Fruits of the Cross. Robert L. Kendrick

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      THE NORMS OF GENRE

      It seems that the system of two pieces per year, one on Thursday and one on Friday, was called into being from scratch in 1660; Pierelli boasted of his text’s success in a letter to Alfonso IV d’Este back in Modena, as if this were an innovation, while Caldana’s Il Sagrifizio d’Abramo is securely dated to the Friday of that year. Pierelli’s poetic collected works of 1669, La Sampogna del pastor Elpireo (an anagram), includes a group of four libretti in a section of the book named “Il sepolcro” (this is the first and only Seicento evidence for the genre’s name); none of these texts survive anywhere else.⁴⁹ The author claimed that all four had been sung in Eleonora’s chapel on Holy Thursdays in the presence of the empress and her stepson. The only years with no hitherto identified Thursday pieces are 1660, 1663 (a time of massive Carnival entertainment), 1664 (when Leopold was at the Reichstag in Regensburg and Eleonora was in Linz), and 1668 (when the whole court was in Wiener Neustadt because of a fire in the Hofburg). Accepting the use of Pierelli’s four texts in these years would also imply a cycling through various librettists for Thursday works in the 1660s: in order, Pierelli, Scarano, Draghi, Pierelli (two years), Sbarra, Federici (two), and Pierelli again, with Draghi called on for the 1669 La Morte debellata, yet another text dealing with the victory over Death.

      If the printing order in La Sampogna corresponds to performance dates, then Pierelli’s opening libretto, Il Trionfo della vita eterna, would have been the 1660 piece. It is striking for its omission of biblical characters and Passion narrative, and its use of purely allegorical figures: Vita, Morte, Penitenza, and three resurrected sinners. Although this casting makes for a balanced ensemble, the last group might have symbolized Eleonora’s deceased: her husband, Ferdinand III, and their two children who had passed on (Theresa Maria in 1653, and Ferdinand Joseph in 1658; less likely herself and the two surviving archduchesses, Eleonora Maria and Maria Anna). In that sense, Il Trionfo, besides being a Tomb piece, also reiterated the triumph of life over the deaths that had dogged the dowager empress, a theatrical overcoming of grief.

      The following years’ works set out the genre’s character types: at least one male sinner (Peter, Longinus, and/or the Centurion), one female mourner, one New Testament male figure of support (John, Joseph of Arimathea), not to mention the plethora of allegorical roles discussed later. Coming out of the medieval tradition, opening “dialogues of character recognition” (e.g., “Chi sei tu? / Io sono …”) allow entering figures to query others and to identify themselves. Although the lexicon of the 1660s could be quite operatic, especially in Draghi’s libretti, the contributions of Sbarra and especially Minato took the genre’s vocabulary into the highest literary register to be found at court. Its most obvious norm is that Christ Himself is never—until the 1708 La Passione nell’orto and the 1709 Gesù flagellato—a character, for all the Christological content of the pieces.⁵⁰ The Resurrection is not even mentioned until the 1706 La Morte vinta sul Calvario. All these late libretti, closer to contemporary Passion oratorios than to local tradition, by Bernardoni testify to a changing piety in the new century, less focused on the Tomb as object and the events immediately surrounding the Entombment.⁵¹

      THE VISUALIZATION OF MEDITATION

      To the degree that the pieces presented both sound and spectacle, they participated in the century’s ideas of aural and visual theology. One popular Italian model for the internalization of Passion events was Bartolomeo de’ Cambi’s (or da Saluzzo’s) Vita dell’anima desiderosa di cavar frutto grande dalla santissima Passione di Giesù Christo (Venice and Rome, 1614), a mixture of poetic narration of the Passion in ottava rima together with meditations on each of these canti. Two copies survive in Vienna, including the 1614 Roman edition with illustrations for each canto, dedicated to Cardinal (later Duke) Ferdinando Gonzaga of Mantua with a testimonial from the Oratorian Agostino Manni, the latter the librettist for Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di anima, e di corpo. Cambi’s verses describe every action of the Passion in detail, while the prose meditations are spoken in the voice of the devout soul. The entire project was meant to furnish a series of mental images and then appropriate reflections on Christ’s sufferings.⁵² As is the case for much Seicento devotional literature, the narrative source is sometimes pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditationes vitae Christi.

      In Canti 28 and 29, Cambi’s account came to the Deposition and to the Tomb, having already introduced Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus together with two laments of Mary and the Magdalen on Calvary in Canto 27 (these roughly correspond to chapters 80 and 81 in the Meditationes: first the Entombment, Lamentation at the Tomb, and the disciples’ return to Jerusalem, followed by the song of the patriarchs during Christ’s Harrowing of Hell).⁵³ After praising the Gospel figures, Cambi’s meditations then turned lithic: “Could I only be entombed with my Jesus in that holy and blessed Sepulcher, never to emerge again during my life. O Tomb, o most sacred Tomb, o holy Ark, you were worthy to receive that most valuable joy within you.” Cambi referred to the Hypostatic Union and then, in a move also found in pseudo-Bonaventure but more recently in Giambattista Marino’s Dicerie sacre, took Paul’s metaphor that “the rock was Christ” as a pivot to consider the Tomb’s clefts as the wound in Christ’s side in which the meditative believer was to dwell. The idea of Mary burying herself both in the Tomb and in the “sepolcro” of the Divine Will came up in the Dominican Ignazio del Nente’s meditations Solitudini di sacri e pietosi affetti (Florence, 1643) at the moment of the imagined final closing of the Tomb. As noted later in this study, it would recur strikingly in the repertory of the later 1690s.

      Following his medieval sources, Cambi’s imaginative path then retraced the steps of Mary, the Magdalen, Martha, John, Joseph, and Nicodemus back into Jerusalem from the Tomb, portraying the Madonna’s grief in vocabulary taken from Lamentations. According to some traditions, John persuaded Mary to return to the Cenacle where the Last Supper had taken place, inside which Cambi had his characters continue to lament. For the 1689 L’Esclamar a gran voce, Burnacini would fashion a set design of the Supper’s space as imagined after the Passion, and this piece opens with Mary’s grief, surrounded by the Magdalen, Veronica, and John. Minato justified this staging with references not to Cambi but to the authority of Nicephorus Kallistos’s Ecclesiastical History (whose unique manuscript was in the imperial collections) and to the so-called Christus patiens, a cento of ancient Greek dramatic verse reworked during late antiquity into a Passion narration and sometimes attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus.

      Cambi’s meditations in Canto 29 concentrated on Mary’s sorrow but also included the Christian soul’s addresses to the Magdalen and the other mourners, as it asked to join in their grief. The engravings that precede each canto in the 1614 Rome edition are also suggestive: that for Canto 28 represented both the Deposition with Mary and the other mourners as well as the Entombment in the background with Joseph and Nicodemus, on two visual planes. The following canto depicted Jerusalem in the background, Calvary in the middle ground, and no fewer than six women plus John returning from the Tomb in the foreground. Thus the very presence of a Tomb “onstage” with differing visual realms set up a series of meditative associations, and it was the task of the set designs to create emblematic meaning to be deduced while the sometimes complex theology of the texts was being sung. In that sense, the demands on sepolcri audiences, even a theologically and musically trained royal such as Leopold, were high.

      As if to echo Cambi’s epistemological divisions, or perhaps to explain them to a new generation for whom they were losing validity, Minato’s preface to one of his last texts, the 1696 La Passione di Christo, oggetto di meraviglia, returned to these categories: “For if marvel abstracts the mind from other objects, the marvels of Christ’s Passion can divert [it] from the errors in my pages…. the contemplation of Christ’s Passion causes pain in memory; illuminates the intellect; purifies the will; creates jubilation in the angels; amazement in humans; and terror in Hell. Thus it is indeed an object of marvel.”

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