Fruits of the Cross. Robert L. Kendrick

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

CHAPTER 2

      Devotional Strategies

      In addition to the visual context and the dramatic background, current piety conditioned the pieces’ meaning. The topics were not confined to the postburial mourning of Christ, but entailed meditative trajectories on the entire process of redemption, from the Incarnation through the Cross. Since the libretti were both commemorative and didactic, they had to adumbrate the need for, and efficacy of, the Passion. Given that little of the entire Viennese oratorio repertory addressed Christ’s death directly—and with the silent but overwhelming presence of His Body on display in the Tomb during the performances—the pieces were also to explain the reasons for His sacrifice in the first place.¹ And they had to be couched in terms meaningful to the royals, beginning with a little-known but important part of court ideology.

      THE ECONOMICS OF REDEMPTION

      Like sepulchral culture and Passion devotion in general, the repertory stands at the intersection of soteriology (the theology of salvation) and justification theory. But its vocabulary also invoked ideas of price and exchange in early modern Europe, even if its background is that of classical explanations of redemption. Beyond the reaffirmation of Anselm’s idea of the Passion as satisfaction for sin, codified in the early discussions at the Council of Trent, Catholic understandings of the medieval saint’s treatise Cur Deus homo? placed the reconciliation of divine justice and mercy precisely in the Cross. With the addition of Aquinas’s emphasis on Christ’s free self-sacrifice, and its reiteration using His Blood as the fluid of salvation, a general consensus was set out in chapter 2 of the 1547 Tridentine “Decree on Justification.”

      Within that framework, however, different emphases on satisfaction for original sin could circulate. The degree to which Christ’s death placated God, and ultimately the need for the Incarnation-Passion, was expressed in the repertory via formulations of restitution and price, as found in Minato’s Sette consolationi (1670). Here Giustizia Divina enters in scene 2 by describing herself in the third person, metrically echoing the versi sciolti with which the grieving Virgin had opened the piece (see chapter 3):

      S’havea di sodisfarsi; / la Giustitia Divina; / era dover così, l’oggetto offeso / se riguardar si deve, / infinita è la colpa /del transgressor Adamo, / che l’infinito suo fattor offese: / e redimer potea / sol de la trina, ed indivisa essenza / Una persona eterna; / l’huomo caduto al pricipizio rio; / che infinito non è, se non Iddio. // Divine Justice had to be satisfied; it was necessary if the “offended object” is considered. The sin of Adam transgressing was infinite, he who offended his infinite Maker. Only an eternal Person of the threefold and undivided Essence could redeem humanity, fallen from the evil precipice; for the only Infinite is God.²

      Beyond traditional satisfaction theory, though, the various exchanges present in redemption and sinners’ reactions—for example, guilt for tears, or Christ’s Body for Adam’s sin—took on special weight in Leo­pold’s court, given the rise of mercantilist thought in economics and its local Viennese exponents. Such thinkers in court circles as Johann Joachim Becher, P.W. von Hörnigk, and Wilhelm von Schröder favored internal trade, the development of an urban mercantile class, and modern financial administration. Outside economics, their ideas also had an impact on ceremonial language and behavior at court, for all that the expenses on music theater and staging might have seemed “irrational” from a monetarist perspective.³ Thus the libretti’s inclusion of payment, prices, and balance showed the presence of both the scholastic and the modern in court discourse. Becher’s own eclectic theology, drawing variously from hermeticism and from the contemporary spirituality of Cardinal Giovanni Bona, also suggests another link between the lexical fields of exchange and soteriology.⁴ In addition, the openness of Catholic anti-Machiavellian thought toward trade (particularly in the political theorist Giovanni Botero, whose ideas had framed Habsburg claims to sovereignty) added weight to this discursive use.

      The first transaction to come up in the libretti was that of sinners’ debt. In the 1661 La Gara, it was expressed in terms of how much humanity owed to justice. After Giuda’s exit to suicide, in scene 8 Misericordia addresses the three remaining figures (Pietro, Longino, and the Centurione) to induce penance. Then Giustizia, armed and furious, reappears, as pitch organization switches in a sharp direction, from G mollis to G durus, and when Misericordia attempts to claim the trio for herself, Giustizia trumps her by pointing to their status: “each one of them is a true debtor to me of tears and pain.” With a sudden lurch toward even sharper pitch regions (on E), the sinners move to comply: “The disbursement of tears from our pain will be made to you, like cash at the bank of the Earth.”⁵ Giustizia accepts this promise with another change in pitch center, moving to C durus, and essentially the contest of justice and mercy is over, resolved dialogically and tonally by the differing remorse of each sinner.

      Even before, payment had come up in the closing madrigale of the 1660 Il Sagrifizio, as Caldana put it in halting verse: “From our eyes, let us pay out the heart’s capital in coins of flowing tears, nor let any penitent greedily hold on to them; pardon can be bought only with these pearls [margarite=“tears”].”⁶ Minato’s 1678 piece for Eleonora, I Tre chiodi di Christo, begins with Redeemed Humanity joyfully shedding its chains, but then being instructed as to the price of the transaction by Catholic Piety: “How much this your fate cost Jesus: thorns, whips, nails, the Cross, and death…. Humanità Redenta: Catholic Piety, you move me to tears; I would almost say that it pains me that my Redeemer bought me back from the Devil’s eternal slavery, if the price of my salvation is so great.”

      But it was in the Friday 1685 libretto (Draghi’s score is not preserved) that Minato rang all possible changes on redemption’s value, starting with his characteristically artificial and self-abnegating preface: “Reader, yesterday [the Thursday sepolcro] you gave me a large capital of sympathy for my Bevanda di fiele; today I seek to pay you with my Prezzo dell’humana redentione…. The price that I present you is Christ’s Blood, of infinite worth.”

      This piece featured one of Burnacini’s more complex designs, which moved the garden where the Tomb was traditionally located back on to Calvary (one drawing, Vienna, Theatermuseum, Min. 29/58b2, seems partially related, but some important details differ). Above the Crucifixion’s hill was the Cherub who expelled Adam from Eden, and in the heights of Burnacini’s set, the typical glory (an earlier version of this design, without the Cherub, had been used for the 1677 L’Infinità impicciolita). Its unusual cast of characters included four symbolic figures linked to redemption (Humanità Redenta again, Amor Divino, Misericordia Eterna, and Pentimento) along with three angels past or present: the Cherub, Lucifero, and a Guardian Angel, the last of whom begins the piece by releasing Humanità from the chains in which Lucifer leads her: “Drop these chains, get out of here, rebellious spirit! Lucifero: Have I lost my spoils? I, made utterly weak?” This echoes the seemingly optimistic opening of I Tre chiodi, and the four characters continue until Amor Divino and Misericordia Eterna appear out of nowhere in the Glory, narrating the events of salvational history with jabs at Lucifer. Finally, Pentimento arrives, eventually causing the Devil to flee entirely and offering the material means of a penitent life—namely and obviously, the Cross—to Humanità.

      Rather than hammering away at price, the underlying conceit of the piece, Minato held back until all the details of redemption had been sung. Then Pentimento’s two-stanza aria brought it back in: “(1) Weep, weep, never cease СКАЧАТЬ