendium, Icones Biblicae (Augsburg, 1679, with a copy in A-Wn). Here I concentrate on those set designs whose descriptions match the libretti closely enough as to preclude doubt about their destination (listed in appendix 3). 56. The first, and in many ways basic, work on Burnacini was that of F. Biach-Schiffmann, Giovanni und Ludovico Burnacini: Theater und Feste am Wiener Hof (Vienna, 1931); some of her proposed destinations for the drawings have been challenged by Özel, partially with reference to Johann Georg Gumpp’s Tomb decorations for the Munich Theatinerkirche.

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57. In this sense, the combination of Tombs with celestial light effects discussed in convincing ways by A. Powell, “A Machine for Souls: Allegory before and after Trent,” in M. B. Hall and T. E. Cooper, eds., The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church (Cambridge, 2013), esp. 284–94, seems relevant here. 58. It was this image to which Leopold’s grandfather had turned when besieged by enemies at the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War in 1619. 59. On deixis in the operatic repertory, the standard work is M. Calcagno, From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi’s Staging of the Self (Berkeley, 2012), 32–37. 60. On Marino’s “fifth pipe” of Christ’s thirst as a Word, see the new edition of his Dicerie sacre, ed. E. Ardissino (Rome, 2014), 302–06, as well as G. Pozzi’s classic ed. thereof (Turin, 1960). Possibly Diego Nisseno’s set of sermons on Christ’s Thirst, La sete che patì Christo nostro redentore sulla Croce (Venice, 1633), also figured in the background. 61. This Roman reuse of the text and its later export to Modena are discussed by A. Morelli, La virtù in Corte: Bernardo Pasquini (1637–1710) (Lucca, 2016), 75–77 and 267–70, who suggests strongly that the original reworking of this Viennese libretto was composed by Pasquini in Rome, before the score’s further journey to Emilia in the wake of Francesco II d’Este’s visit to the Eternal City. 62. C. a Lapide, Commentaria in quatuor prophetas maiores (I use the Antwerp, 1625 ed., 312ff.). 63. These two libretti are in Minato, RS, 333–73. For Marino’s use of music and the Passion, see Ardissino, Dicerie sacre, 230–33 and 250–56; for the number symbolism of “seven” (e.g., in the Seven Seals of the Book in the Apocalypse, to return in Minato’s I Sette sigilli of 1694), ibid., 268–74. 64. The issues of preexistent ideas, allegory, and spiritual interpretation in the Spanish pieces are wonderfully discussed by B. Kurtz, The Play of Allegory in the Autos Sacramentales of Pedro Calderón de la Barca (Washington, DC, 1991), 184–204. Given that Margherita Teresa had seen some of these pieces in Madrid, the relevance of their methods to the sepolcri of 1667–72 is examined later. 65. On the generic norms (including the “framing” role of the opening/closing character) of the late Quattrocento, see P. Ventrone, Lo spettacolo religioso a Firenze nel Quattrocento (Milan, 2008), 161–82. The classic work on Minato’s operatic texts overall, including some Viennese pieces from around 1670, is N. Pirrotta, “Note su Minato” (1984), now in Poesia e musica (Florence, 1994), 195–230. 66. Besides the work of Deisinger on her patronage and cultural activity, a comparison with Eleonora (I) Gonzaga (Ferdinand II’s widow, 1598–1655) is given by M. Schnettger, “Die Kaiserinnen aus dem Haus Gonzaga: Eleonora die Ältere und Eleonora die Jüngere,” in B. Braun, K. Keller, and M. Schnettger, eds., Nur die Frau des Kaisers? Kaiserinnen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Vienna, 2016), 117–40. Although her Jesuit biographer Franz Wagner was dismissive of the intellectual aspects of her piety (cited in G. B. Intra, “Le due Eleonore Gonzaga imperatrici,” Archivio storico lombardo 18 [1891], pt. 2, 629–657, at 635), the amount of evidence for personal devotion, not least the sepolcri texts, argues otherwise. The two standard biographies of Leopold—J. P. Spielman,

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Leopold I of Austria [New Brunswick, NJ, 1977], and J. Bérenger, Léopold Ier (1640–1705), fondateur de la puissance autrichienne (Paris, 2004)—tend to deal with issues in the political realm, and the second is unfortunately highly imprecise in its discussion of the emperor’s musical practice. 67. “Fece ella [Maria Gonzaga] . . . la divotione della buonamorte ne’ giorni di Domenica doppo pranso . . . Consisteva questa divotione in una decorosa esposittione del Santissimo . . . poi si cantava solennemente il vespro in musica, obligandovi li musici stessi della ducal capella.” G. Gorzoni, Istoria del Collegio di Mantova della Compagnia di Giesù, ed. A. Bilotto and F. Rurale (Mantua, 1997), 198. Milan’s noble (and highly philo-Habsburg) Congregazione dell’Entierro (based around devotion to Christ’s burial, and later to sponsor G. B. Sammartini’s oratorios in the Settecento) had begun a similar paraliturgical event in the 1630s. To prepare herself for her matrimonial journey to Vienna in March 1651, Eleonora had anticipated a Good Friday devotion to Christ’s Blood and celebrated Bl. Luigi Gonzaga in Mantua’s Jesuit church (Gorzoni, Istoria, 225). For theatrical relations between Mantua and Vienna up to 1630, including several sacre rappresentazioni, see U. Artioli and C. Grazioli, eds., I Gonzaga e l’Impero: Itinerari dello spettacolo (Florence, 2005). 68. There are no records of such expenses in ASDiocMant, Capitolo di S. Barbara 474 (“Terminationes 1649–61”) nor the “Ordinanze capitolari” (of the cathedral) 438 (1646–74). 69. “Prattica di divozioni”; A-Wn, Cod. Ser. Nov. 3918; this was moved to the manuscript collection from the “Altbestand” in 1899. The Mantuan background to these prayers is evident in their inclusion of Bl. Osanna of Mantua in their Litany of the Saints, even though the formal beatification of this mystic would not take place until 1694, after Eleonora’s death. Possibly this work was mentioned in Eleonora’s letter to her mother of 26 October 1659, ASMant Gonzaga 437, f. 96. 70. Neither Opac-SBN Italy nor WorldCat gives any surviving edition by Varese (or any other Roman firm) with anything like this title between 1655 and 1665. 71. The possibility that Pietro Guadagni’s 1668 oratorio dedicated to her was performed is discussed later, while the 1683 piece (music by Pederzoli) dates to an obvious moment of crisis with the Ottoman war. The most updated biography of Pederz(u)oli (I have used the form “Pederzoli” found today among families near Chiari [Brescia], his place of origin) is by Deisinger, DBI 82 (2015; online at www.treccani.it). 72. Preface: “Dio omnipotente, Fontana di tutto il bene. Il Cielo da Vostra Divina Maestà arricchito di tante bellezze si sforza a raccontar la gloria Vostra, parendo ch’a questo fine tante lingue ne spuntino, quante stelle ci compariscono di notte. V’offerisco ancor’io queste puoche Orationi, composte da me e scritte di mia mano, in lode Vostra”; on the infant Mary (for 8 September, the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin): “Poi c’imagineremo d’havere questa bambina fra le braccia, e di baciare, i suoi occhi, le sue orecchie, la sua bocca, le sue mani, i suoi piedi, & il suo petto, ad ogni bacio dicendo una volta la Salve Regina.” My thanks to Rachel Brown for her ideas on this unusual passage, and to Nicoletta Pisu for checking the print edition of 1706 (I-TRc) as compared to the Vienna ms. 73. For a seemingly accurate description of her political talents and public persona (as well as her semi-eclipse after the arrival of Margherita Teresa), see

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the 1674 report of the Swedish envoy Esaias Pufendorf, Bericht über Kaiser Leopold, seinen Hof, und die österreichische Politik (Leipzig, 1862), 62. 74. The portrayal of her apolitical nature, as given to a visiting Modenese delegation in autumn 1659 (in the anonymous account “Frutti autunnali, overo relazione d’Alemagna,” in ASMod, Ambasciatori, Germania, 100, and accepted by Deisinger, “Mäzenin und Künstlerin,” 53, as accurate) was likely an official fiction; a ciphered letter (resolved in the original) from the anti-Spanish (i.e., pro-French) ambassador Giardini criticized the Spanish envoy,“il quale ha per così dire sposato il partito dell’Imperatrice; sono cose durissime, e pure bisogna dissimularle” (i.e., the Spaniard joined the empress’s faction; 29 May 1660 back to Modena; ASMod, Ambasciatori, Germania, ibid.). 75. The letters of the Lents 1659–61 back to Mantua, first to her mother and then to her brother, all in ASMant, Gonzaga, 437, ff. 20–430, do not mention sepolcri, although they often record the Saturday services of the “Five Sermons” (cinque prediche, e.g., on 5 April 1659, ibid., f. 40), which she attended. Her sheer maternal pride in her daughters was, however, quite evident, not least in their musical abilities. 76. In a letter of 16 April, the Modenese envoy Giuseppe Acerbotti noted “la continua occupazione havuta in questa trascorsa settimana santa nella capella della M.tà dell’Imperatrice, e particolarmen.te in tempo di Giubileo” (ASMod, Ambasciatori, Germania, 100); cf. also the report of the nuncio Carafa to Rome, “In questa settimana santa essendosi pubblicato il Giubileo concesso dalla Santità di N. S. hanno poi doppio motivo questi Augustissimi Prencipi havuta occasione d’essercitare gli atti della loro solita pietà con essempio molto notabile et ammiratione non ordinaria di tutti, havendo più d’una volta visitate a piedi le chiese e santi sepolcri col seguito di tutta la corte, e ministri di Prencipi,” ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Germania, 169, no. 300, 16 April 1661. A similar report from Carafa for 1660 is in ASV, Germania, 165, no. 245, 12 April, and for 1663, ASV, Germania, 173, no. 197, 24 March. Alexander’s Jubilee is described in M. Battaglini, Annali del sacerdozio e dell’Imperio (Venice, 1709), vol. 3, 246; possibly Innocent XI’s similar, anti-Ottoman Jubilee decreed in August 1683 formed a background for the two sepolcri of 1684 and their emphasis on healing, discussed in chapter 4. 77. The list of Eleonora’s musicians is found in Seifert, “Die Musiker der beiden Kaiserinnen Eleonora Gonzaga” (1982), now in Texte zur Musikdramatik, 633–63. The next surviving score for Eleonora was the 1669 L’Humanità redenta (text and music by Draghi), whose bass role of Nicodemo is considerably less extrovert, and intended probably for a different singer, such as Carlo Veterano or Bernardo Bartolini. Possibly Pierelli’s polemical poem addressed to a bass singer who had deliberately ruined the poet’s verse by singing it badly (La Sampogna, subsection “Gli Scherzi,” 145) was targeted at Draghi, in a case of court rivalry among those producing texts; the role of Giuda in Vismarri’s oratorio is also for an accomplished bass. This oratorio’s cover dating of “1690” is probably a generation too late, stylistically, for the music. 78. [G. Liliani], La disperazione di Giuda, poemetto del Sig. Torquato Tasso (Venice, 1627); G. B. Manni, Quaresimale primo (Venice, 1681), 522 (in the context of Mary’s viewing her Son on the Cross).

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79. The only biography of Scarano seems to be that of D. L. de Vincentiis, Storia di Taranto (Taranto, 1878), vol. 1, 39–40; in 1666 he was recommended by Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino to the Spanish ambassador in Paris, the Marquis de la Fuente, but then returned home to Taranto, where he died in 1671. 80. T. Erhardt and A. Noe have done an excellent edition of Bertali’s 1661 Il Pentimento, in Antonio Bertali: Dramatische Sakralwerke (Graz, 2014; Denmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, 156), xi–xiii and 60–110. 81. Evidently Leopold did not value Tricarico as Eleonora did, and the composer’s lack of modal propriety might have something to do with his distaste. 82. To her brother Carlo, 18 June 1658: “Ho sentita pena non ordinaria in tutto questo corso di tempo,” ASMant, Gonzaga 436, f. 463. Later in life, e.g., in her letter back to Mantua, ASMant, Gonzaga 438 of 24 October 1676, her script became so large that she must have had vision problems. 83. E.g., Calori’s letter of 3 January 1660, ASMant, Gonzaga 501, f. 45. 84. On other operas and serenatas incorporating representations of the various arts, see A. Sommer-Mathis, “Musica, Pittura e Poesia. Musikalische Mythen aus der Antike in den Libretti des Wiener Kaiserhofes,” Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Museums 11 (2009): 129–53. 85. On these pieces, see the fundamental studies of A. Morelli, “La circolazione dell’oratorio italiano nel Seicento,” Studi musicali 26 (1997): 105–86, and Il nobilissimo oratorio della Chiesa Nuova (Rome, 2001). 86. “Tutte l’altre hore del tempo sono state le [orazioni] mentali di S. M. in Chiesa, essercitandosi spiritual.te in meditar i misterii dell’humana redentione rappresentati in flebili, e divotiss.mi oratorii da’ musici esquisiti dell’imperial Capella” (ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Germania, 180, no. 276, 24 April). The pieces that year would have been Sbarra/Sances’s Le Lacrime di San Pietro (Friday; only five singers) and Federici/Ziani’s Gli affetti pietosi (Thursday; seven singers).

2. devotional strategies 1. In the preserved repertory up to Leopold’s death in 1705, the only oratorios that deal directly with the Passion are San Pietro piangente (1665); La Potenza della Croce (1674); the two pieces on Marian sorrow, Il Cuore Appassionato (1674) and L’Amor della Redentione (1677, the latter with many repeats); and La Vittima d’Amore (1704), this last imported from Modena (1690). On the Viennese background for devotional literature just before 1660, see Noe’s excellent new study, Giambattista Marinos Wort-Zucht-Peitschen und die Gegenreformation in Wien um 1655 (Vienna, 2016), esp. 91–148 comparing the religious state of Paris of Marino’s original edition and of Vienna a generation later, along with his catalogue of devotional works printed locally in the 1640s through 1650s (149–59). 2. As Aquinas was popularized in an anonymous manual for a Christian death: “Il peccato commesso da nostro primo parente fu infinito, perche fu offesa fatta a Dio infinito; e benchè fu commesso da persona finita, nondimeno perchè risguardava Dio, però [i.e., perciò] fu infinito,” Arte di far ben morire (Naples, 1631), 77.

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3. H. C. Ehalt, Ausdrucksformen absolutistischer Herrschaft: Der Wiener Hof im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1980); for German parallels, V. Bauer, Hofökonomie: Der Diskurs über den Fürstenhof in Zeremonialwissenschaft, Hausväterliteratur und Kameralismus (Vienna, etc., 1997), 30–45. The archival holdings of the Hofstaat are now summarized at http://www.oesta.gv.at/site /6662/default.aspx (accessed 2 February 2017). 4. On this, see H. Rudolph, “Kirchengeschichtliche Beobachtungen zu J. J. Becher,” in G. Frühsorge and G. F. Strasser, eds., Johann Joachim Becher (1635–1682) (Wiesbaden, 1993), 173–96, esp. 192–96. 5. Giustizia: “Son miei trionfi ancora,/ poiche ciascun di questi / m’è giusto debitore / di lagrime e dolore. A3: A te, di contanti / su’l banco del suolo / farassi del duolo / lo sborso di pianti.” 6. “Al comun Dio pietoso, / non men pronto d’Abramo, / in pianto doloroso / de le viscera nostre / i parti offriamo. / Sborsiam da gli occhi fuori / il capital del core / in moneta di lagrime correnti. / Ne sia tra penitenti/ ch’avaro osi tenerle. / Sol si compra il perdon / con queste perle.” 7. There is a brief discussion of this piece in M. Grassl, “Das Jüngste Gericht im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” in C. Ottner, ed., Apokalypse Symposion 1999 (Vienna, 2001), at 84–86. 8. A distant echo of this approach can be heard in the chorus of Metastasio’s La Passione di Gesù Cristo, “Quanto costa il tuo delitto.” 9. More traditional allegorical personages continued to appear in the sepolcro (e.g., Minato’s 1685 Prezzo [“La Misericordia Eterna”]) and oratorio repertory (e.g., Minato’s 1691 Il Crocefisso per gratia [“La Speranza in Dio”]). 10. O. dell’Assunta, La sublime contemplazione e sicura pace in Christo Giesù crocefisso (Rome, 1700), 40ff. 11. This scene is Burnacini’s “Female Figure with the Eucharist in a Palm Tree,” Theatermuseum, Min. 29/29/b2, which lacks the actual figure of the male Sponsus and the perspective distance in Cupeda’s description. 12. W. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt am Main, 1972), 213 and 222ff., respectively. One detail that links Silesian tragedy to the Habsburgs is Lohenstein’s dedication of his play Ibrahim Sultan (1673) to Leopold and Claudia on their wedding. 13. The 1702 Le profezie adiempite thematizes prophecy and the Passion. 14. Here Jeremiah eschews any reference to “his” Lamentations, despite their presence in the week’s Office. 15. On Abraham a Sancta Clara’s construction of knowledge as seen in his sermons, using similar compendia, see Eybl, Abraham a Sancta Clara, 125–75. 16. On this, see the translation and notes by J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz and C. Hill, Ambrose of Milan: Political Letters and Speeches (Liverpool, 2005), 174–203, at 175. 17. Girolamo Bosio, La trionfante e gloriosa croce (Rome, 1610), bk. 2, ch. 3, 136–42; this volume was also in the imperial collections. 18. Cupeda’s 1702 Le profizie adiempite gives a brief reference to Lam 1:11c in the voice of Sinagoga/Lady Jersualem (“Considera, Signore, / quanto alla gente fatta son vile”). For the 1711 piece, see below.

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19. Sinligkeit: “Die Barmhertzigkeit Gottes/Wehret ewig/Sie wird uns allzeit gewehren/Wann wirs begehren [in original: ‘1 Esdra 3.11’]. Geist des Gewissens: Vertrau nicht zuvill / Er ist nur gnaedig wenn er will. . . . [aria:] Wie die Erde ohne Regen / und der Regen ohne Erde / wenig Segen / bringt der Heerde / also frucht die Gnad ohn Will / und der Will ohn Gnad nicht vill.” 20. Apparently there are no German-language pieces for 1680 and 1681 because of the court’s presence in Prague and Linz, respectively, in those years. There is an excellent overall discussion of the German texts in I. Scheitler, Deutschsprachige Oratorienlibretti von den Anfängen bis 1730 (Paderborn, 2005), 247–59. 21. “Die Lehrer der Heiligen Schrift lehren/dass ein jeglicher Mensch nachdem er in eine schwaere Sind gefallen/eine gnugsame Gnad von Gott habe widerum daraus zuerstehn/allein musse er diser genusgamen Gnad/so er von Gott hat/auch seiner seits mitwuercken/. . . dass er nemlich seiner gnugsamb habenden Gnad mitwuercke/dem andern aber dieselbe nicht gebe mag (nach der Lehr dess H. August in dem Buch von dem Kinder=Tauff).” 22. “Das Lamb ist das Lamb Gottes/welches durch seinen Todt das Buch dess Lebens/so mit den siben Siglen der siben haubt=Sinden versiglet gewesen/ eroeffnet/und nunmehro in der himmlischen Glory auff dem Thron der Gnaden sitzend berait ist/alle und jede buesfertige Sinder darein zuschreiben. Und gleich wie zu einem Zeichen dess Bunds . . . der Regen=bogen. Also ist es in dem Neuen der zarte Fronleichnam Christi unter dem hochwuerdigen Altar Geheimnuss . . . das Christus der Herr welchen wir [essen] durch sein Heyligen Grab uns den freyen Zuetritt zu den Goettlichen Gnaden=Thron eroeffnet. Heb 4.16.” In a “mystical” reading of Revelations 5:1, Lapide had summarized a secondary (and unnamed) tradition in which the Seals were a “chirograph” of Adam’s sin (the phrase is taken from the Easter Vigil Exultet), i.e., the offense of God (Lapide, Commentarius in Apocalypsin S. Johannis [I cite from the 1698 Antwerp ed., 101]). 23. R. Höfstetter and I. Rainer have produced a modern edition of this piece; see J. H. Schmelzer: Stärcke der Lieb, sepolcro (Vienna, 1998). 24. The reference to the Canticle in the 1684 piece is discussed later; halfway halfway through the 1695 La Trasfigurazione, Lo Spirto d’Elia provides a more audible citation to Cant 2:10–14 in his invitation to the Christian soul/dove (“Veni, colomba mea”) to rest in the clefts of Christ’s Wounds, while the biblical book runs through Cupeda’s 1701 sepolcro as noted earlier. 25. In all the manuscript scores, recitatives/arias composed by the emperor in pieces otherwise by Sances, Schmelzer, Draghi, or Ziani are marked “Di S. M. C.,” which resolves to “Di Sua Maestà Cesarea.” 26. The materials are in A-Wn; Keldorfer later (1918) published his reworking as his op. 117. He eliminated the original’s cross-relations and dissonances in movements 5 and 7 (the angel’s aria “Jesus, der nichts wusst” and Peter’s “O du scharffe Cron von Dornen,” the latter another case of devotion to the Thorn). A later note in the April 1918 Musica divina reported another performance on Holy Thursday that year in the Elisabethkirche under Keldorfer. In terms of ticket prices, in 1916 one US dollar was worth about eight Kronen. 27. Possibly Burnacini’s drawing has to do with this piece (appendix 3).

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28. “Wie wohltuend wirkt aber an dem Werk dieser einfache Zweistrophenbau der Arien! Welche Wonne, in einer alten Komposition einmal von der entsetzlichen dreiteiligen Arie verschont sein zu können (die erst 1693 aufkam)! Diese grässliche dreiteilige Arie mit ihren unerbittlichen Ritornellen und dem erbarmungs-und endlosen Nachspiel!” Ironically, the writer must not have known that Leopold himself would write da capo arias in his later years, in the 1705 Le due passioni among other pieces. 29. All these reviews are available on ANNO (anno.onb.ac.at; accessed 14 January 2017); the “Neuigkeits-Welt-Blatt” of 6 May, p. 9; the “Deutsches Volksblatt” of 4 May, p. 7; the “Neue Freie Presse” of 4 May, p. 8; and the “Reichspost” of 5 May, p. 8. 30. The devotion of the nobility, as opposed to the court, has only recently received scholarly treatment; cf. K. Keller, M. Scheutz, and P. Mata, eds., Adel und Religion in der frühneuzeitlichen Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna, 2017). 31. “Dolor: Duol, del mio più vehemente, / non si creda, che ci sia. / Amor: Del mio amor, amor più ardente / Non trovossi, non vi fù. /A2: Son la doglia / l’amore di Maria-Giesù. /Dolor (aria con viole): De la Vergine il martire / d’ogni duolo fù maggior / l’impossibil da soffrire, / fù possibile al suo cor. / Amor: Per volersi prender cura / de’ mortali il Redentor; / l’impossibil per Natura, / fù possibile per Amor.” The German reads: “Der Schmerz: Keine Qual ist, die nicht weichet / Dieser die da fuehlt mein Hertze./Die Liebe: Keine Lieb ist, welche gleichet/Jener, die ich stens ueb./A2: Ich bin der Maria Schmertze-des Erloesers Lieb./ Der Schmerz: Uber alle Achmetz und Plagen/Ware der Jungfrauen Pein:/ Was unmoeglich zu ertragen/wurde moeglich ihr allein./Die Liebe: Abzuwenden die Gefahre/Die den Menschen hat gebuehrt/Der sonst nicht Leid=faehig ware/Bloss auss Lieb Leid=faehig wird.” The translation is remarkable for its fidelity to Minato’s meters, and the differences in meaning suggest that analysis of these texts should be based on the Italian originals and not the German versions. 32. Rimorso: “Volgiti a questo sasso, ove sen giace / il tuo Dio sepolito, / e mira, se per te s’è impicciolito. / No’l capiscon le sfere, / no’l contermina il loco / non v’è dimension, a cui soccomba. / Rimorso and Respiscienza: E per te sta qui chiuso in picciol Tomba//Turn to this rock, where your buried God rests, and see if He was not diminished for you. The [planetary] spheres do not contain Him; no place bounds Him; there is no dimension to which He gives way. And for you here He is enclosed in a small Tomb.” 33. “Commemorazione: De la morte di Giesù, peccatori / è questo il dì . . . Il Rito: Ecco secondo il rito / della Chiesa Cattolica al Sepolcro / del Redentor Giesù l’annuo tributo / di funebre apparato//O sinners, this is the day of Jesus’s death. . . . Behold, according to the practice of the Catholic Church, the annual tribute of a funereal construction at the Tomb of Jesus the Redeemer.” 34. This parallels Mary’s special perception at moments of other sepolcri. 35. The levels of mystical ascent according to Giovanni Bona are treated by S. Stroppa, Sic arescit: Letteratura mistica del Seicento italiano (Florence, 1998), 37–56. That the sepolcro’s Soul continues to enjoy mystic vision during its rapture argues against the kind of imageless experience present in P. M. Petrucci’s writings of the time, discussed in ibid., 79–101.

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36. E.g., in Lapide, Commentarium in quatuor prophetas maiores, 327. The Soul’s second stanza begins, “Il monarca del tutto / Il Signor del Empireo / Il Re de gl’Elementi, / Fatto l’huom dei dolori, e de i tormenti? / Fatto l’huom de i . . ./ E de i . . .//The monarch of all, the Lord of the heavens, the King of the Elements, has become the Man of sufferings and of torments? Become the man of . . . and of . . .,” as she is enraptured [“Resta l’Anima Giusta rapita in Estasi”]. 37. Among the short musical dialogues in G. Bartolomei’s (Smeducci) Dialoghi sacri musicali (Florence, 1657, but written earlier), “L’Estasi di S. Ignazio Loiola” opens with its protagonist already enraptured, listening to God the Father. Nicolò Monte Mellini’s short oratorio Dio in estasi d’amore (Perugia, 1696) refers to the ecstacy of its character “Amor Divino,” while G. L. Lulier’s oratorio S. Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (libretto: B. Pamphilj, Rome 1687, with a Viennese repeat in 1697) treats only the saint’s vocation. 38. For instance, F. A. Bevilacqua’s 1693 Roman oratorio, L’innocenza gloriosa (libretto in I-Rn) in honor of Theresa, makes no mention of her rapture but only of her decision for religious life. The libretto of the Viennese Carmelites’ oratorio on the saint, Le Sacre visioni, was by Maria Antonia Signorini, with music by Maria Anna von Raschenau; cf. Page, Convent Music and Politics. 39. As in the opera repertory, Draghi was active as a librettist for sepolcri before composing pieces, a trait that makes his rise through the court’s musical hierarchy all the more remarkable. 40. The idea of pilgrims to the Tomb would be taken up by S. B. Pallavicino’s 1742 Dresden libretto, I Pellegrini al sepolcro di Nostro Signore, which uses completely nonbiblical characters. 41. In this piece, the Mother is given her own scene (5) in dialogue with the Magdalen, while her first appearance elsewhere seems to be a generation later in the eponymous oratorio by Girolamo Gigli (Siena, 1685); she comes up again in Pietro Pariati’s 1714 work for Vienna, La Donna forte. 42. The presence of the latter figure, none of whose extensive hagiography ever placed him on Calvary or at the Tomb, might have been a way to prepare the Viennese court for the kind of sanctoral veneration that Margherita’s Spanish entourage would bring along after their arrival at the end of the following year. 43. This piece is available in a modern facsimile, ed. J. L. Johnson (“The Italian Oratorio,” 9; New York, 1987). 44. E.g., the interaction of angels with Peter is limited to his time in chains in Rome in two standard works on the growing cult of the Guardian Angel: Andrea Vittorelli’s De angelorum custodia (Padua, 1605) and Jeremias Drexel’s Horologium auxiliaris tutelaris angeli (Munich, 1623), both present in various editions in the imperial collections. 45. Evidently Pierelli was being eased out of all textual duties, as his version of Atalanta was not used, replaced by that of Minato, who arrived in summer 1669. 46. Letter no. 46 of 25 February, ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Germania, 184: “In pochi mesi habbiamo veduto quello, che appena può raccontarsi di sciagure un secolo intiero”; see also the missives nos. 53, 54, and 57, concerning Eleonora, the condolences of Pope Clement IX on Ferdinand Wenzel’s death, and

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the two weeks of the court’s preparations to move to Wiener Neustadt. In addition, the Spanish court letrado Juan Silvestre Salvo wrote two discourses of consolation that winter, one on Ferdinand Wenzel’s death and one on the Hofburg fire, probably for Margherita and her Spanish Hofstaat (A-Wn, Cod. 10120 and 10007). 47. Candidates for 1668 oratorio performances proposed in the literature have included Draghi’s La Giuditta (score in A-Wn, although the only basis seems to be the title page’s naming the composer as Eleonora’s vice-maestro [which he was from 1662 to 1668]), and what seems to be a lost 1668 reprint of Ippolito Benivoglio’s text Oratorio del Giuditio, mentioned by Deisinger, “Wiener Aufführungen von Oratorien aus ober- und dem nördlichen Mittelitalien 1665–1705,” Musicologica Brunensia 49, no. 1 (2014: 53). This latter, however, would have been simply a repeat of this piece, with music by Legrenzi, first performed at court in 1665 (printed libretto in I-Vnm) and noted by S. Monaldini, L’Orto dell’Esperidi: Musici, attori e artisti nel patrocinio della famiglia Bentivoglio (Lucca, 2000), xviii. Another possibility (Seifert, Die Oper am Wiener Kaiserhof, 463) is Sant’Elena with a text on the saint finding Cross relics—exactly the dowager empress’s situation after the fire—by Pietro Guadagni, but this undated, and sloppily produced, edition’s title page (D-HEu) says only “dedicato” to Eleonora, not “cantato.” Noe’s overview of the repertory (Geschichte der italienischen Literatur, vol. 1, 230–32) considers all the works of 1668 as representing a “monumentale Wende.” 48. Aloisi, ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Germania, no. 90 of 31 March, also reported on the Habsburgs’ piety even in Neustadt during the traditional Holy Thursday foot washing of twelve elderly men and women, here done twice, once by Eleonora and once by Leopold/Margherita, another sign of the presence of “Dio humanato” in the week’s rituals. Pietro Ziani must have set Pierelli’s text that spring, since his winter 1668 request to Eleonora for support for his Venetian citizenship application (so that he could acquire the benefice of Arlesica) seems to have been granted without reference to any interruption of employment (HHStA, Dispacci di Germania, 132, pp. 7–10); he left the court later that year. 49. J. Svoboda, Die theresianische Militär-Akademie zu Wiener Neustadt und ihre Zöglinge (Vienna, 1894), vol. 1, xxiv, lists St. George’s dimensions as 32 by 19 by 15 meters, only slightly smaller than the imperial chapel. 50. Sbarra’s death on 20 March 1668, given in all the literature since G. Sforza’s first studies of the librettist in the Ottocento, is not borne out by the city’s Totenbeschauprotokoll for 1667–69 under that date (available online at https://www.wien.gv.at/actaproweb2/benutzung/archive.xhtml?id=Ser+++++00 000354ma8Invent#Ser_____00000354ma8Invent, accessed 30 July 2017), nor under the Sterbebuch 1648–1755 (p. 4 for 1668) of the Augustinerkirche, nor the Sterbebuch 1631–1699 of the Michaelerkirche for 1668 (although there seems to be a gap in this last source between 11 March and 2 May; both these latter available at the ICARUS Matricula site, http://icar-us.eu/cooperation /online-portals/matricula/, accessed 3 February 2017). Neither does he appear in the Sterbebuch 1656–1682 of the main parish church of Wiener Neustadt in March 1668 (visible at the same Matricula site; accessed 4 February 2017); still,

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the death records of both the Schottenstift (where Sbarra’s son Filippo would be living in 1688) and the Stephansdom are missing for that year. 51. Sbarra, Il Tributo de gl’elementi . . . Idillio musicale (Innsbruck, 1663), in which the river Inn stands in for Water. For a study of the Elements’ material culture and their role in Savoyard festival theater, see C. Santarelli, La gara degli elementi: Acqua, aria, terra e fuoco nelle feste sabaude (1585–1699) (Lucca, 2010), with reference to the Parma spectacle of the same title (1666). These festive pieces, however, are secular. 52. Piatti, Trattato, 364–66. 53. In the I-Mb copy of the 1682 libretto, two later scribes ended “Atto primo” variously on f. B1v and f. B3, respectively. For a comparison of Passion thematics in this piece to those of Venetian oratorios, see M. Girardi, “Al sepolcro di Cristo: Una poetica consuetudinaria: Religio, prassi, devozione, rappresentazione nei riti oratoriali del Venerdì Santo, a Vienna e a Venezia,” in Il tranquillo seren del secol d’oro: Musica e spettacolo musicale a Venezia e a Vienna fra Seicento e Settecento (Milan, 1984), 127–196 54. The unusual metric choice anticipates Peter’s penance aria in the 1678 Memorie dolorose, discussed in chapter 4. 55. R. Bellarmine, Explanatio in Psalmos (here Paris, 1612), 851; similarly Simon de Muis, Commentarium . . . in omnes psalmos Davidis, in Opera omnia (Paris, 1650), vol. 1, 674. 56. Perhaps the 1674 performance was meant to commemorate Margherita, who had died about a year before, although Claudia Felicitas had already married Leopold in the meantime. That winter/spring seems to have witnessed little activity from Minato. 57. “Porro illa, lachrymosa, a nobis . . . postulat, ut Filio suo . . . vel publicas de more, vel ex amore privatas, ad aram compassionis exequias faciamus, et in centro cordis nostri, compassivi doloris pala, foveam excavemus; ut in ea examine Christi corpus sepeliamus. Vespillonem agat amor, praeficam compassio, campanatorem, pectoris percussio, cantorem gemitus, organistam oratio. Parochus sit pietas, sacellanus, lamentatio. Magister ludi, gratiarum actio”; L. Crasius, Prodromus libri vitae (Vienna, 1667), 31. In Roman antiquity, the vespillo was someone who accompanied bodies to the grave, while the praefecta was a paid female mourner. 58. A-Wn, Cod. Ser. nova 4270. 59. “Dell’Imperatore, il quale con ammirabile virtù d’altra ricreatione più non gode che di discorsi riservati, poesie, e musica, componendo egli pure in italiano, e ponendo in musica eccellentemente” from Alvise Molin’s letter of 13 March, HHStA, Dispacci di Germania, 116, p. 51. 60. That this libretto was not given to Sances for composition (Bertali’s last score had been done for 1665, and he must have been infirm), as the 1666 Le Lacrime di San Pietro had been, suggests Leopold’s personal takeover of the music. Given that the string players came with the royals to Wiener Neustadt, Sances must have been present as well; both the ceremonial documents and the Ältere Zeremoniellakte files in the HHStA omit detailed mention of ritual life during the stay in Neustadt.

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61. As a composer, Leopold was not always this adventuresome; the 1682 Sig des Leydens is almost entirely in mollis around C or closely related pitches. This may have been due to its primary audience, the teenage Maria Antonia. 62. For Venetian opera libretti of the period, the standard source for metric use and shifts is P. Fabbri, Il secolo cantante: Per una storia del libretto d’opera in Italia nel Seicento, rev. ed. (Rome, 2003), 123–54.

3. social others and selves 1. The standard explanation of the hidden identity of secular opera characters is found in Seifert, Die Oper am Wiener Kaiserhof, 248–73, considering largely repertory from the 1670s, and in Seifert, “Kaiser Leopold I. im Spiegel seiner Hofoper,” now in Texte zur Musikdramatik, 401–12. 2. Lapide, in Pentateuchum Moysis Commentaria (I use the Paris, 1626 ed., 805); F. Förner, Palma triumphalis miraculorum ecclesiae catholicae (Ingolstadt, 1620), 507. 3. G. Gualdo Priorato, Continuazione dell’historia di Lepoldo Cesare (Vienna, 1676), gave a pro-Habsburg account of the rebellion and its severe punishment in 1671. On this most recently, see G. Michels, “Ready to Secede to the Ottoman Empire: Habsburg Hungary after the Vasvár Treaty (1664–1674),” AHEA: E-Journal of the American Hungarian Educators Association 5 (2012): http:// dx.doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2012.69 (accessed 14 January 2017). On the background, see G. Wagner, “Der Wiener Hof, Ludwig XIV, und die Anfänge der Magnatenverschwörung,” Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 16 (1963): 95–150. My thanks to Professor Michels for illuminating the issues around the Hungarian rebellion. The issue of conspiracy would not come up again in the local repertory until the allegorical scherzo, La Congiura del Vizio contro la Virtù (?Cupeda/M. A. Ziani, probably 1700). 4. Maria: “Ah, che questo non solo,/Ma una gran parte ancora/Di quelli che, irrigate/Di Christiano libor’ hauran le chiome,/Portando solo il nome/D’esser del Figlio mio fida seguace.” 5. Il Giusto: “In tua mano, ch’è mano vitale,/Nulla temo la sferza amorosa;/ Ma quest’alma, ch’è un’alma assai frale,/In sue forze affidarsi non osa,” followed by the madrigale “S’affidi pure in Dio la tua speranza:/A chi soffre pe’l Ciel, dà il Ciel costanza.” The concept of “constancy” would of course become central to eighteenth-century Habsburg self-projection, not least in the 1723 opera for Charles VI, Costanza e fortezza. 6. F. Sbarra, La Tirranide dell’Interesse (Lucca, 1653). The issue of Habsburg anti-Machiavellianism in the secular operas was first raised in an unfinished dissertation by P. (Firca) Arzaga. 7. La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, no. 39: “L’Interêt parle toutes les langues. . . .” 8. The fundamental difference between Machiavelli and Botero was outlined by M. Senellart, Machiavélisme et Raison d’État: XIIe–XVIIIe siécle (Paris, 1989). 9. This separation of characters also anticipates that of Il Lutto three years later.

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10. “Interesse: Il più stimato Nume, / Ch’hoggi s’adori in Terra, / Il potente Interesse / Che d’Innocenze oppresse, in Pace e in Guerra / Ha sopra ogn’altri il vanto . . . [Aria; Invidia, stanza 1:] “Del gran Nazzareno . . . [Interesse, st. 2:] Ma l’alta cagione, / Che l’ha condennato, / Fu sol la Ragione, / che addussi di stato.” 11. For all that scene 3’s contraposition of Judas and Peter owes something to tradition, scene 5’s dialogue between the traitor and the Magdalen is unexpected. It would, however, recur in Abraham a Sancta Clara’s use of Judas as the figure of all evil; Judas der Ertz-Schelm (Salzburg, 1686), pt. 1, 443–57. 12. For a balanced view of Abraham’s anti-Jewish rhetoric and its social context, see Eybl, Abraham a Sancta Clara, 312–26. A set of sermons dedicated to Eleonora characterized Interesse as central to the Scribes’ and Pharisees’ condemnation of Christ (F. A. Spinola, Prediche quadragesimali [Genoa, 1667], “Predica 34” on Matthew 21, which claimed “se da’ Farisei con ingiustissimo decreto dettato da interesse politico fu stabilita in Concilio la morte di lui” [Christ]). 13. “O popolo spietato / E come non ti desti / Dal tuo sonno profondo? E non t’avvidi / Che quegli che uccidesti / È il Redentor del mondo?//O impious people, how did you not wake from your deep slumber? And did you not realize that He Whom you killed is the world’s Redeemer?” 14. The standard history of this moment for the Mantuan community is S. Simonsohn, History of the Jews in the Duchy of Mantua (New York, 1977), 51–66. 15. The documents are given in A. F. Pribram, Urkunden und Akten zur Geschichte der Juden in Wien (Vienna, 1918), vol. 1, 225–44; the story of the two-part expulsion is in B. Staudinger’s “Die Zeit der Landjuden und der Wiener Judenstadt 1496–1670/71,” in E. Brugger, M. Keil, and H. Wolfram, eds., Geschichte der Juden in Österreich (Vienna, 2006), here 330–37. 16. In the Friday 1660 piece, “Ma voi ch’uccideste / il Dio che vi creò, / senza pupille meste / fede a l’aspro tormento / che v’apre il pentimento, / no, non havrete / se non piangete” seems a call to Jews (as opposed to everyone) to repent; Pierelli’s one anti-Jewish reference comes at the end of La Gara della Pietà (?1663), when the Virgin and the Magdalen seek to outdo each other in mourning; and the 1661 Gara includes Longino’s self-exculpatory “Per contentar gl’Hebrei / aprii col la mia lancia / il bel [text rewritten] costato / del buon Giesù spirato//To satisfy the Hebrews, I opened the lovely side of the dead good Jesus by using my Lance,” which goes beyond the noncausal description of the Wound given in John 19:27. 17. Marta: “Ebraica crudeltà, / rendimi il mio Signor . . . ,” with Lazaro’s scene ending “onde [ms. libretto reads: ‘l’empio Giudeo / vegga confuso hormai’] confus’ hormai / vegga l’empio Giudeo, che vita e morte / traggon solo da te la propria sorte.” 18. “Empii Giudei, / de l’innocente Agnello / non satollovi il sangue / che pur spargeste a torto? / Ancora l’odio resta [libretto: ‘vive’], e Christo è morto!” 19. San Giovanni Battista: “E da quai furie mai / siete voi spinti, o perfidi Giudei, / a sdegni così rei? / [a3]: Che ti fè il buon Giesù, popolo ingrato?” 20. Burnacini’s set design (not preserved in drawing form) for this piece was a compendium of many others, including the Sacrifice of Abraham, the Bronze Serpent, Jonah (another reference to Leopold), and the Apocalypse’s Lamb plus four winged animals, all of which had appeared in pieces since 1690. The text

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opens with Blind Paganism mocking the Chained Synagogue, and then the standard reproaches directed at the Synagogue by Divine Justice and Love because of her rejection of Christ. 21. Bernardoni’s 1705 preface refers to Christ’s sufferings as “l’atrocità de’ tormenti, di cui lo caricò la perfidia Giudaica,” while the 1709 Gesù flagellato stages a dialogue between a leader of the Jews and Pilate in which the former calls for crucifixion. 22. On these pieces, see Morelli, La virtù in corte, 251ff. 23. Marracci, Refutatio Alcorani, dedication and (on Christ’s Divinity) 208–36. 24. This drawing has sometimes been misidentified in the literature, but Cupeda’s description makes it clear: “Scopertosi il SS.mo Sepolcro, si vede l’Apparenza d’un Mare tempestoso, col Cielo tutto coperto di tenebre, senz’altra luce, che di fulmini. Nel mezzo del Mare sarà un Vascello co’l suo Nocchiero in punto d’esser inghiottito dalla tempesta; e di lontano su’l lido alcuni huomini, e donne in atto di mirare, e compatirne il naufragio.” The theme of shipwreck in connection with sin had been anticipated in the previous year’s Le profizie adiempite, in which the standard Holy Week Office quote on encountering storms at sea from Ps. 68 (“Veni in altitudinem maris”; an allegory of Christ’s sufferings) was paraphrased by Cupeda. 25. Although Ziani’s first three scores (1701–3) do not survive, already Il Mistico Giobbe of 1704 introduced a trombone obbligato in an aria (Consolatione’s reminiscence of Isaiah, “Quel sembiante così bello,” f. 35). For an overview of the composer’s sepolcro production, see now J. Prominczel, “Die sogenannten Sepolcri von Marc’Antonio Ziani,” Musicologica Brunensia 49 (2014; online). 26. Keller, Scheutz, and Tersch, Einmal Weimar-Wien, 123, and especially A. Jendorff, “Katholische Barockfrömmigkeit im Spiegel des Müllerschen Diariums,” ibid., 211–29. 27. A poem on his life and his Mantuan connections was dedicated to an earlier Gonzaga (by marriage) duchess, Eleonora de’ Medici: G. Magagnati, La vita di S. Longino cavalier mantoano (Venice, 1605). This work (pp. 9–11) makes Longinus, not Joseph of Arimathea, responsible for having convinced Pilate to release Christ’s Body. In addition, his character as penitent and as a local saint in Mantua was extensively treated in G. Asiani, Istoria del sangue tratto dal costado di Giesù Christo per Longino (Mantua, 1609), and by S. Agnello Maffei, Annali di Mantova (Tortona, 1675), 106–39 and 297–309. His nonbiblical role in the Deposition was evident in the devotional work of the Venetian patriarch Giovanni Tiepolo (Le considerationi della Passione [Venice, 1618], 850–58). Thus Pierelli’s La Conversione di S. Longino, along with all the later sepolcri texts that featured him, made perfect sense in Eleonora Gonzaga’s chapel. 28. L. Baur, “Berichte des Hessen-Darmstädtischen Gesandten Justus Eberh. Passer an die Landgräfin Elisabeth Dorothea über die Vorgänge am kaiserlichen Hofe und in Wien von 1680 bis 1683,” Archiv fur Österreichische Geschichte 37 (1867): 271–409. 29. On these issues, F. Kirchweger, “Die Geschichte der Heiligen Lanze vom späteren Mittelalter bis zum Ende des Heiligen Römischen Reiches (1806),” in

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F. Kirchweger, ed., Die Heilige Lanze in Wien (Vienna, 2005), 71–110, esp. 92–95. On the medieval German tradition of Lance/Passion plays, see C. Dauven–van Knippenberg, “Einer von den Soldaten öffnete seine Seite”: Eine Untersuchung der Longinuslegende im deutschsprachigen geistlichen Spiel des Mittelalters (Amsterdam, 1990). M. Zane, “Oratorii al SS. Sepolcro e immaginario barocco,” in Il tranquillo seren del secol d’oro, 197–215, compares passages from sepolcri texts with meditations by Teresa de Avila on the arma Christi. 30. “[The Nails] saranno gemme a’ fedeli; & uno d’essi / Nel grand Errario Sacro / De’ sempre gloriosi / CESARI AUSTRIACI [NB: score reads “Sacro /del Primo Leopoldo Cesare Austriaco”], splendera’ fra molte / pretiose reliquie / fonte di gratie, gemma salutare, / venerando Tesoro.” 31. On her cult, I. E. Friesen, The Female Crucifix: Images of St. Wilgefortis since the Middle Ages (Waterloo, ON, 2001). The text (score, f. 16) reads: “Angelo: “Fin tenere donzelle, / . . . / martiri della croce / veranno dalla Siria / . . . / e, con serene ciglia, / del Lusitano anch’ una regia figlia [with a footnote to Wilgefortis]; [Maria:] O me infelice! Adunque / e perche non poss’io / su la Croce morir del mio Figlio?” (a later hand in the score added “del Figlio Mio”). 32. For the tradition outside Germany, E. Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a “True” Image (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 128–30. Perhaps for reasons of scriptural fidelity, in Lepore’s 1662 Le Lagrime della vergine the Magdalen brings the Veil (in the equivalent of scene 5) to the grieving biblical mourners on Calvary, without mentioning Veronica, as she begins, “Del Re’ d’ogni martir questa è l’Imago.” 33. Veronica: “Mirate in questo velo / del Salvatore il santo volto impresso, / e contemplate i suoi dolori in esso. / Maddalena: Ben mi sovvien, che quando / corresti a lui per asciugargli il viso, / egli, intorno guardando, / vide più donne lagrimose e meste, / e le parole sue furono queste: / ‘O di Gerusalem figlie dolenti . . .’” 34. “Cieca Gerusalemme, ecco vicine / quelle gravi ruine, / onde s’udì con lagrime dolenti / l’afflitto Geremia sciolto in lamenti. [aria with paraphrase of Lam 1:1ff.:] Come, o Dio, con aspra pena / sola giace/ senza pace/ di gran popolo ripiena / deplorabile città! / Alta donna delle genti / quasi vedova diventi: / della bella Palestina/ la Reina / tributaria altrui si fà.” 35. R. L. Kendrick, Singing Jeremiah: Music and Meaning in Holy Week (Bloomington, 2014), 145. 36. The Virgin’s opening aria reads: “Sepollitemi, o miei rai, / che sepolto è’l mio Gesù,” while the Magdalen’s first aria stanza is: “Così dunque un Dio soccombe / de la morte a l’aspro passo; / chi per altri aprì le tombe / hor è chiuso dentro un sasso.” This is separated by a duet, “Dell’esclamar di Christo,/o diverso tenore.” 37. Possibly the unusual inclusion of the Credo was also a doctrinal reinforcement for the ten-year-old Maria Antonia, who had had her own German sepolcro the same day. 38. On this, see Ardissino’s ed. of Marino, Dicerie sacre, 260–74. 39. For the emperor’s patronage of the Jesuit mission and its intellectual efforts in China (the first dedication of a work on the mission to him dates from 1656), see N. Golvers, Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J. (1623–1688) and the Chinese Heaven (Leuven, 2003), 23–34 and 166–67.

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40. For these, see http://astro.ukho.gov.uk/eclipse/Vienna_Austria.html (accessed 11 February 2017). 41. These figures would recur in Minato’s 1684 pair of sepolcro texts. 42. Mary: “Se memorie dolenti / ritrovo in ogni loco, / atte a farmi penar, / non vi par, ch’io faccia poco/ solo a piangere, e sospirar?” 43. The second stanza of his aria on E durus, “Se dal presule ottenuta / ho la spoglia lacerate” refers directly to the Entombment: “Se da me pietosa Tomba / . . . che sia fatto ufficio mio / sepellir il morto Dio, / raro don, ch’il ciel mi fa.” This piece is relatively virtuosic by the standards of sepolcro arias. 44. On Savini, see Casimiro da Roma, Memorie istoriche della chiesa e convento di S. Maria in Araceli di Roma (Rome, 1736), 258; the preacher died later in 1689. Marino’s text is “Lidia, ti lasso, ahi lasso! / . . . ma, sei nel cor scolpita / sei tu, dolce mia vita, / come senza il cor mio / viver dunque poss’io?,” from La Lira, whose literary text was in the Imperial Collections, along with Pietro Pace’s setting thereof in his Il quarto libro de’ madrigali, op. 6 (Rome, 1614); on this Habsburg ownership after 1655, see A. Noe, Die Präsenz der romanischen Literaturen in der 1655 nach Wien verkauften Fuggerbibliothek (Vienna, 1997), vol. 2, 755. 45. On the biblical history and Western views of Joseph (and Nicodemus), see W. J. Lyons, Joseph of Arimathea: A Study in Reception History (Oxford, 2014), esp. 8–20 and 45–71. 46. This was detailed by Giovanni Palmieri’s reworking of Cesare Franciotti’s Historia del volto santo di Lucca (Rome, 1650), 6–8. 47. I. Savini, “La trasfiguratione politica christiana,” “Discorso XXVI” in his Discorsi panegirici de’ santi (Rome, 1685). 48. This is also evident in the Viennese request to Rome to add Joseph to the official Litany of the Saints (HHStA, Hofkorrespondenz Rom 13, 5 February 1684, in time for the upcoming feast on 19 March). For her chapel in the Leopoldinischer Trakt, Eleonora Gonzaga had commissioned an altarpiece of the Death of St. Joseph (now Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) in 1676 from Carlo Maratta (see Karner, “Der Leopoldinische Trakt 1660–1705,” in Die Wiener Hofburg 1521–1705, at 396). 49. As noted later, the text seems originally destined for Friday that year according to its manuscript libretto, then was possibly moved to Thursday (as in its print version), perhaps to make way for Sbarra’s Le Lagrime di S. Pietro. If this were the case, then the apportioning of this metaphor for Communion under both species would have reflected an original desire by Leopold (=John) to drink the sacramental wine, transferred then to Eleonora (=the Magdalen). 50. Oddly, Mary the mother of James (“Maria Giacobbe”), mentioned in two Gospels as being the other woman at the Tomb with the Magdalen, appears only in Stampiglia’s 1711 text across the entire repertory. Mary Cleophas is to be found in four works (Thursday pieces in 1667 and 1682; Friday works for 1678 and 1695), while Mary Salome appears in the same 1667 and 1678 pieces. 51. M. Reichenberger, Mariani cultus vindiciae (Prague, 1677), 60–64 (on the title of co-Redemptrix) and 121 (on Leopold’s Marian piety). 52. It is not clear if Pietro Ottoboni would have known Bernardoni’s text when he wrote the libretto for the 1707 Roman Introduzione all’oratorio della

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Passione, whose second part opens with a swooning Madonna; Kendrick, Singing Jeremiah, 142–44. 53. The first printed poetical collection in Italian dedicated to Christ’s Heart (as opposed to Mary’s) seems to be F. M. Ghirlandi, Ghirlanda d’affetti poetici al Sacro Cuore di Gesù (Pistoia, 1702). 54. HHStA, AZA 8 (1667–73) contains documents for funerals and baptisms in that time span along with a few others from the 1690s. 55. The fights of 1669–70 occupy ff. 221–90 of HHStA, AZA 8; one case was noted that “no es la primera batalla que en Palacio tuve con tocas, [a servant] queda poco morado.” 56. “La M.ta dell’Imp.e . . . si sgravò col parto d’un maschio, che per esser fuori di tempo, toccando appena l’ottavo mese, non sopravisse, che mezza hora in circa. Quest’improuiso accidente ha straordinariamente conturbato questa corte Cesarea, per vedersi anch’ d’oggi svanite quelle speranze, che la promettevano lo stabilimento dell’Augustissima Casa, et il comun riposo dell’Imperio”; Pignatelli to Rome, 23 February 1670, ASV, Segreteria Di Stato, Germania, 187, no. 16. Noe discusses the works of 1670–72 in Geschichte der italienischen Literatur, vol. 1, 233–35. 57. Vita, e conversione maravigliosa della B. Angela da Fuligno (Venice, 1669). Cicogna’s name is not on the title page. 58. Ambrosia celeste, 227–65. 59. The “lira cetrata” might well represent an early example of the version of the instrument with sympathetic strings as mentioned by Mersenne and Kircher. The use of the violino piccolo in J. H. Schmelzer’s works preserved in Kromĕříž is discussed in C. E. Brewer, The Instrumental Music of Schmeltzer, Biber, Muffat, and Their Contemporaries (Farnham, 2011), 141–42. In addition, Leopold’s 1679 Erlösung des menschlichen Geschlechts has a sonatina “auf ein klaines geigl.” 60. On Eucharistic theology here and in the 1689 sepolcro, an introduction is in R. L. Kendrick, “Staging Sacramental Consolation,” in W. S. Melion, ed., Quid est sacramentum? On the Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe and the Americas, 1400–1700 (Leiden, forthcoming). 61. This piece is briefly discussed in Riepe, Die Arciconfraternita, 420 and 426–28. In addition, the 1704 oratorio La Sepoltura di Christo (anonymous libretto in I-Bc; score by Perti) was to be performed on the occasion of the Morte’s hosting the traveling Tomb that year; it features only a standard double pair of mourner characters (Mary, the Magdalen, John, and Joseph), and opens in darkness with the Magdalen. Her address to Mary, “Quanto, gran donna, oh quanto / è diverso il tenor del nostro duolo,” in its comparison of the two women’s pain, recalls the opening of Ferri’s 1674 La Pietà contrastata and, as noted (n. 35), would recur in Bernardoni’s 1705 Le Due passioni. 62. E.g., in G. B. Novati, De eminentia deiparae Virginis Mariae (Rome, 1632), vol. 1, ch. 7, “Quaestio XL,” 187–89. 63. On this, most recently see L. Oliván Santaliestra, “ ‘My sister is growing up very healthy and beautiful, she loves me’: The Childhood of the Infantas María Teresa and Margarita María at Court,” in G. E. Coolidge, ed., The Formation of the Child in Early Modern Spain (Farnham, 2014), 165–87.

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64. On these stagings, see M. T. Chaves Montoya, El espectáculo teatral en la corte de Felipe IV (Madrid, 2004), 218–35 and 263–301. 65. This point is indebted to the discussion by Kurtz, The Play of Allegory, 102–19; for the text see the ed. by J. E. Duarte (“Autos sacramentales completos,” 24; Pamplona, 1999). 66. Juan de Duenas, Espeio de consolación de tristes (Toledo, 1589), in the royal library, had included a consolation for Passion Saturday, noting that Christ’s death joined the faithful to him. Among other Spanish editions present in Vienna was the Compendio de todas las obras espirituales of Luís de Granada (Madrid, 1660). Ángel Manrique’s (1577–1649) Meditaciones para todos los días de la Quaresma (Valencia and Zaragoza, 1613) was present in two copies in Vienna; it described at great length the “martirio espiritual” of the Madonna on Calvary, 564–86 (Zaragoza ed.). 67. Madrid, 1658, pp. 327 and 349. 68. S. McClary, “Introduction,” in S. McClary, ed., Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression (Berkeley, 2013), 203n.11, insightfully considers this piece as an example of Venetian gender flexibility, but seems unaware of its original destination for the Catholic Viennese court (and its 1696 repeat there).

4. music and its affects 1. Keller, Scheutz, and Tersch, Einmal Weimar-Wien, 71. 2. Conceivably the 1680 pieces in Prague Castle were performed in the All Saints’ Chapel, a more intimate space than St. Veit’s Cathedral, and one freed from the constraints of necessary liturgy in the latter. 3. Since the Baroque chapel in Linz Castle was converted into an oratory in 1732, and then burned in 1800, there seems to be no sense of its seventeenthcentury size. On this, see L. Schultes, “Das Linzer Schloss: Von den Anfängen bis zum Ende der Monarchie,” in G. Ridler, ed. Schlossmuseum Linz. Schätze aus Oberösterreich (Linz, 2016), 12–37. 4. “Benigno Lettore: Sono molti anni, che questo sacro Componimento fù prodotto dal sublime ingegno del Co[nte] Minati d’onorata memoria; il quale prevenuto dalla morte non ha potuto compirne un’altro, che aveva già per le mani. Egli dopo l’avere con la sua non men divota, ch’erudita penna trenta tre volte compianto il morto Redentore nel Sepolcro, si deve piamente credere, che sia salito a contemplarlo trionfante nel Cielo. Ma la sua Lira, ch’a guisa di quella d’Orfeo, risplender a sembre luminosa nel Firmamento di quest’Augustissima Reggia, torna a rendere il suono, veramente Celeste nella presente piissima rappresentazione, che per sovrano Comando si replica questa sera: Non v’essendo stato bastevol tempo al lavoro di nuova Poesia, e di nuova Musica.” Cupeda is likely to have written this passage, given that he would pen the next six sepolcri texts. 5. One issue in this piece is the music’s authorship; Minato’s original preface of 1675 claimed, in a way hyperbolic even for him, that “in questa compositione s’è accoppiata alla debolezza delle parole la divinità della Musica, come Dio Eterno unissi all’humanità . . . le illustrò chi ha dolcezza di cigno in penna

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d’aquila” (a remarkable reworking of the Hypostatic Union). This can be taken as a hint at Leopold’s own authorship of the music via the mention of the imperial eagle. But Cupeda’s (?) preface to the individual libretto reprint for the 1700 reprise suggested that “le note uscirono dalla penna d’un drago, nella cui bocca . . . fabbricarono i favi l’api dell’immortale Parnaso,” a clear gesture toward Draghi and his earlier career as a singer. Possibly the 1675 score had been a collaboration between Draghi and Leopold, because of illness in the aging Sances. 6. I take the information on Leopold’s and Joseph’s singers from a variety of sources: the Excel spreadsheets of payments to most court servants from the HZAB, available at http://www.oesta.gv.at/site/6662/default.aspx (accessed 2 February 2017); the archival summaries of H. Knaus, Die Musiker im Archivbestand des kaiserlichen Obersthofmeisteramts, pts. 1–3 (Vienna, 1967–69; “Sitzungsberichte der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaft, Phil.-Hist. Klasse,” 254/1; 259/3; and 264/1) along with his “Die Musiker in den geheimen Kaiserlichen Kammerzahlamtsrechnungsbüchern,” Anzeiger der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaft, Phil.-Hist. Klasse 106 (1969): 14–38; D. Glüxam’s fundamental “Verzeichnis der Sänger in den Wiener Opern- und Oratoriumspartituren 1705– 1711,” Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 48 (2002): 269–319, along with her entries in Österreichisches Musiklexikon Online (http://www.musiklexikon.ac.at). As noted, for the empress’s musicians, see Seifert, “Die Musiker der beiden Kaiserinnen.” Deducing other possible singers for Eleonora’s pieces, based on voice types and the records adduced by Seifert, is outside the range of this study. 7. Of all these singers, only Pancotti never received a raise, despite salary increases for most others in the early 1670s (a similar set of raises went into effect around 1702); this may indicate the royals’ low regard for his vocal skills; although after 1700 he was technically the chapelmaster, Ziani did all the composing. In Leopold’s reign, the non-HZAB chamber accounts survive only for 1669. 8. Between 1691 and 1700, Borosini had sung operatic roles from Genoa to Naples. 9. In general, the Lenten oratorios—not all of whose scores survive—do not feature cast lists, so the participation of these opera singers in works before Holy Week is unclear. 10. The ms. is A-Wn, Hs. 13276, “Gli affetti pietosi nel Sepolcro /di Christo / Rappresentati in Musica nella /Cesarea Cappella /dell’Augustissimo Leopoldo. /Di Domenico Federici da Fano”; the print reads “Gli Affetti Pietosi per il Sepolcro di Christo.” 11. Whether this meant a shift of composers from Leopold’s Bertali to Eleonora’s P. A. Ziani is not clear, as no score survives. 12. The reference to the preacher is in the Sun’s opening aria about his own occluded face at the Crucifixion; Federici’s “Va, va, pallida fronte, / con gramaglia funesta, / dentro nube sanguigna” employs Emanuele’s arcane vocabulary on the sun’s regular setting as part of the natural order: “quando tramontato da nostro emisfero il Sole, ricoverto il Cielo di gramaglia funesta.” Emanuele, Frutti del Carmelo, vol. 1, col. 814. The quotation from Andreini’s play comes from act I of L’Adamo, as God the Father calls to him: “Sorgi Adamo repente,

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hor che ‘n te l’alma / spirai con caldo” (I cite from the 1617 Milan ed., p. 3); in the sepolcro this becomes “Sorgi, Adamo, apri le porte / che la carcere è finita,” sung to himself as he emerges from his grave (under Calvary, it should be remembered). 13. In Il Limbo aperto, this begins immediately with Adam’s first aria, “Horrori funesti,” present in the libretto but not in the score. As for the 1679 piece, the second stanza of Il Greco’s aria “Si, si innocente / Pilato lo disse” (f. 27v) is also lacking in the score. 14. There is no indication for the surviving oratorios of 1712–15 of a performance specifically at the Tomb. The development of the tradition is well discussed by R. Schnitzler, “From Sepolcro to Passion Oratorio: Tradition and Innovation in the Early Eighteenth-Century Viennese Oratorio,” in P. F. Devine and H. White, eds., The Maynooth International Musicological Conference 1995 (Dublin, 1996), pt. 1, 392–410, and by White, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Fux and the Viennese Sepolcro Oratorio,” in A. Colzani, M. Padoan, and A. Luppi, eds., Il teatro musicale italiano nel Sacro Romano Impero nei secoli XVII e XVIII (Como, 1999), 215–28. 15. A-Wn, Hs. 1784, f. 637v; on this, see T. A. G. Wilberg Vignau-Schuurman, Die emblematischen Elemente im Werke Joris Hoefnagels (Leiden, 1969), and http://www.lavieb-aile.com/2015/03/le-hibou-au-caducee-chez-joris-hoefnagel .html (accessed 12 February 2017). 16. One of his texts is an Atalanta “destined” for Eleonora’s birthday, thus never performed and probably replaced by Minato’s, staged in November 1669. 17. On him, the most accessible account is that of M. G. Marotta in DBI 45 (1995). 18. The downfall of Ferri (and of his employer) is narrated by A. Wolf, Fürst Wenzel Lobkowitz (Vienna, 1869), 412–19. 19. Ferri’s Il Cieco nato (Ferrara, 1679) was set by Sebastiano Cherici; the libretto is in I-PGc. 20. Noe’s listing of a Breviario o sia poesia di devozione by Minato with music by Stradella (Nicolò Minato Werkverzeichnis, 47) gives a call number for the score, citing R. Giazotto, Vita di Alessandro Stradella (Rome, 1962), 168, of I-MOe, F. 1116, and as having been written for Christina of Sweden in Rome—which is a totally different piece (these are the parts for Stradella’s motet for the Immaculate Conception, Convocamini, congregamini). There is no trace of an edition as cited by Giazotto, Vita, 774, titled Poesie di devozione (Modena, 1660) ostensibly by Minato. 21. The libretto is in I-Pu and was first remarked by Steffan, “Oratori senza sepolcri.” On this practice in Friuli, T. Perusini, “Il Crocifisso con le braccia mobili del sec. XVI della chiesa di San Giovanni Battista a Pontebba,” Vultus Ecclesiae: Rassegne dal Museo diocesan e Galariis dal Tiepolo di Udin. Palàz patrialcjal, no. 1 (2000): 21–38. My thanks also to Professor Franco Colussi for his ideas on Lombardini. 22. The case of the central Italian Giovanni Francesco Lazzarelli and his fruitless 1677 shipment of the libretto La Passione di Nostro Sig.r Giesù Christo to Eleonora was noted by Deisinger, “Mäzenin und Künstlerin.” That Lazzarelli’s text must have been written in the absence of the kind of devotional/

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iconographic program evident in all Minato’s works rendered it an unlikely candidate for acceptance in Vienna. 23. Space precludes a longer discussion of Pederzoli’s works for Eleonora’s chapel, but in their use of a modern violin band, their wider range of musical meters, and their greater periodicity, they are a better parallel to Italian music of the 1680s; this is not surprising, given the composer’s recent arrival from south of the Alps. 24. One mark of the unusual nature of this tonal construct is that it does not figure in Francesco Gasparini’s 1708 list of twenty-one “keys” in his L’Armonico pratico al cimbalo. 25. One extreme case is Cupeda’s preface to his 1704 Il Mistico Giobbe, which refers to Minato’s opera Creso staged back in 1678; the reference also suggests the identification of both title characters with Leopold (“Preparati non a vedere un Creso adorno d’oro, e di gemme, ma un Giobbe da capo a piè ricoperto di piaghe”). A previous insider hint at Il Pomo d’Oro was noted in chapter 3. 26. The constructs of A. Berardi, Miscellanea musicale (Bologna, 1689) and Il perché musicale (Bologna, 1693), along with G. B. degli Antonii’s Versetti per tutti li tuoni naturali, op. 2 (Bologna, 1687), are all clearly laid out by G. Barnett, “Tonal Organization in Seventeenth-Century Music Theory,” in T. Christensen, ed., The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (Cambridge, 2002), 407–56, and in M. Dodds’s forthcoming From Modes to Keys: The Organ in Baroque Literature. 27. It should be remarked that this unusual tonal construct was postulated also by degli Antonii, as his tuono 6 transposed down a major second. 28. The texts on the Peter/Malchus incident available in the court library concentrate on the apostle’s error and on Christ’s miracle, without any mention of Malchus’s character; cf. the long discussion in A. Salmerón, Commentaria in evangelicam historicam (Madrid, 1601), vol. 10, 185–199, and the sermons of Placido Caraffa, Prediche (Naples, 1674), 36–38. Possibly this allegorical figure was a stand-in for Jewish “ingratitude.” 29. Baur, “Berichte,” 336: “der verwittibten Kayserin Ihres [Tomb] war am kostbahrsten, dann das allerschlechteste mit Silber Vffgeputzet und gezieret war, oben in der Luft schwebte Ein Engel, welcher an der Brust das venerabile, so mit Dämanten, Ametisten, und andern Edelgesteinen Treflich gläntze . . . eine schrifft mit Diamanten gestickt, Exsurget Deus et dissipabit inimicos suos. Vfm Theatro stund ein Königl. Stuhl . . . dabey saß der König David in Lebensgröß . . . das Creutz, daran Christus crucifixus hange, war pur gold.” 30. P. Lambeck, Commentariorum de augustissima Bibiotheca Caesarea Vindobonensi…Liber IV (Vienna, 1671), 22–23 (remarking the sixteenth-century copy in A-Wn), and the modern edition of the work by A. Tuilier, Grégoire de Nazianze, La Passion du Christ (Paris, 1969), 14–15. 31. Speaking in his own voice, after cites to Augustine, Bernard, and the Psalms on the value of weeping, the Dominican continued “Non posso più . . . lasciatemi sforare il cordoglio, lasciatemi piangere, acciocche io possa vivere”; A. Paciuchelli, Lezioni morali sopra Giona profeta, vol. 3, lezione 60 (Venice, 1664), 273. 32. The work of Silke Leopold, and more recently Hendrik Schulze (e.g., the latter’s Odysseus in Venedig: Sujetwahl und Rollenkonzeption in der vene-

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zianischen Oper des 17. Jahrhunderts [Frankfurt am Main, 2004]), has shed considerable light on character pairs in Venetian secular opera. 33. Hunting formed a major part of winter and summer court life, as noted in the letters of the foreign ambassadors; conversely, Leopold’s 1664 hunting rifle (now in the Art Institute of Chicago; see http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections /artwork/108757?search_no=5&index=33) had musical instruments depicted on its stock. The pact with Venice and Poland was signed on 5 March 1684, in the middle of Lent. 34. The best biography of the prelate remains that of G. De Caro, in DBI 15 (1972), http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/francesco-buonvisi_(Dizionario -Biografico)/, accessed 16 March 2017). 35. ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Germania, 208 (1684), ff. 273–78: “Di esser pronto a finir qui i miei giorni, bisognerà difenderla [his dignity] con vigore contro gli attacchi dell’imperatrice Eleonora, che asserice di farli col tacito consenso dell’Imperatore. . . . E se bene mi astenevo dalle sue cappelle per le novità, che mi haueva fatte a fauore del Sig. Duca di Lorena, giudicavo alle apparenti cortesie, che [Lorraine] riceveva, che a S.M. piacesse più di hauere la libertà di fare verso S.A l’istesso che l’Imperatore faceva d’esso il sig.re Elettore di Baviera. Mi significò poi il P.re Nauata che a S.M. dispiaccia, ch’io non andassi alle sue Cappelle. . . . Risposi che altro era l’andarui, altro il potervi andare, essendo per altro la funzione pubblica con la maggior solennità che S.M. sia solita di praticare in una Cappella distinta dall’altra, dove suole priuatamente udire la Messa, e fare l’altre sue diuozioni e che se non andauo a servirla, cio procedeua perchè nell’istesso tempo doueuo assistera alla Capella dell’Imperatore. . . . e sarebbe statto troppo grand’inconueniente che una volta il Populo vedesse far maggior trattamento ad un Prencipe, e l’altra volte minore al Nunzio, particolarmente quando è Cardinale. . . . Mercordì passato finalmente l’Imperatrice scrisse di propria mano un biglietto al Sig. Maggiordomo Magg.re con intenzione di mostrarse a me, et egli se ne astenne, ma il giovedì li fece nuoua istanza, che me lo mandasse e l’hebbi la sera mentre visitavano il Sig.re Ambasc.re di Venezia indisposto . . . et hora l’Imperatrice ha dato di nuovo luogo più nobile nella sua cappella al sig. Duca, e nell’Oratorio del Giovedì Santo accanto il Sepolcro stavano le M.M. avanti, e due passi a dietro il Sig. Duca con sedia, inginocchiatore e credo anche con il coscino, e se io ci fossi andato, non ci sarebbe intervenuto S.A., ma sarei stato sopra un banco per fianco, come è lo stile.” 36. ASV, Germania, ibid., f. 579: “Dapoi l’Imperatrice Vedova, che sempre desidera ossequij maggiori di quelli, che si prestano all’Imperat.re.” 37. Given that there are no known musical dedications to the prelate, and little mention of music in the ASV correspondence, possibly he would not have cared about missing the pieces. Noe gives an overview of the 1684 texts in Geschichte der italianischen Literatur, vol. 1, 246–47. 38. On the hopes for another male heir, see the letter from Buonvisi to Rome, ASV, Germania, ibid., f. 281 (4 April, still from Linz). 39. The standard article on her now is J. J. Schmid, “Eleonore Magdalena von der Pfalz—ein Leben zwischen den Häusern Neuburg und Habsburg,” in Braun, Keller, and Schnettger, eds., Nur die Frau des Kaisers?, 157–74, esp. 162–65 on her relation to dynastic theater. For a linkage of Viennese court

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opera with female authority, see S. Rode-Breymann, Musiktheater eines Kaiserpaars: Wien 1677 bis 1705 (Hildesheim, 2010), 282–94. 40. The court instructions on education from 1672 for Eleonora and 1677 for her sisters are given in F. Schmidt, Geschichte der Erziehung der Pfalzischen Wittelsbacher (Berlin, 1899), 150–59. For the accoutrements of the Düsseldorf court church, see Dominikanerkloster Düsseldorf, ed., St. Andreas in Düsseldorf: Die Hofkirche und ihre Schätze (Düsseldorf, 2008). Whether Eleonore heard the sacred Latin theater of the Jesuit Jakob Balde during his years in Neuburg is unclear. 41. On Eleonore Magdalene’s devotion to Teresa and her order (as well as on Eleonora Gonzaga’s efforts to establish the female Carmelites in Vienna), see A. Coreth, “Kaiserin Maria Eleonore, Witwe Ferdinands III., und die Karmelitinnen,” Mitteilungen des österreichischen Staatsarchivs 14 (1961): 42–63, at 63. 42. On this point, see I. Peper, Konversionen im Umkreis des Wiener Hofes um 1700 (Vienna, 2010), 73–78. 43. One publication dedicated to her and related to her Hungarian coronation was Vortreffliches Leben der . . . Jungfrauen Margaritae (Vienna, 1689), a biography of the thirteenth-century St. (at that point Venerable) Margaret of Hungary as a model for female sanctity. 44. For neither of these titles does there seem to be an exact precedent in the patristic or devotional literature. 45. A. Paciuchelli, Discorsi morali sopra la Passione di N. S. Gesù Cristo (Venice, 1664), 44.

epilogue: the power of the cross 1. My thanks to Angela Ida de Benedictis for her help in assessing Maderna and Nono’s project. The materials in the Paul-Sacher-Stiftung include transcriptions of arias and the sinfonia in both composers’ hands, as well as a joint set of notes containing the original title and other details. These are in addition to those noted by M. Romito in M. Baroni and R. Dalmonte, eds., Bruno Maderna: Documenti (Milan, 1985), 325, which include arias for Giovanni and Maddalena plus the duet used in the final transcription, and two arias (Giovanni and Maddalena) left out of the performed work. There are forty-seven measures of Nono’s transcriptions in the Archivio Luigi Nono in Venice, according to C. Vincis, “Avec l’autorisation du maître; Bruno Maderna et la ‘musiche’ ancienne,” in G. Mahon and L. Feneyrou, eds., Á Bruno Maderna (Paris, 2009), 23–42. 2. The concert poster can be seen at http://archiviostorico.teatrolafenice.it /scheda_0.php?ID=12631 (accessed 13 March 2017). Maderna also orchestrated some originally continuo-only recitative sections. My thanks to Michele Chiappini for tracking down various details. 3. Scherchen to Maderna, 28 March and 5 April 1950, noted in R. Dalmonte, ed., Bruno Maderna: Studi e testimonianze (Lucca, 2004), 22–23; two letters from Maderna to him from earlier in the winter are in the conductor’s papers in D-Badk. Possibly Scherchen wanted to publish the arrangement in his Ars Nova Verlag, for which Nono did some work as a copyist.

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4. Maderna’s recording with Milan’s Angelicum Orchestra and soloists was made in 1957 and issued (in the United States) as Westminister XWN 18838 sometime thereafter; Bernhard Klebel’s 1979 performance of Il Lutto dell’universo in Vienna’s Jesuitenkirche was later released on LP by Christophorus (SCK 70365), based on the staging by Bletschacher. 5. One such note is the Virgin’s reproach of Giovanni, to be sung by Anna Maria Badia “con ammirazione.” 6. Mila’s remark was made in passing in his review of the Venice festival, including the Italian premiere of Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw; M. Mila, “Lettera da Venezia,” La rassegna musicale 20 (1950): 327. 7. Davia to Rome, ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Germania, 242 (1705), letters 285 and 310 (11 and 25 April, respectively). Because of his siding with France in the War of the Spanish Succession, the nuncio was kept away from Leopold’s deathbed and eventually banished. 8. It is thus striking that there are no pieces on C or G durus in the whole repertory; clearly some kind of inflected trajectory was intended. 9. In addition, Leopold composed three of the arias in L’Adalberto that year. Mellini also sang operatic roles in Bologna and Reggio in 1688 and 1701. 10. However, all three would sing in the summer 1697 birthday opera for Leopold, L’Amare per virtù (Cupeda/Draghi, with the usual aria composed by the emperor). 11. Consolatione: “Pria, ch’havesser le sfere e tempo e moto”; Timore: “Ah, Peccato, letal mostro d’Averno”; Amore: “[1] Gioir deggio, perche m’hai / ricomprato dall’Inferno”; [2] “Desti troppo per un niente” [with a reference to Cyprian again]. 12. “Amate si, e sperate; / amando, giorirete, / sperando, ‘l ciel havrete, / se amando, e sospirando, Dio placate.” 13. This is of the 5th ed. (Bologna, 1666), with an ownership note on the title page (A-Wn, 14.Z.27); Joseph of Arimathea’s burial of Christ is Auriemma’s last reflection on the Passion, 322.

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General Index

Abraham and Isaac story, 127 Abraham a Sancta Clara, 176n36 acoustics, 14–17; 110, 173n15 allegorical characters, 22, 26, 28, 35–36, 39, 49ff., 62, 67, 82, 84–85, 90, 97, 105, 120, 123, 126, 135–140, 157; “second-order,” 49–52, 60–62, 88, 105, 129, 140 allegory, 56, 116–117 Aloisi, Properzio, 67 Amalteo, Aurelio, 43, 79 Ambrose, St., 39, 53 Anchioni, G. B., 85 Andreini, Giovanni Battista, 104, 122, 196n12 Angela of Foligno, 107–108 Anselm, St., 45, 54 anti-Islamic sentiment, 86 anti-Jewish sentiment, 82–86, 156 Apocalypse of John, 48, 56, 134–135 Ardissino, Erminia, 178n52 aria, two-stanza 7, 41, 48, 58, 60–63, 109–110, 143–144, 148, 184n25 ars moriendi, 161 Augustine, St., 11, 23, 55, 69, 89 Auriemma, Tommaso, 162 Azzolini, Cardinal Decio, 67

Becher, Johann Joachim, 46 Belli, Francesco, 22 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 30, 51 Berardi, Angelo, 9, 132 Bernard of Clairvaux, 138 Bernardoni, Pietro Antonio, 85, 88, 105, 153 Bertali, Antonio, 5, 40, 66, 76 Biach-Schiffmann, Flora, 178n56 Bletschacher, Richard, 173n11 Boccabella, Filiberto, 66 Bona, Giovanni, 46 Bonelli, Giovanni Paolo, 120–121 Borosini, Antonio, 121, 158 Borrini, Rainero, 158 Borromeo, Carlo, 37 Bosio, Girolamo, 54 Botero, Giovanni, 46, 79, 155 Bruti, Vincenzo, 158 Buccellani, Giovanni, 75 Buonvisi, Cardinal Francesco, 144–146 Burnacini, Lodovico Ottavio, 1, 5, 14, 24, 28, 30ff., 47, 50, 56, 59, 79, 88–90, 116, 119, 127; Eucharistic designs of also used in sepolcri sets, 141; Ill. 5–9; App. 3 Buzzoleni, Giovanni, 121, 158

Badia, Anna Maria Lisi, 122, 154 Badia, Carlo Antonio, 20 Baumann, Dorothea, 173n15

Caldana, Niccolo, 21, 25, 47, 75 Caldara, Antonio, 94, 124 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 36, 115–116

213

214

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General Index

Calori, Antonio, 43 Cambi, Bartolomeo de’, 27–28 Carafa, Antonio, 126 Cesti, Antonio, 43, 72, 121 characters in sepolcri; allegorical, see allegorical characters; Centurion (Centurione), 26, 39, 52, 54, 95, 133, 142; exorbitant grief of, 108–110; Immaculatist devotion to, 52–53;James the Great, St. (Giacomo), 66; Jewish, 82–86; John the Baptist, St. (Giovanni Battista), 33–34, 84; John the Evangelist, St. (Giovanni Evangelista), 9, 22, 65, 74, 100, 103, 140; Joseph of Arimathea (Giuseppe d’Arimatea), 11, 22, 24, 66, 95, 100–102, 106, 153; Judas Iscariot (Giuda), 23, 39ff., 50, 81, 99–100; Lazarus (Lazaro), 83, 99, 102, 109, 134; Longinus (Longino), 26, 38, 40, 88–91, 108, 134, 140; Lucifer (Lucifero), 54, 88, 133; Man Born Blind (Il Cieco Nato), 148ff.; Mary Magdalen (Maddalena), 23–25, 33–35, 57, 78, 81, 83–85, 91, 93–95, 104, 124, 129, 142ff., 153–154; Mary the mother of James (Maria Giacobbe), 124, 193n50; Mary of Salome (Maria Salome), 193n50; Mary, Virgin, 21, 27ff., 37, 49, 56–57, 65, 70, 74, 83, 92, 99–101, 104–105, 114–116, 118, 130–135, 140, 142ff., 153–154; Nicodemus (Nicodemo), 11, 22, 24, 28, 34, 66–67, 95, 101ff., 131, 143, 153; Peter (Pietro), 11, 38, 67, 74, 81; Simon the Cyrenian (Simone Cireneo), 49, 67, 102, 153; use of memory, 99ff.; Widow of Nain (La Vedova di Nain), 148ff. Charles V of Lorraine, 145 Charles VI, Emperor (Archduke Karl), 61, 85, 103, 124 Christ, absence of in repertory, 26, 82 Cicogna, Michele, 107–108 Cicognini, Giacinto Antonio, 43–44 Claudia Felicitas of Tyrol, Empress, 4, 14, 147 Colonna, Giovanni Paolo, 12 Core (Korah; in Numbers), rebellion of, 78 Corraro, Vincenzo 174n18 costumes in sepolcri performances, 90 Crasius, Ludovicus, 75 Cross relic. See relics Cupeda, Donato, 49–50, 74, 85, 88, 105, 120

Cybo, Cardinal Alderano, 145 Cyprian, St., 69 deaths of Habsburgs, dynastic, 26, 43, 74, 106ff. degli Antonii, Giovanni Battista, 132 Deisinger, Marko, 172 n10 deixis, 23, 31, 148 devils and demons, 87–88 disjuncture of music and texts, 51 Donati, Giulio Cesare, 51 Draghi, Antonio, 2, 5, 7, 21; compositional techniques of, 35, 95–97, 109, 134–143, 149, 158–162; as librettist, 26, 66, 102; as singer, 39; eclipses, 96–97 ecstacy, 63–64 Elements, as characters, 69–70, 97, 116, 144 Eleonora Gonzaga. See Gonzaga Eleonora Maria, Archduchess, 20 Eleonore Magdalene of Pfalz-Neuburg, Empress, 59, 61, 94–95, 144ff., 151; early musical experiences of, 146–147 Emanuele di Gesù Maria, 37, 122 emblematics, 30ff. Ercolani, Girolamo, 38 Eucharist, 13, 25, 34, 56, 65, 100, 107, 114–116, 143, 155 Eybl, Franz, 176n36 Ezechias, 33–35 Fabricius, Georg, 125 Federici, Domenico, 21, 26, 31, 78, 103, 122, 125 Ferdinand III, Emperor, 12, 14, 19, 26, 43 Ferdinand Wenzel, Archduke, 67, 72 Ferri, Giberto, 23, 83, 101, 107–109, 125–126 Fiamma, Paolino, 22 Five Wounds of Christ, 1, 6, 24, 37, 48, 94–96, 139, 149, 151, 161 Fozio, Francesco, 124 Franck, Adam, 120 Frugoni, Carlo Innocenzo, 114–115 Funder, Friedrich, 59 Furttenbach, Joseph, 19 Fux, Johann Joseph, 124 gender and mourning, 101–108 German-language sepolcri, 4, 55ff. German-language translations of Italian texts, 6, 59ff., 156

General Index | 215 Gerson, Jean, 63 Glissanti, Fabio, 42 Gonzaga, Anna Caterina, 38 Gonzaga, Eleonora (II), 3–4, 13–14, 68, 84, 148; anti-Judaism in texts for, 82–84; artistic patronage of, 9; devotion to the Cross, 91–92, 94; fight with Cardinal Buonvisi, 144ff.; grief of, 43; interest in holy women, 65; piety of, 36–39; political involvement of, 145; youthful experiences of in Mantua, 38–39 Gonzaga family devotion, 121–122, 134 Gonzaga, Ferdinando, 27 Gonzaga, Maria, 36 Granada, Luís de, 62 Gréban, Arnaul, 39 Grillo, Angelo, 21 Guadagni, Pietro, 66 Günther, Adam Franz (“Franzel”), 158 Habsburg (Austrian) dynasty, 5–9, 46, 53, 38, 78, 86, 104–106; devotion to St. Joseph, 102; relations with Spain after 1660, 12, 90; Spanish branch of, 106–107; Tomb piety of, 17, 40, 155–157 Harrowing of Hell, 22, 27, 33, 52, 62, 64, 105, 116 Herberstein, Johann von, 59 Helena, St., 37, 53, 68, 84, 91 Hoefnagel, Joris, 125 Hofburg complex (Vienna), 4, 12, 25, 55, 67 Hofburgkapelle, 12, 14–18, 59, 65, 110, 114, 119, 162 Holy Thursday foot-washings, 12, 68, 187n48 Holy Week, 2, 6, 10–13, 19, 21, 25, 60, 67, 106, 114, 119, 144, 154–156 Hungarian magnates, rebellions of, 79–81 Hypostatic Union (two natures in Christ), 6, 23, 27, 34, 86, 110, 135 Incarnation, 6, 46, 134 instrumentation, 5 Interest, as political-allegorical character, 78–81 Ivanovich, Cristoforo, 66 Jarrard, Alice, 176 n35 Jesuits, sepolcri of, 10, 20 Jewish community in Vienna, forced eviction of (1669–1670), 83 Job, as symbol for Leopold I, 1–2, 79, 159

John the Baptist. See characters John Chrysostom, St., 55John the Evangelist. See characters Jonah, 31 Joseph of Arimathea. See characters Joseph I, Emperor (Archduke Joseph), 4, 61, 84, 103, 106, 124, 146, 154Joseph, St. (Christ’s earthly father), 37, 102–103 Josephskapelle (Hofburg), 174n17 Jubilee of 1660–1661, 38 Kallistos, Nikophoros, 28 Karbala, Battle of, 20 Karner, Herbert, 173n16 Keldorfer, Viktor, 57–58 Kempis, Thomas à, 151 Kircher, Athanasius, 7, 42, 96, 132 Küsel, Melchior, 30 Labroca, Mario, 152 Lambeck, Peter, 142 laments, structure of, 69–76, 86, 91, 95, 105, 108–110, 131–135, 140ff. Lamentations of Jeremiah, use of, 54, 70, 85, 92–95 Lance, Holy. See relics Lapide, Cornelius a, 23–25, 33–35, 78, 89 Laudate pueri (Ps. 112), as symbol of Christian optimism, 71–72 Lent, composition of sepolcri during, 121 Leopold I, Emperor, 2, 4, 7, 12, 23, 61, 81, 86, 115, 145, 152, 154; as composer, 12, 57–58, 67ff., 123, 130–136, 154ff.; as contributor of arias to others’ sepolcri (“di S. M. C.”), 2, 123, 154, 158–161; personal piety of, 75–76, 104–106, 161; scientific interests of, 96ff. Lepori, Vito, 21, 23, 65, 146 Lesma, Giovanni Antonio, 121 Liliani, Giulio, 39 linkage of annual themes in sepolcri, 65ff. Linz, Schlosskapelle, 144 liturgy in Holy Week, use of, 12, 72 Lobkowicz, Wenzel von, 125 Lombardini, Giovanni Antonio, 126 Longinus. See characters Lora, Francesco, 178n51 Lucca, 82, 102 Ludolph of Saxony, 50 Luycx, Frans, 8–9; Ill. 1 Machiavellianism, 81, 155 Maderna, Bruno, 152–154 male Habsburgs, 103–104

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General Index

Malipiero, G. F., 152 Manni, Agostino, 27 Manni, Giovanni Battista, 37 Mantua, 36–37, 88–90, 104, 121–122 Margherita of the Cross (Habsburg), 108 Margherita Teresa, Empress, 38–39, 68ff., 83, 106ff.; grief and losses of, 70–71; Spanish court experience of, 115–116 Maria Anna Josepha, Archduchess, 26, 100, 145, 148 Maria Antonia, Archduchess (1669–1692), 4, 13, 55–58 Marian devotion, 86, 104–105, 115, 140, 156 Marino, Giambattista, 27, 34, 96 Marracci, Ludovico, 86 marvel, 28–30 Mary. See characters Mary Magdalen. See characters Maselli, Lorenzo (“Lorenzino”), 158 mathematics and number symbolism, 96–99 Mellini, Salvatore, 158 memory as theme, 99–101, 130–134 mercantilism and economics, 6, 46, 155 metanoia, 60ff. Michels, Georg, 189n3 Mila, Massimo, 154 Minato, Nicolò, 1, 5, 13, 24, 40, 46, 124, 158ff.; death of, 120; depiction of ecstacy, 61–65; depiction of grief, 99ff., 146ff.; depictions of women, 116–117; innovations in sepolcro and opera libretti, 113ff., 158ff.; large-scale sepolcri of 1670–1672, 117–118; poetics of, 26–30, 33–34, 36, 46–50, 61, 82–85, 90–91, 94ff., 99, 143; previous experience in Venice, 98, 117, 138; use of citations, 52–56; use of poetic meters, 59, 127ff. Mocchi, G. B., 147 Modena, 25, 33 Montecuccoli, Raimondo, 21 Morelli, Arnaldo, 179n61 Morone, Bonaventura, 22 Mourning of Muharram, 20 Müller, Johann Sebastian, 43, 88, 119 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio, 124

Nono, Luigi, 152–153 Novati, Giovanni Battista, 115

Nails. See relics Napolitano, Aquiles, 116 Nente, Ignazio del, 27 Nicodemus. See characters Noe, Alfred, 176 n37, 182 n80

Reichenberger, Maximilian, 104 relics, in general, 6, 84, 88–94, 153, 156; Cross particle, 2, 6, 88ff.; Nail, 6, 91, 94; Thorn, 6, 72, 89, 91, 132, 184n26; Veil, 6, 22, 83, 92

obbligati, instrumental, 112, 121, 153 Oliviciano, Vincenzo, 121 Onorio dell’Assunta, 50 operatic singers and voice-types, 121–122 Oratorians, sepolcri of, 20 Orsini, Gaetano, 93–94 Ottoboni, Cardinal Pietro, 19, 85, 94 Ottomans, 6, 35, 38, 79, 84, 92, 140 Özel, Çiğdem, 178n55 Paciuchelli, Angelo, 63, 143, 151 Paër, Ferdinando, 124 Page, Janet, 175n30 Pancotti, Antonio, 121 Panigarola, Francesco, 23 Palmanuova, 126 Pariati, Pietro, 124 Pasquini, Bernardo, 33, 86 Passer, Justus, 90 Passero, Felice, 62 Pazzi, Maria Maddalena de’, 64 Pederzoli, Giovanni Battista, 31, 123, 127, 145, 198n23 penance and conversion as topoi, 60ff., 147 Perti, Giovanni Antonio, 114 Peter. See characters Petrucci, Pier Maria, 107–108 Piatti, Domitio, 69 Pierelli, Giovanni, 21, 25–26, 39, 68, 83, 90, 117, 125ff. Pietas “austriaca”, 3, 75, 86; historiographic problems of, 86, 101 Piffl, Cardinal Friedrich, 58 Pignatelli, Antonio, 68, 107 poetic meter, use of, 27, 109, 113, 127ff., 138, 151 Powell, Amy, 179n57 prophets as characters, 52–53, 62–63 Prague, 20, 90, 92, 96 Priuli, G. F., 23 Pseudo-Bonaventura, 27, 74 publishing and books as allegorical themes, 138 Quietism, 107

General Index | 217 Reposition of the Host, 13, 25 Riepe, Juliane, 175n26 Rossi, Rocco Maria, 126 Sacred Heart, eighteenth-century devotion to, 154 sacre rappresentazioni, tradition of, 21ff. Salto, Arcangelo de’, 68 Salvo, Juan Silvestre, 186n46 Sances, Giovanni Felice, 5, 92, 110ff., 132–134, 140ff. Sandaeus, Maximilian, 63 Sarti, Domenico, 120 Saunders, Steven, 175n26 Savini, Ignazio, 100–101 Sbarra, Francesco, 13, 26, 44, 51, 65ff., 79–82, 101–102, 126, 157; operatic libretti of, 69 Scarano, Camillo, 21, 39ff. Scarlatti, Alessandro, 49, 85, 94 Scheitler, Irmgard, 184n20 Scherchen, Hermann, 153 Schmelzer, Johann Heinrich, 5, 55ff., 90, 130ff. Schott, Gaspar, 96 Schnitzler, Rudolf, 172n9 scientific discourse in sepolcri, 96–99 Scriptural citations, 14, 52ff., 133, 157Seifert, Herbert, 172n9, 181n27, 189n1 Sepulcher. See Tomb Seven Sorrows of Mary, devotion, 108 shortenings of libretti and scores, 122–123 Signorotto, Gianvittorio, 171n4 Silos, Giuseppe, 25 Sommer-Mathis, Andrea, 173n15 Song of Songs, 50, 56, 64, 101 Soteriology, 45–46 space, architectonic, 12–14, 23, 68, 90, 104, 114 space, theatrical, 68, 90, 114 Spinola, Fabio Antonio, 190n12 Spinola, Giulio, 44, 68 Stampiglia, Silvio, 85, 92, 106 Staudt, Johann Baptist, 20 Stroppa, Sabrina, 185n35 Suárez, Francisco, 115 Sutter von Rosenfeld, Kunegonde, 122

symbolism, musical, 91 Tasso, Torquato, 39, 90, 122 Tenebrae Office, 50, 55, 174n24 Teresa of Avila, 64, 147 Theodosius, 53 Thorn. See relics Title of the Cross, trilingual, 95 Toledo, Ana María de, 107 Tomb devotion, general, 2, 6, 13, 21ff., 23–25, 25–31, 33, 36, 41, 50, 56, 60–62, 65–68, 71, 75, 89–94, 100–103, 108–10, 114–118, 123–235, 133, 140, 143, 155; popularity in early modern Europe, 17–20 Tombs in Viennese sites, 17ff. Tricarico, Giuseppe, 5, 21, 39ff. tuoni (church-keys) and tonal structures, 2, 7, 110, 132ff., App. 2 Ursulines, sepolcri of, 20, 64 Valentini, Giovanni, 91 Vecchio, Marco de, 21 Venice, 108, 125, 145, 152 Verbiest, Ferdinand, 96 Veronica, St. and her Veil; 6, 22, 28, 92, 111. See also relics Vienna, 67, 82–84, 90, 96, 108, 144, 156; and World War I, 57ff.; Holy Week in, 6, 12, 17 viola d’amore, 112–113 Vismarri, Filippo, 39, 40, 43, 120 visuality and meditation, 14, 26ff., 75 von Wöss, Johann Venantius, 58 Weaver, Andrew H., 175n26 Weckbecker, Wilhelm Freiherr von, 58 Westphalia, Peace of (1648), 12, 81 Wiener Neustadt, Schlosskapelle, 68, 145 White, Harry, 172n9 Widenfeld, Adam, 104 Wilgefortis, St., 92, 133 Zelenka, Jan Dismas, 20 Ziani, Marc’Antonio, 50, 79, 88, 93–94, 106, 132, 152 Ziani, Pietro Antonio, 23, 66, 123 Zuccari, Federico 19

Index of Sepolcri by Short Title

The following alphabetic index of sepolcri includes only pieces mentioned in this text. Gli Affetti pietosi (1666; topic: emotion at the Tomb; text/music: Federici/Sances), 31, 103 L’Ambizione punita (oratorio, 1667; Core’s revolt against Moses in Numbers; Federici/P. A. Ziani), 78 L’Amor della redentione (oratorio, 1677; Seven Sorrows of Mary; Minato/ Leopold), 105 La Bevanda di fiele (1685; Christ’s thirst; Minato/Pederzoli), 47, 85 Le Cinque piaghe di Christo (1677; Five Wounds; Minato/Draghi), 24, 37, 84, 95 La Corona di spine (1675; Thorns; Minato/ Draghi), 23, 91, 103, 131 Il Dono della vita eterna (1686; eternal life; Minato/Draghi), 51 Le Due passioni (1705; Mary’s and Christ’s sufferings; Bernardoni/M. A. Ziani), 105, 122, 152ff. Epitaffi sopra il sepolcro (1671; epitaphs for Tomb; Minato/Draghi), 49, 91, 117 L’Esaltatione del serpente (?1668; serpent of Numbers 21; Pierelli/?P. A. Ziani), 68 L’Esclamare a gran voce (1689; Christ’s

218

cries on the Cross; Minato/Draghi), 28, 92, 99, 120, 142–144 L’Eternità soggetta al tempo (1683; time, eternity, and the Passion; Minato/ Draghi), 33, 84, 97 Il Fascietto di mirra (1701; Christ as myrrh bundle; Cupeda/M.A. Ziani), 49ff., 85 La Fede trionfante (1662; dispute of believers and unbelievers on Calvary; Draghi/Tricarico), 42, 65, 90 I Frutti dell’albero della Croce (1691; effects of the Cross/ecstasy; Minato/Draghi), 28, 62ff., 157 La Gara della misericordia e giustitia di Dio (1661; Mercy vs. Justice; Scarano/Tricarico), 36–43, 47, 83, 89; Ex. 1.1 L’Humanità redenta and La Morte debellata (1669; redemption and triumph over death; Draghi/Draghi and Draghi/ Sances), 66, 102, 143 L’Infinità impicciolita (1677; infinity diminished; Minato/Schmelzer), 48, 59–61

Index of Sepolcri by Short Title L’Ingiustizia della sentenza di Pilato (1676; Pilate’s judgment of Christ; Minato/ Draghi), 14, 54, 82 L’Ingratitudine rimproverata (1675; reproach of sinner; Minato/?Leopold and/or Draghi), 54, 59, 86, 120 Le Lagrime della Vergine (1662; Virgin’s laments; Lepori/?Bertali), 23, 65 Le Lagrime di San Pietro (1666; Peter and Judas; Sbarra/Sances), 11, 81 Le Lagrime più giuste di tutte le lagrime (1684; Mary’s weeping and human healing; Minato/Pederzoli), 84, 120, 145 Il Libro con sette sigilli (1694; Christ as Apocalyptic Book with Seven Seals; Minato/Draghi), 48, 56, 59, 136ff.; Ex. 4.2a-b, 4.3 Il Limbo aperto (1672; Harrowing of Hell; Ferri/Draghi), 83, 123 Il Limbo disserato and L’Inferno deluso (1665; Harrowing of Hell and evil frustrated; Sbarra/?P.A. Ziani/?Bertali), 14, 65, 81, 101–102 Il Lutto dell’universo (1668; Elements’ grief, penance, Marian sorrow; Sbarra/ Leopold), 54, 67ff., 121, 156; Ex. 2.2, 2.3; dating of preserved score, 74 Le Memorie dolorose (1678; contrast of Mary’s sad and happy memories; Minato/Schmelzer), 84, 99, 115, 129ff., 134; Ex. 4.1 Il Mistico Giobbe (1704; trials of the Just Man as “mystical Job”; Cupeda/M. A. Ziani), 79, 85, 122, 132, 198n25 La Morte vinta sul Calvario (1706; triumph over death; Bernardoni/M. A. Ziani), 88 Il Paradiso aperto per la morte di Christo (1672; Good Thief; Minato/Sances), 49, 88, 118, 123, 132 La Passione di Christo, oggetto di meraviglia (1696; Passion as marvel; Minato/Draghi), 28–29 Il Pentimento (1661; penance; ?/Bertali), 76, 104 Il Prezzo dell’humana redentione (1685; redemption’s price; Minato/Draghi), 24, 47, 61, 86 La Sacra Lancia (1680; the Holy Lance; Minato/Draghi), 90

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219

Il Sacrifizio non impedito (1692; Christ’s sacrifice not obstructed; Minato/ Draghi), 51, 60, 127, 135 Il Sagrifizio d’Abramo (1660; AbrahamIsaac, followed by Penance; Caldana/ Leopold), 25, 40, 54, 65, 68, 76, 83, 120 Il Sangue e l’acqua (1693; blood and water from Christ’s side; Minato/ Draghi), 89 Il Segno della humana salute (1684; healing and mourning; Minato/ Draghi), 84, 120, 132, 144ff.; Ex. 4.5, 4.6 Il Sepolcro nell’orto (1711; Christ’s Tomb in the garden; Stampiglia/M. A. Ziani), 85, 92ff. La Sete di Christo (1683; Christ’s thirst on the Cross; Minato/Draghi), 20, 33–34, 84, 86, 119 Sette consolationi di Maria (1670; attempted consolations of Mary; Minato/Sances), 22, 23, 40, 46, 53, 57, 83, 92, 106ff. 133, 140; Ex. 3.4a-b, 4.4 Sette dolori di Maria Vergine (1670; Mary’s sorrows; Ferri/Draghi), 57, 83, 106–109, 134–135 Sig des Leydens (1682; Joshua and anti-sensuality; J. A. Rudolph/Leopold), 57–59 Il Sole eclissato (1677; solar eclipse at the Crucifixion; Minato/Schmelzer), 96–98, 132; Ex. 3.2 La Sorte sopra la veste di Christo (1686; lots cast on Christ’s clothes; Minato/ Pederzoli), 31, 84 Stärcke der Lieb (1677; Christ’s love; anon./ Schmelzer), 55ff.; Ex. 2.1 Tempesta de’ dolori (1703; Christ’s sufferings and penance; Cupeda/M. A. Ziani), 88, 105 Il Terremoto (1682; earthquake during the Crucifixion; Minato/Draghi), 49, 84, 97, 140–142 Thron der Gnaden (1678; Seat of Mercy; anon./Schmelzer), 55–56, 59 Il Titolo posto su la Croce di Christo (1679; “INRI” inscription on Cross; Minato/ Draghi), 84, 94, 123 La Trasfiguratione sul Calvario (1695; Transfiguration as anticipation of the Crucifixion; Minato/Draghi), 161

220

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Index of Sepolcri by Short Title

I Tre chiodi (1678; the three Nails from the Cross; Minato/Draghi), 47, 56, 84, 91, 94, 135 Il Trionfo della Croce (1671; glorification of the Cross; Minato/Sances), 65, 86, 92, 107, 126, 132

Il Trionfo della vita eterna (?1660; sin and redemption; Pierelli/?Tricarico), 26, 39, 52 La Virtù della Croce (1697; Cross piety; Minato/Draghi), 1ff., 48, 157ff.; Ex. 5.1, 5.2