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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
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.
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.)
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. 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
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.)
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 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 thirty-odd 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