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Fruits of the Cross. Robert L. Kendrick
Читать онлайн.Название Fruits of the Cross
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isbn 9780520969872
Автор произведения Robert L. Kendrick
Издательство Ingram
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.
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 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 little-known 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 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