Fruits of the Cross. Robert L. Kendrick

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СКАЧАТЬ 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: 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 СКАЧАТЬ