Fruits of the Cross - Robert L. Kendrick

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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 covenant 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 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 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, 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

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