song of recovery (Is 38:10ff.), “In the midst of my days I shall go to the gates of Hell; … I shall not see the Lord God in the land of the living,” as a direct reference to Christ’s entombment and the Harrowing. To complete the hermeneutic circle, Lapide had referred to this biblical song as a “carmen eucharisticum,” whether the text was written by Ezechias or by Isaiah himself. The presence of the Santissimo in the set design had reflections in the textual allusions of biblical passages.
Still, the unfolding of the emblematics was a dramatic process, beyond the initial visual impact. In working out the Thursday piece, Minato would also have had in mind Marino’s second Diceria sacra, “La musica,” whose theme is the Seven Words of Christ. Minato’s preface works around the ideas of “fountains of eloquence,” along with various meanings of “thirst,” and ends by wishing the reader to be “thirsty for divine grace.” La Sete begins with a long paraphrase of the Improperia, reproaching the Chosen People for its “ingratitude,” and moving on to a consideration of Christ’s suffering.63
This is interrupted by one of the Words (in Latin), “Sitio” (I thirst), sung by the offstage Voice of Christ (this device is normally used for choruses or for God the Father), which leads the five characters to a sacra conversazione. Since the Word’s enunciation had happened before the Entombment, this is a representation of meditative memory. In the discussion, the Baptist’s presence is justified, as he had baptized Christ with water at the beginning of His mission, as a sign of His humanity; the Magdalen’s tears represent the later presence of water in salvational history; and the simple opposition of water/fire swings the discourse around to “ardor.” Along the way, Minato played on a characteristically diverse set of authorities: Drogo of Laon/Ostia, Johannes Tauler, and Seneca. The three non-hidden followers of Christ (Mary, the Magdalen, the Baptist) then begin a series of metrically differentiated choral interjections. These continue with other trios involving Giuseppe and Nicodemo, until the Baptist recognizes Christ’s real need: “Yes, my crucified one, I believe that Your thirst is [really] Your desire that sinners may enjoy the fruits of the Blood that You shed.”
After Nicodemo invokes the Hypostatic Union, the Baptist moves the meditative progression one level further by concluding that “thirst holds a profound mystery”; the Magdalen then echoes Minato’s preface, “Yes, incarnate and crucified God, for You am I thirsty”; and all five characters then come around to their thirst for the Cross. The Magdalen and the Baptist, as human followers, have the last word, and the final madrigale is addressed to sinners, royal and other: “When Christ thirsts, he is thirsty for your weeping.” Thus the seemingly simple set of the Cross, perhaps ultimately dictated by the constraints of the military situation, turns out to reveal liquid associations.
In Friday’s L’Eternità, the one-plane (and hence relatively easy to construct, given the logistics in 1683) set, however obscure it might have seemed at first view, also played out sequentially. Beyond the despairing Penitent with whom the libretto begins, the other eleven allegorical figures are all related to time, and they are introduced in descending order of temporal scope: (1) Time/Eternity, (2) the Four Seasons, (3) Day/Night, and (4) the Three Hours of Darkness. Eternità begins the pedagogical process with explanations of Divine Unity so technical that Draghi’s ability to set them to music is astounding. But given the looming Ottoman threat, this could also be construed as the musical answer to Islamic criticisms of Christian “polytheism.”
After an analogously hermetic explanation by Tempo, the Stagioni appear to exemplify temporal change, and to enunciate the central conceit of the text: that the Hypostatic Union was parallel to eternity’s becoming subject to time. Tempo and Eternità then summarize this point, allowing the issue of “limits” to be raised via the introduction of Giorno and Notte, related to the Creation (Gen 1:14, “He divided the day from the night”). The first four characters to appear then retell Christ’s life and Passion in terms of temporal spans (e.g., the forty days in the desert). Here, however, the visual emblem of the sundial becomes important, as Ezechias’s canticle in Isaiah also features a refrain foretelling Good Friday: “de mane usque ad vesperam finies me//You finish me from morning until evening.” In the sepolcro, this is echoed by Tempo and Eternità’s references to Passion events that occurred by both day and night. Lapide’s commentary on Isaiah had taken this verse as only a meditation on the brevity and vanity of human life, without reference to Good Friday. Minato did not miss the occasion to connect temporality to the preceding day’s piece by having L’Estate sing the second stanza of a two-strophe aria, “and His thirst was so terrible, lasting so long that finally on the Cross He showed Himself thirsty” (sitibondo, the key word of La Sete’s conclusion).
In Minato’s careful construction of scenes, Il Giorno then sets up the entrance of the final trio of characters, Le Tre Ore di Tenebre, by lamenting his own abandonment of Christ that allowed darkness to come upon the earth. Their entrance toward the piece’s climax would have presaged the coming sunset on that 16 April, as sunset happened around 6:45 p.m. (in modern terms). The combination of each Hour of Darkness brings the Penitent to a culminating two-stanza aria of penance (“Mio Christo, perdono”), and the concluding coda, on the “reversed” idea of using earthly time to acquire eternal life, also retrogrades the order of appearance of the allegorical characters. Listeners had to make the meditative connection among the stage set (never explicitly invoked in the sepolcro’s text), the poetic conceits, and the musical experience.
These pieces raise the issue of audiences’ reception of allegorical figures, as they arise also in Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s autos sacramentales.64 The role of such characters in Italy, coming out of the medieval rappresentatione tradition, is less known, and their specific employment by a dramatist of European renown like Minato will be investigated in chapter 2.65
ELEONORA’S VIEW: LA GARA DELLA MISERICORDIA E GIUSTITIA DI DIO (1661)
The totality of the messages for the 1683 Triduum also suggests that penance and Passion mourning were woven together in close (and not always obvious) ways in any given year. At the very beginning of the genre, the 1661 Thursday piece gives one view of Eleonora Gonzaga’s devotional world.66 She would have learned early how to use spectacle and music in the service of penance. Her mother (also a widow), Maria Gonzaga, had personally supervised the cultural and physical reconstruction of Mantua after the devastation of the 1629–31 War of the Succession, and in the 1640s, the duchess had set up a Sunday Eucharistic celebration in the ducal capital, officiated by the local Jesuits, with candles and the ducal musicians at the church of S. Stefano, entitled the “buonamorte.”67 In the devastated duchy, the young (and half-orphaned) Eleonora would have seen musical enactments of a Christian death. Still, there seems to be no tradition of Tombs, with or without music, in Mantua’s churches.68
There also survives evidence for her own piety, notably an incomplete manuscript, gathering daily prayers plus orations and occasional Offices for important sanctoral celebrations throughout the year (the fascicles containing feasts from January to May, and hence potentially Holy Week, are sadly missing).69 This Prattica di divotioni bears a manuscript colophon indicating its destination for the Varese printing house in Rome in 1659, the main publisher of both devotional and historical works by the Jesuits around midcentury. Although nominally written “di mano propria,” the neat hand looks nothing at all like Eleonora’s large script in her letters from the 1650s back home to Mantua. For whatever reason, it was evidently not printed until well after her death, as Prattica di divotioni quotidiane (Vienna and Trent, 1706), since there is no record of a Roman edition.70 The volume, both the print and manuscript versions, includes daily prayers of adoration, texts for each individual day of the week, invocations of Christ’s Five Wounds, addresses to Christ Crucified, “Ave Marias” based on the virtues of St. Joseph, Carlo Borromeo’s “Protesta a ben morire” (like her childhood experiences), and then texts for important (to Eleonora) feast days, including St. Anne,
