Fruits of the Cross. Robert L. Kendrick

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СКАЧАТЬ 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). СКАЧАТЬ