The circulation of the libretti also publicized the dynasty’s role as custodians of the Passion and of its relics, including a Nail from the Cross, a Thorn from Christ’s Crown, and a particle of the Cross (the copy of Veronica’s veil now in the Vienna Schatzkammer would not make its way to the court until later in the eighteenth century). These material proofs of Christ’s suffering were instantiations of salvational agency, and in Minato’s libretti they were joined by two numerical conceits: prime-number symbolism (Three Nails, Five Wounds, Seven Sorrows) and astronomical/temporal mechanics (the eclipse at Christ’s death or biblical stoppages of time), particularly in the works of the 1670s.
The central theme linking the Passiontide pieces to other Lenten and Advent works was the Incarnation, or “Dio humanato” as it appears in some ten of Minato’s texts. The degree to which this idea of Christ’s two natures—technically, the Hypostatic Union—was also an attack on Islam is not explicit in the libretti, although the political situation with the Ottomans could be quite pressing (e.g., in 1660, 1663, 1683–84, and 1687). In terms of differentiating Christianity from another Abrahamic faith, there is a recurrent—revoltingly so, to modern sensibilities—amount of anti-Judaism in the sepolcri texts, no matter what their temporal origin or destination, with multiple mentions of Hebraic “guilt” in about half the libretti. These ideological issues are discussed further in a later chapter.
The performances happened amid busy Holy Week ritual in Vienna itself, not least the Tomb installations in some thirty churches outside the court. The sepolcri were acts of recollection of Christ’s life and the Passion; only in a few are the events of Good Friday narrated in anything like real time. In most, the Savior is presumed already deposed and buried. They thus look toward the past, in their performance of memory (not for nothing was a sepolcro by Minato and Schmelzer of 1678 entitled Le Memorie dolorose), and toward the future, in their call for personal penance. Their degree of textual intersection with the ritual readings of the week thus deserves examination; from the libretti of Francesco Sbarra in the mid-1660s onward, there is some liturgical/biblical citation, and this is footnoted—and massively extended to both patristic and classical literature—in Minato’s works.
For all the fascination of the devotional and literary aspects of the texts, still the theatrical music of the Viennese court has suffered music-analytical neglect. In the widest sense, it is not easily comparable to Lully’s far more extrovert and tractable work, and even in terms of contemporary Italian opera north and south, the Viennese pieces take a midcentury aesthetic as their foundation. Perhaps the most evident sign of this is the moment of emotional stasis embodied in the normal lyrical form of the two-stanza aria, sung by a single character or shared by two (there are some cases of single- and three-stanza arias; da capo forms make their appearance only late in the repertory). In this form, textual parallelisms between the stanzas are underscored by the music’s repetition, normally with an intervening instrumental ritornello. Much of the musical projection of the texts was in standard recitational delivery, the stile recitativo, with only a few ensemble numbers. It was in this midcentury school that Leopold himself had been trained, and his own aesthetics seem to have continued unchanged. Thus it is difficult to isolate an unusually good—or bad—passage or aria in, for example, Draghi’s output at first hearing, and the uniformity of the musical surface, largely recitational with a respectable number of arias, reinforces the seeming predictability of the texts.
Although musical means changed sooner in the Viennese opera and oratorio repertory, it was only with the switch in court composers to Ziani that sepolcri took on a different shape, more like other stage works of that decade. Scores for eight of this composer’s works between 1704 and 1711 survive and mark the changes, spanning the dynastic break as well as the transition in librettists from Minato’s self-proclaimed follower Donato Cupeda to Pietro Antonio Bernardoni.
Clearly the interaction between the play of poetic meters and their musical projection is important, as are the tonal dichotomies often applied to this repertory. Indeed, the cantus durus/mollis (pitch systems based around natural/flat sonorities) binary, as found in the works of Athanasius Kircher seems to have relevance to the Viennese repertory, given the Jesuit scholar’s close relationship to the Habsburg court. Still, the overall pitch structures have their parallels in north Italian theories of “church-keys,” combinations of pitch centers and inflections. For all the different structures that appear in the sepolcri—and here the operatic repertory runs parallel—many can be explained as transpositions of these tuoni according to various Seicento schemes (the opening of La Virtù della Croce is in one such organization). In this study, two different systems are used to get at the overall pitch structure of sepolcri: G.B. degli Antonii’s 1687 list of eight church-keys and their transpositions, along with Angelo Berardi’s 1689 idea of twelve modes, plus his later examples of these constructs’ possible transpositions (see appendix 2). Even as late as Ziani’s 1707 Il sacrifizio d’Isaac, the use of a hexachord device in a modern aria shows the genre’s debt to tradition.
FIGURE 1. Frans Luycx, Crucifixion with Habsburg Mourners, c. 1662, Vienna, Kirche am Hof. (Photo: UNIDAM database, University of Vienna, by permission.)
In some ways, sepolcri are epiphenomenal of the ways in which Habsburg culture seems both overdetermined and understudied. Although they have a timeless quality, due to both their generic norms and the events of the Passion, they are also linked to specific moments of devotion, royal self-portrayal, and conceptualist aesthetics. Given the money and effort that evidently went into their production, they should be taken as moments of the spectacle that, on many fronts, was central to the dynasty’s ideology. In a wider European sense, though, the Austrian Habsburgs’ musical reenactment of Passion memories in front of the Tomb was, in its details, unlike anything else to be found in the nexus of royal devotion and hegemony that characterized the century.
An image not directly related to the genre’s sets summarizes the centrality of the Cross to this combination. One of Eleonora Gonzaga’s evidently few commissions in the visual arts, executed at the beginning of Leopold’s reign (c. 1662 and thus just after the first sepolcri), shows the Virgin, the Magdalen, St. John, and the living royals (Leopold, Eleonora and her two daughters plus her stepson Karl Joseph) as co-spectators at the Crucifixion, complete with its darkened sun, earthquake, and tearing of the Temple’s veil (figure 1; this altarpiece must originally have been meant for a court setting, although it now resides in the Kirche am Hof). In addition, two young cherubs in the space behind the dowager empress might represent her infant sons deceased in the 1650s. If such a design is medieval, Frans Luycx’s brilliant brushstrokes and somberly differentiated palette mark the image as modern. This sign of Habsburg desire for co-participation on Calvary and at the Tomb is embodied in the music theater, the subject of what follows.
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: