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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
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
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.
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 twenty-four), 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. 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.