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CHAPTER 1

Passion and Theater

The most striking feature of all sacred drama in the seventeenth century is its sharing of literary register, stage techniques, and musical expression with the wider world of theatrical forms. Best known in the Catholic world are the Jesuit plays across Europe, but at the courts—that of Louis XIV, the great Other for the Austrian Habsburgs, and that of their close Spanish cousins—many stagings, devout or secular, were tied to seasonality and/or specific moments in festive or sacred commemorations.¹ In Vienna, an entire ritual year was marked by performances, and after 1660 these were largely musical: starting with oratorios in Advent, the opera and dance central to Carnival, oratorios again in Lent, 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 more complicated on Friday. The two pieces of 1676, Il Sole ecclissato and L’Ingiustizia della sentenza di Pilato, featured set designs with a dark sky with an eclipsed sun, and Pilate’s atrium with a separate representation of the Tomb underneath the space, respectively. These two are roughly the same length (nineteen printed pages), and the density of their footnoted biblical or patristic citations is about equal. It was particularly painful that they were performed as the young empress Claudia Felicitas lay dying, with Leopold and/or her mother, Anna de’ Medici, constantly by her side.

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 popular Tomb piece, mixing prose and song in the vernacular.²⁸ At the Jesuit University Church, Johann Baptist Staudt’s arias were performed as part of spoken Latin Passion drama at their Sepulcher on Holy Saturdays in the 1680s and onward, but evidently without a set design, and often in the presence of the royals. The order’s piece for 1685, Patientis Christi memoria, featured six seminarian singers and one professional for eight allegorical roles; its first act starts at the Tomb but moves later to suffering, penance, and redemption.²⁹ The arias are relatively short, probably also because of the mainly amateur performers, and some of the other Jesuit works, of similar stamp, focus on the Name of Jesus devotion. The Ursulines’ church in the Seilerstätte also hosted newly written and composed sepolcri in Italian in the 1690s, and recent work has shown the chronology of these pieces composed by C.A. Badia for performance by the nuns.³⁰ Shortly after 1700, the Viennese Oratorians put on a combination of prose, recitative, and arias in a piece called Schmerzliche Beweinung dess angehessten Heylands Iesu Christi on a Good Friday at 5:00 p.m. in their new chapel Zu der allerheiligsten Dreyfaltigkeit in the Judengasse.³¹

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. It ultimately reflects Augustine’s equivalence (Tractate 120 on John 19) of her womb and the Tomb, both virgin repositories for His Body.⁴⁵

The 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 of Sbarra and especially Minato took the genre’s vocabulary into the highest literary register to be found at court. Its most obvious norm is that Christ Himself is never—until the 1708 La Passione nell’orto and the 1709 Gesù flagellato—a character, for all the Christological content of the pieces.⁵⁰ The Resurrection is not even mentioned until the 1706 La Morte vinta sul Calvario. All these late libretti, closer to contemporary Passion oratorios than to local tradition, by Bernardoni testify to a changing piety in the new century, less focused on the Tomb as object and the events immediately surrounding the Entombment.⁵¹

THE VISUALIZATION OF MEDITATION

To the degree that the pieces presented both sound and spectacle, they participated in the century’s ideas of aural and visual theology. One popular Italian model for the internalization of Passion events was Bartolomeo de’ Cambi’s (or da Saluzzo’s) Vita dell’anima desiderosa di cavar frutto grande dalla santissima Passione di Giesù Christo (Venice and Rome, 1614), a mixture of poetic narration of the Passion in ottava rima together with meditations on each of these canti. Two copies survive in Vienna, including the 1614 Roman edition with illustrations for each canto, dedicated to Cardinal (later Duke) Ferdinando Gonzaga of Mantua with a testimonial from the Oratorian Agostino Manni, the latter the librettist for Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di anima, e di corpo. Cambi’s verses describe every action of the Passion in detail, while the prose meditations are spoken in the voice of the devout soul. The entire project was meant to furnish a series of mental images and then appropriate reflections on Christ’s sufferings.⁵² As is the case for much Seicento devotional literature, the narrative source is sometimes pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditationes vitae Christi.

In Canti 28 and 29, Cambi’s account came to the Deposition and to the Tomb, having already introduced Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus together with two laments of Mary and the Magdalen on Calvary in Canto 27 (these roughly correspond to chapters 80 and 81 in the Meditationes: first the Entombment, Lamentation at the Tomb, and the disciples’ return to Jerusalem, followed by the song of the patriarchs during Christ’s Harrowing of Hell).⁵³ After praising the Gospel figures, Cambi’s meditations then turned lithic: “Could I only be entombed with my Jesus in that holy and blessed Sepulcher, never to emerge again during my life. O Tomb, o most sacred Tomb, o holy Ark, you were worthy to receive that most valuable joy within you.” Cambi referred to the Hypostatic Union and then, in a move also found in pseudo-Bonaventure but more recently in Giambattista Marino’s Dicerie sacre, took Paul’s metaphor that “the rock was Christ” as a pivot to consider the Tomb’s clefts as the wound in Christ’s side in which the meditative believer was to dwell. The idea of Mary burying herself both in the Tomb and in the “sepolcro” of the Divine Will came up in the Dominican Ignazio del Nente’s meditations Solitudini di sacri e pietosi affetti (Florence, 1643) at the moment of the imagined final closing of the Tomb. As noted later in this study, it would recur strikingly in the repertory of the later 1690s.

Following his medieval sources, Cambi’s imaginative path then retraced the steps of Mary, the Magdalen, Martha, John, Joseph, and Nicodemus back into Jerusalem from the Tomb, portraying the Madonna’s grief in vocabulary taken from Lamentations. According to some traditions, John persuaded Mary to return to the Cenacle where the Last Supper had taken place, inside which Cambi had his characters continue to lament. For the 1689 L’Esclamar a gran voce, Burnacini would fashion a set design of the Supper’s space as imagined after the Passion, and this piece opens with Mary’s grief, surrounded by the Magdalen, Veronica, and John. Minato justified this staging with references not to Cambi but to the authority of Nicephorus Kallistos’s Ecclesiastical History (whose unique manuscript was in the imperial collections) and to the so-called Christus patiens, a cento of ancient Greek dramatic verse reworked during late antiquity into a Passion narration and sometimes attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus.

Cambi’s meditations in Canto 29 concentrated on Mary’s sorrow but also included the Christian soul’s addresses to the Magdalen and the other mourners, as it asked to join in their grief. The engravings that precede each canto in the 1614 Rome edition are also suggestive: that for Canto 28 represented both the Deposition with Mary and the other mourners as well as the Entombment in the background with Joseph and Nicodemus, on two visual planes. The following canto depicted Jerusalem in the background, Calvary in the middle ground, and no fewer than six women plus John returning from the Tomb in the foreground. Thus the very presence of a Tomb “onstage” with differing visual realms set up a series of meditative associations, and it was the task of the set designs to create emblematic meaning to be deduced while the sometimes complex theology of the texts was being sung. In that sense, the demands on sepolcri audiences, even a theologically and musically trained royal such as Leopold, were high.

As if to echo Cambi’s epistemological divisions, or perhaps to explain them to a new generation for whom they were losing validity, Minato’s preface to one of his last texts, the 1696 La Passione di Christo, oggetto di meraviglia, returned to these categories: “For if marvel abstracts the mind from other objects, the marvels of Christ’s Passion can divert [it] from the errors in my pages…. the contemplation of Christ’s Passion causes pain in memory; illuminates the intellect; purifies the will; creates jubilation in the angels; amazement in humans; and terror in Hell. Thus it is indeed an object of marvel.”

In this remarkable work, all the characters are allegorical, and three of them derive from Cambi’s explication: Contemplation is flanked by Memory, Intellect, and Will, and the “audience” for the contemplative subject consists of a different trio: the allegorical Angels’ Jubilation, Human Stupor, and Hell’s Terror. Burnacini’s drawing for the upper part of the set—Moses and the Burning Bush—also survives (Vienna, Theatermuseum, Min. 29/29b1; figure 5). Along with the 1691 I Frutti, this is one of Minato’s pieces on the process of meditation, and as such is discussed later. Unfortunately, the scores for both these sepolcri went missing after Draghi’s death on 16 January 1700, or perhaps they were simply considered too anachronistic for a new century’s devotional taste and thus not preserved.

FIGURE 5. L.O. Burnacini, Moses and the Burning Bush. (Permission by KHM-Museumsverband.)

THE EMBLEMATICS OF STAGING

The loss of La Passione’s score is all the more regrettable since Minato asked for three separate orchestras, each on a discrete set level, to play different music in the opening sinfonia simultaneously.⁵⁴ This is one of the correspondences among poetic conceit, Burnacini’s multiplane designs, and music, and it seems to have been generated by the threefold divisions of subject and audience in the piece; perhaps it was the first “marvel” to be heard musically in the work. Throughout the piece, sinfonias celestial and infernal function as sonic markers of characters on various planes (Heaven, earth, Hell).

Differentiating Burnacini’s drawings among sepolcri and other projects for operas, Forty Hours’ expositions, and even capricci (fantasies) is not easy. A clear case can be made for eight of the drawings (now in the Österreichisches Theatermuseum; see appendix 3) to represent sepolcri sets. To these should be added Minato’s ekphrastic descriptions at the beginning of some fifteen libretti. Most important for the technical and intellectual complexity of the design are the number of representational planes—one, two, or three—in the conceptions. The former concept is analogous to, but different from, Benjamin’s consideration of “vertical” and “horizontal” planes in tragedy, which in the case of drawings he considered to interfere with the representations of the celestial.

Burnacini’s surviving wash drawings are sometimes hard to correlate with Minato’s set descriptions, and they seem to date from the later repertory. They were designs, subject to modifications, and not finished constructions. Some of their gestures, as recent research has shown, are taken from emblem books available in the court library, notably Melchior Küsel’s Icones biblicae (Augsburg, 1679), an illustrated Bible synopsis from the primary illustrator of the time and a figure with links to the Habsburgs.⁵⁵ In addition—and unlike the opera sets—they remained visible throughout the entire piece, and thus their meaning developed as the symbolic trajectory of any work unfolded.

Thus the sets have to be taken as integral parts of the sepolcri’s manufacture of meaning. Even the works of the 1660s imply action with characters’ comings and goings (in Federici’s 1666 Gli affetti pietosi, Adam begins his scene 2 by lifting his torso from his grave under the Cross, slowly to come entirely onstage), and although none of Burnacini’s designs can be safely matched to any texts earlier than the 1680s, it is hard to imagine pieces of the previous decades without a basic staging.⁵⁶ The first two scenes of the 1662 Fede trionfante take place in the darkness over the earth at the Crucifixion, before Faith illuminates the stage with her sheer brightness in scene 3, overwhelming Longinus and presumably the spectators in Eleonora’s small, dark chapel in the Neue Burg.⁵⁷

Indeed, some of the deictic textual indications suggest a basic visual environment, at least some kind of Crucifix, such as the famed one of Ferdinand II kept on the high altar of the Hofburgkapelle.⁵⁸ The first presence of a constructed stage design can be deduced from the Friday 1670 work by Minato and Sances, and the opening indication for such a scene is in the following year’s libretto for the same Day, Il Trionfo della Croce. Of course, after the rites earlier on Thursday, all statues and altarpieces in the royal chapels would have been draped for the Triduum; thus the Tomb and, after 1670, the set design were the only representational objects visible.⁵⁹

One example of such interplay is the very last sepolcro for Eleonora, La Sorte sopra la veste di Christo of 1686 (Minato, with music by G. B. Pederzoli). The libretto gives Jonah’s ship with the whale as the set design, and there survives a likely drawing (Theatermuseum, Min. 29/39b1; figure 6), which also includes the biblical motto from Jonah 1:7 (“And they cast lots [sortes], and the lot fell on Jonah”). Given the long tradition of identification of the prophet with Christ (the former’s three days in the whale ≈ Christ’s three days in the Tomb), one level of identification (whale=Tomb) would have been obvious. Still, the motto referring to “casting lots” comes before the first mention (Jon 2:1) of the fish, and the libretto works out the symbolic equivalence of Jonah’s lots with those thrown by the Roman soldiers on Calvary over Christ’s clothes. This design would have involved at least two architectonic planes with the motto on top (and no Eucharist present in either the drawing or Minato’s description), hence setting up the triangular process of meditative association.

FIGURE 6. L.O. Burnacini, Jonah Cast Overboard. (Permission by KHM-Museumsverband.)

As on many other fronts, the works of the 1670s had already raised the level of visual complexity in the single design in front of which all the psychological action plays out. The distance between image and devotional topic thus engaged the same kind of meditative association as did emblems, working out the invisible similarities that the imprese presented at any given moment over the course of an hour’s worth of text and music.

A single year’s sets (for which there are no drawings) give some idea of the emblematics. The Thursday piece for 1683—a moment at which the upcoming Ottoman threat meant curtailed stagings as early as the winter operatic works—was La Sete di Christo. Minato’s indication gives the set background as Calvary with Christ crucified, and the text opens with the entire cast onstage, an unusual quintet of biblical lamenters: the Virgin, the Magdalen, John the Baptist, Joseph, and Nicodemus.⁶⁰ This text was later reworked by an anonymous author and set to music by Bernardo Pasquini, probably for his Borghese patrons in Rome, with this version then performed in Modena in 1689.⁶¹ Its Friday pendant, L’Eternità soggetta al tempo (another case of Minato’s upending an early modern commonplace), featured a set with Ahaz’s sundial (Is 38:8, the story of Ezechias’s recovery from sickness and the divine reversal of ten degrees on the dial to give the king a longer life) as its apparato, and some twelve completely allegorical figures singing: a Penitent, Time and Eternity, the Four Seasons, Day and Night, and the Three Hours of Darkness.

Thus the intellectual material differed; on Thursday, listeners would have had to place John the Baptist at the Tomb with Calvary in the background, even though the Precursor had died before Christ. Friday’s message was more encoded, and it is again helpful to turn to Lapide’s exegesis of the verse from Isaiah 38.⁶² After a long disquisition on the astronomical implications of the reversal (whether the sun or just its shadow retroceded, whether the ten degrees meant ten hours, how long the actual day was, etc.), the Jesuit had given his characteristic four meanings for the passage beyond the literal sense, of which the tropological and allegorical ones are most relevant. In terms of the spiritual, souls undergoing conversio like Ezechias were indeed restored to their earlier merit and perfection; allegorically, Christ in His Passion and Harrowing of Hell descended ten levels (~degrees) below the choirs of angels and humans, then to rise again in the Ascension.

This sepolcro’s concern with astronomy and measuring time also echoed Leopold’s own scientific interests, typical of the libretti around 1680. Finally, the royal listeners on Friday would also have thought of the following verses of the book, Ezechias’s song of recovery (Is 38:10ff.), “In the midst of my days I shall go to the gates of Hell; … I shall not see the Lord God in the land of the living,” as a direct reference to Christ’s entombment and the Harrowing. To complete the hermeneutic circle, Lapide had referred to this biblical song as a “carmen eucharisticum,” whether the text was written by Ezechias or by Isaiah himself. The presence of the Santissimo in the set design had reflections in the textual allusions of biblical passages.

Still, the unfolding of the emblematics was a dramatic process, beyond the initial visual impact. In working out the Thursday piece, Minato would also have had in mind Marino’s second Diceria sacra, “La musica,” whose theme is the Seven Words of Christ. Minato’s preface works around the ideas of “fountains of eloquence,” along with various meanings of “thirst,” and ends by wishing the reader to be “thirsty for divine grace.” La Sete begins with a long paraphrase of the Improperia, reproaching the Chosen People for its “ingratitude,” and moving on to a consideration of Christ’s suffering.⁶³

This is interrupted by one of the Words (in Latin), “Sitio” (I thirst), sung by the offstage Voice of Christ (this device is normally used for choruses or for God the Father), which leads the five characters to a sacra conversazione. Since the Word’s enunciation had happened before the Entombment, this is a representation of meditative memory. In the discussion, the Baptist’s presence is justified, as he had baptized Christ with water at the beginning of His mission, as a sign of His humanity; the Magdalen’s tears represent the later presence of water in salvational history; and the simple opposition of water/fire swings the discourse around to “ardor.” Along the way, Minato played on a characteristically diverse set of authorities: Drogo of Laon/Ostia, Johannes Tauler, and Seneca. The three non-hidden followers of Christ (Mary, the Magdalen, the Baptist) then begin a series of metrically differentiated choral interjections. These continue with other trios involving Giuseppe and Nicodemo, until the Baptist recognizes Christ’s real need: “Yes, my crucified one, I believe that Your thirst is [really] Your desire that sinners may enjoy the fruits of the Blood that You shed.”

After Nicodemo invokes the Hypostatic Union, the Baptist moves the meditative progression one level further by concluding that “thirst holds a profound mystery”; the Magdalen then echoes Minato’s preface, “Yes, incarnate and crucified God, for You am I thirsty”; and all five characters then come around to their thirst for the Cross. The Magdalen and the Baptist, as human followers, have the last word, and the final madrigale is addressed to sinners, royal and other: “When Christ thirsts, he is thirsty for your weeping.” Thus the seemingly simple set of the Cross, perhaps ultimately dictated by the constraints of the military situation, turns out to reveal liquid associations.

In Friday’s L’Eternità, the one-plane (and hence relatively easy to construct, given the logistics in 1683) set, however obscure it might have seemed at first view, also played out sequentially. Beyond the despairing Penitent with whom the libretto begins, the other eleven allegorical figures are all related to time, and they are introduced in descending order of temporal scope: (1) Time/Eternity, (2) the Four Seasons, (3) Day/Night, and (4) the Three Hours of Darkness. Eternità begins the pedagogical process with explanations of Divine Unity so technical that Draghi’s ability to set them to music is astounding. But given the looming Ottoman threat, this could also be construed as the musical answer to Islamic criticisms of Christian “polytheism.”

After an analogously hermetic explanation by Tempo, the Stagioni appear to exemplify temporal change, and to enunciate the central conceit of the text: that the Hypostatic Union was parallel to eternity’s becoming subject to time. Tempo and Eternità then summarize this point, allowing the issue of “limits” to be raised via the introduction of Giorno and Notte, related to the Creation (Gen 1:14, “He divided the day from the night”). The first four characters to appear then retell Christ’s life and Passion in terms of temporal spans (e.g., the forty days in the desert). Here, however, the visual emblem of the sundial becomes important, as Ezechias’s canticle in Isaiah also features a refrain foretelling Good Friday: “de mane usque ad vesperam finies me//You finish me from morning until evening.” In the sepolcro, this is echoed by Tempo and Eternità’s references to Passion events that occurred by both day and night. Lapide’s commentary on Isaiah had taken this verse as only a meditation on the brevity and vanity of human life, without reference to Good Friday. Minato did not miss the occasion to connect temporality to the preceding day’s piece by having L’Estate sing the second stanza of a two-strophe aria, “and His thirst was so terrible, lasting so long that finally on the Cross He showed Himself thirsty” (sitibondo, the key word of La Sete’s conclusion).

In Minato’s careful construction of scenes, Il Giorno then sets up the entrance of the final trio of characters, Le Tre Ore di Tenebre, by lamenting his own abandonment of Christ that allowed darkness to come upon the earth. Their entrance toward the piece’s climax would have presaged the coming sunset on that 16 April, as sunset happened around 6:45 p.m. (in modern terms). The combination of each Hour of Darkness brings the Penitent to a culminating two-stanza aria of penance (“Mio Christo, perdono”), and the concluding coda, on the “reversed” idea of using earthly time to acquire eternal life, also retrogrades the order of appearance of the allegorical characters. Listeners had to make the meditative connection among the stage set (never explicitly invoked in the sepolcro’s text), the poetic conceits, and the musical experience.

These pieces raise the issue of audiences’ reception of allegorical figures, as they arise also in Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s autos sacramentales.⁶⁴ The role of such characters in Italy, coming out of the medieval rappresentatione tradition, is less known, and their specific employment by a dramatist of European renown like Minato will be investigated in chapter 2.⁶⁵

ELEONORA’S VIEW: LA GARA DELLA MISERICORDIA E GIUSTITIA DI DIO (1661)

The totality of the messages for the 1683 Triduum also suggests that penance and Passion mourning were woven together in close (and not always obvious) ways in any given year. At the very beginning of the genre, the 1661 Thursday piece gives one view of Eleonora Gonzaga’s devotional world.⁶⁶ She would have learned early how to use spectacle and music in the service of penance. Her mother (also a widow), Maria Gonzaga, had personally supervised the cultural and physical reconstruction of Mantua after the devastation of the 1629–31 War of the Succession, and in the 1640s, the duchess had set up a Sunday Eucharistic celebration in the ducal capital, officiated by the local Jesuits, with candles and the ducal musicians at the church of S. Stefano, entitled the “buonamorte.”⁶⁷ In the devastated duchy, the young (and half-orphaned) Eleonora would have seen musical enactments of a Christian death. Still, there seems to be no tradition of Tombs, with or without music, in Mantua’s churches.⁶⁸

There also survives evidence for her own piety, notably an incomplete manuscript, gathering daily prayers plus orations and occasional Offices for important sanctoral celebrations throughout the year (the fascicles containing feasts from January to May, and hence potentially Holy Week, are sadly missing).⁶⁹ This Prattica di divotioni bears a manuscript colophon indicating its destination for the Varese printing house in Rome in 1659, the main publisher of both devotional and historical works by the Jesuits around midcentury. Although nominally written “di mano propria,” the neat hand looks nothing at all like Eleonora’s large script in her letters from the 1650s back home to Mantua. For whatever reason, it was evidently not printed until well after her death, as Prattica di divotioni quotidiane (Vienna and Trent, 1706), since there is no record of a Roman edition.⁷⁰ The volume, both the print and manuscript versions, includes daily prayers of adoration, texts for each individual day of the week, invocations of Christ’s Five Wounds, addresses to Christ Crucified, “Ave Marias” based on the virtues of St. Joseph, Carlo Borromeo’s “Protesta a ben morire” (like her childhood experiences), and then texts for important (to Eleonora) feast days, including St. Anne, another model for widowed mothers of female children. The Five Wounds devotion would appear in the 1677 Le Cinque piaghe for her chapel, repeated in 1681. Eleonora’s sense of female piety was evident in the two different Viennese oratorios (possibly 1668, and 1683)—evidently the first in the Italian repertory on the topic—on the life of her patroness St. Helena, and her Prattica had also noted the presence of an “Eleonora” among the eleven thousand virgins martyred with St. Ursula.⁷¹

The extremely sensual devotion in the empress’s text for the feast of Mary’s birth (8 September) might have represented an obstacle to its actual publication around 1660; this outburst of corporeality on Baby Mary was a highly charged version of devotion to the Immaculate Conception. The opening of the whole book gives a sense of Eleonora’s own formulations, indebted not least to the tradition of Christian optimism: “All-powerful God, fountain of all good, Heaven has been enriched by Your Divine Majesty with so much beauty that it is hard to tell Your glory, for which purpose as many tongues would need to come forth as stars appear to us at night.” This text, along with the sepolcri, probably comes close to the empress’s own unmediated devotion.⁷²

Devotional prints written by others and dedicated to her include Lenten manuals and reflections on other important saints. The Discalced Carmelite Emanuele di Gesù Maria inscribed his Fiori di Carmelo sparsi nelle festività de’ santi (Vienna, 1666) to the dowager empress, including sermons for Bl. Luigi Gonzaga (her relative) and St. Joseph given that same autumn at court. If these items show off the festive side of her devotion, penance and mortality are more evident in the work of the Modenese Jesuit preacher Giovanni Battista Manni (1606–82), who spent enough time in Vienna to write the rules of the Order of the Starry Cross that she had founded in 1662, and who dedicated the first part of his Lenten sermons to her in 1681. Manni also published a biography of the empress’s mother, Maria, and an emblem book on death, his Varii e veri ritratti della morte (Milan, 1671).

Yet Eleonora had even more direct models for how to mourn at Tombs. In his massive 1,031-page compendium of virtuous Christian widows, La reggia delle vedove sacre, dedicated to the empress in 1663 (and reprinted in 1682), the Paduan Dominican Girolamo Ercolani (c. 1620–68) recalled the piety of an earlier female Gonzaga who had gone to Austria, married a Habsburg, and then was left widowed at age twenty-eight, Anna Caterina (1566–1621). In her time as ruler in Innsbruck, Anna had had a new church of the Sepulcher built with seven chapels (the now-secularized Siebenkapellenkirche). During her widowhood spent as a Servite tertiary in the monastery that she had founded in 1614, according to Ercolani Anna had participated in the nuns’ reenactments of the Via Crucis, their forming a “living Cross,” and seeming “like so many Magdalens in their watch day and night, destroyed by sorrow, at the Tomb of God deceased.” Ercolani’s dedication of this tome forms part of Eleonora’s efforts to create a circle of virtuous and religious women in the world, something like a revival of the medieval bizzoche (roughly “secular tertiaries”) tradition, organized around both the “Starry Cross” and her all-female “Slaves of Virtue.”

For all her piety, the empress was also active in court politics.⁷³ Clearly she played vital roles in the transition from her husband to her stepson, and even after the arrival of Margherita Teresa in 1666, largely taking the side of the Spanish party at court.⁷⁴ She weighed in strongly on Leopold’s choices for his second and third wives in 1673 and 1676. Her political place was also evident in her patronage of sepolcri, as the case of Holy Thursday in 1684 (discussed in chapter 4) shows.

As for many early modern Christians, Eleonora’s devotional world was thus complex.⁷⁵ Lent 1661 seems to have been a particularly busy time in her chapel, as a letter from the new Modenese ambassador suggests, partially because of her response to Pope Alexander VII’s universal Jubilee of that year to implore pardon for Christian sin along with heavenly aid in the battles against the Ottomans.⁷⁶ Indeed, the foregrounding of Misericordia in the Thursday piece might have been a response to this theme in the Jubilee. The sepolcro enacts the remorse of two character pairs: Giuda and Pietro together with the Centurione and Longino (in the Viennese tradition, these latter were separate figures on Calvary). This quartet is in dialogue with the three allegorical figures: the contesting Misericordia and Giustizia, along with Disperatione. The allegorical trio parallels that of 1660’s Trionfo, and the piece’s virtuoso bass part for Giuda suggests what the music for Morte might have been like the previous year if Pierelli’s Trionfo (for which Tricarico’s score does not survive) were the text. Given that Draghi was the only bass singer employed by the empress in 1662, this part or parts might well have been meant for him; certainly the character’s unusual presence in this piece testifies to some kind of extraordinary singer. Five of eight scenes include the traitorous disciple, starting with a despairing monologue at his first appearance in scene 2.⁷⁷

In the literary environment, there were even longer treatments of Judas’s fate, such as the forty-five-page poem by Giulio Liliani printed in 1627 under Tasso’s name. Quoting Ambrose, Manni noted in his Lenten sermons that the apostle’s despair was a greater sin (because of its denial of divine mercy) than his betrayal of Christ.⁷⁸ Obviously, the creation of an allegorical Despair was not original with Scarano, dating as it did to the Mystère de la Passion of the fifteenth-century Parisian organist and author Arnaul Gréban. Giuda’s presence in this piece also reflects an undated oratorio, probably from the 1660s, for the court by the castrato singer and occasional composer Filippo Vismarri, Giuda disperato (score in I-Baf).

As the lineup of characters suggests, La Gara works around paired duets leading to trios, thus imparting an expansive dramatic macrorhythm to the scenes. Like the 1660 Il Sagrifizio, it starts in media res, here with a squabble over precedence between Misericordia and Giustizia, followed by a duet of Giuda and Pietro and then a trio of these two last and Misericordia. The pattern repeats with a duo for the Centurione and Longino, followed by Giuda and Misericordia, and another trio for these two plus Giustizia, featuring the betraying disciple’s most florid music. The final three scenes move from a trio on Giuda’s final despair, to a quartet, to a quintet of characters, as he disappears and penance is enacted by the others. The constructivism of the structure is evident, and the piece marked the first use of the “competition” trope in a sacred context, although the idea had originally been employed for a Viennese opera in January 1652 to celebrate the birth of Margherita Teresa in Spain. The same idea would return in Pierelli’s (?1663) sepolcro La Gara di pietà, which features the Virgin, an angel, and some four allegorical characters (Fede, Amor Divino, Gentilesmo, and Paganesmo), before it went on to a long career in stage works secular and sacred. The Thursday 1661 piece was followed on Friday by Draghi and Bertali’s Il Pentimento, focusing only on penance and calling for fewer (six) singers than did La Gara della misericordia.

How Scarano might have come up with his dramatic scheme is not entirely clear. He had been born into a middle-class family in Taranto, educated in the seminary and taken orders, and at some point made his way to Vienna, where he would collaborate on other dramatic projects before returning home and dying in 1671.⁷⁹ He might well have known Tricarico in Apulia before ever reaching Austria. His piece marks the first use of New Testament characters in the repertory, and the first reference to a Habsburg relic, by virtue of his inclusion of Longino and thus the Holy Lance which the soldier had wielded to pierce Christ’s side. Rather than having Penance be an actual character, as in the two pieces of the previous year and the other 1661 work—indeed, Penitenza’s “epilogue” to Il Sagrifizio d’Abramo on Good Friday 1660 had turned out as a show-grabbing solo for Vismarri—here remorse is enacted in different ways by Pietro, the Centurione, and Longino, while rejected by Giuda. Thus every nonallegorical figure is a sinner of some sort.

The setup of the first three scenes shows the links to the past tradition of rappresentazioni, while the music is firmly rooted in midcentury styles. The two allegorical figures open by snapping at each other in versi sciolti, with their opening scene falling into the flatter regions of their G mollis tonality. Misericordia points at a Crucifix, while Giustizia places the scene temporally by noting that nothing has been the same for her since Christ’s death. In this recited dialogue, even the smallest vocal flourish stands out.

With the entrance of two soliloquizing sinners, the literary register drops in scene 2, the verses even out into settenari, and the tonal environment shifts abruptly into durus regions around D. Giuda opens with a long, despondent monologue descending to his low E, while Pietro reiterates the depth of his betrayal, and the two squabble as to whose sin was greater, a parody of the opening dispute between the allegorical figures (example 1.1).

EXAMPLE 1.1. G. Tricarico, La Gara della Misericordia e Giustizia (1661; A-Wn 18716), “Uccidetemi omai,” f. 8v.

Perhaps because of the underlying popular tradition of Tomb theater, the opening of this piece, while serious, comes off as livelier than might be expected. It is certainly nothing like the outpourings of unbridled grief that would open some later sepolcri, starting with Minato’s 1670 Sette consolationi. And in its studied ignoring of the actual Sepulcher, it focuses attention from the outset on penance—just as the works of the previous year and Il Pentimento would do.⁸⁰

The first aria, cast in the two-stanza form that was normative in both sacred and secular dramatic works, is given to Pietro at the end of scene 3, cast in settenari and endecasillabi and based on E, moving to a more distant tonal center. As if to contrast all this, the two Roman soldiers arriving from Calvary frame their penance with duets in scene 4, before we return in the next scene to an increasingly desperate Giuda, who asks Giustizia to kill him with the sword of Justice. Although she lays out the path of penance culminating in hope, the former apostle refuses to take it, despite a duet plea from the two sisters. Misericordia leaves Giustizia to observe Giuda’s downfall, which begins with his aria at the end of scene 6, paralleling Pietro’s three scenes earlier. By this point, the didactic division between “good” and “bad” remorse has been made evident, and Scarano then introduces Disperatione (with Giuda’s reference to her black armor) in another “dialogue of recognition” at the beginning of scene 7. The essential identity of the two characters becomes evident (Disperatione: “[io] son quel che tu sei”), and, still in relatively sharp pitch areas, the two go off together in a bouncy triple rhythm, despite Giustizia’s offstage warning about the horror of Hell. This jocund banalization of suicide seems to come out of the rappresentazione tradition.

Before the scene ends, Giuda becomes the target of an invocation of despair by the devils, with a repetitive sinfonia consisting of only two pitches. The remarkable moment closes with second thoughts from Giuda, and Giustizia’s vow that she will accompany him even in his suicide. To the degree that there is any contemporary model for this scene, it was probably not Liliani’s poem, a series of solo laments for Judas with minimal narration, but rather a moment in Fabio Glissanti’s guide to Hell, L’horribile e spaventevole inferno (Venice, 1617). Here a damned soul is led through infernal regions and passes a mural that depicts the dialogue between Despair and the betraying disciple. As a major creator of allegorical drama, Glissanti also served as something of a model for the early sepolcri.

The reappearance of Misericordia at the opening of scene 8 thus marks the denouement, as she brings mercy to the three repentant sinners. This moment also marks the only recurrence of the piece’s opening pitch structure (G mollis), after most of the central scenes’ placement on A or D durus. Set in the sharp sonorities that had characterized most of the piece, the finale depicts the end of the contest between the two allegorical sisters, as Giustizia shows herself satisfied by the “expense of tears” of Pietro, Longino, and the Centurione. The concluding couplet, set homophonically and not as an imitative madrigale, simply states the point: “Arise, o sinner, and raise your head, for heavenly grace is always ready.” Uniquely in the entire repertory, the sepolcro ends on a different pitch center and system (in Athanasius Kircher’s sense) from that in which it had begun.⁸¹

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