Fruits of the Cross. Robert L. Kendrick

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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.