LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

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 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 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 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

Скачать книгу