piaghe for her chapel, repeated in 1681. Eleonora’s sense of female piety was evident in the two different Viennese oratorios (possibly 1668, and 1683)—evidently the first in the Italian repertory on the topic—on the life of her patroness St. Helena, and her Prattica had also noted the presence of an “Eleonora” among the eleven thousand virgins martyred with St. Ursula.71
The extremely sensual devotion in the empress’s text for the feast of Mary’s birth (8 September) might have represented an obstacle to its actual publication around 1660; this outburst of corporeality on Baby Mary was a highly charged version of devotion to the Immaculate Conception. The opening of the whole book gives a sense of Eleonora’s own formulations, indebted not least to the tradition of Christian optimism: “All-powerful God, fountain of all good, Heaven has been enriched by Your Divine Majesty with so much beauty that it is hard to tell Your glory, for which purpose as many tongues would need to come forth as stars appear to us at night.” This text, along with the sepolcri, probably comes close to the empress’s own unmediated devotion.72
Devotional prints written by others and dedicated to her include Lenten manuals and reflections on other important saints. The Discalced Carmelite Emanuele di Gesù Maria inscribed his Fiori di Carmelo sparsi nelle festività de’ santi (Vienna, 1666) to the dowager empress, including sermons for Bl. Luigi Gonzaga (her relative) and St. Joseph given that same autumn at court. If these items show off the festive side of her devotion, penance and mortality are more evident in the work of the Modenese Jesuit preacher Giovanni Battista Manni (1606–82), who spent enough time in Vienna to write the rules of the Order of the Starry Cross that she had founded in 1662, and who dedicated the first part of his Lenten sermons to her in 1681. Manni also published a biography of the empress’s mother, Maria, and an emblem book on death, his Varii e veri ritratti della morte (Milan, 1671).
Yet Eleonora had even more direct models for how to mourn at Tombs. In his massive 1,031-page compendium of virtuous Christian widows, La reggia delle vedove sacre, dedicated to the empress in 1663 (and reprinted in 1682), the Paduan Dominican Girolamo Ercolani (c. 1620–68) recalled the piety of an earlier female Gonzaga who had gone to Austria, married a Habsburg, and then was left widowed at age twenty-eight, Anna Caterina (1566–1621). In her time as ruler in Innsbruck, Anna had had a new church of the Sepulcher built with seven chapels (the now-secularized Siebenkapellenkirche). During her widowhood spent as a Servite tertiary in the monastery that she had founded in 1614, according to Ercolani Anna had participated in the nuns’ reenactments of the Via Crucis, their forming a “living Cross,” and seeming “like so many Magdalens in their watch day and night, destroyed by sorrow, at the Tomb of God deceased.” Ercolani’s dedication of this tome forms part of Eleonora’s efforts to create a circle of virtuous and religious women in the world, something like a revival of the medieval bizzoche (roughly “secular tertiaries”) tradition, organized around both the “Starry Cross” and her all-female “Slaves of Virtue.”
For all her piety, the empress was also active in court politics.73 Clearly she played vital roles in the transition from her husband to her stepson, and even after the arrival of Margherita Teresa in 1666, largely taking the side of the Spanish party at court.74 She weighed in strongly on Leopold’s choices for his second and third wives in 1673 and 1676. Her political place was also evident in her patronage of sepolcri, as the case of Holy Thursday in 1684 (discussed in chapter 4) shows.
As for many early modern Christians, Eleonora’s devotional world was thus complex.75 Lent 1661 seems to have been a particularly busy time in her chapel, as a letter from the new Modenese ambassador suggests, partially because of her response to Pope Alexander VII’s universal Jubilee of that year to implore pardon for Christian sin along with heavenly aid in the battles against the Ottomans.76 Indeed, the foregrounding of Misericordia in the Thursday piece might have been a response to this theme in the Jubilee. The sepolcro enacts the remorse of two character pairs: Giuda and Pietro together with the Centurione and Longino (in the Viennese tradition, these latter were separate figures on Calvary). This quartet is in dialogue with the three allegorical figures: the contesting Misericordia and Giustizia, along with Disperatione. The allegorical trio parallels that of 1660’s Trionfo, and the piece’s virtuoso bass part for Giuda suggests what the music for Morte might have been like the previous year if Pierelli’s Trionfo (for which Tricarico’s score does not survive) were the text. Given that Draghi was the only bass singer employed by the empress in 1662, this part or parts might well have been meant for him; certainly the character’s unusual presence in this piece testifies to some kind of extraordinary singer. Five of eight scenes include the traitorous disciple, starting with a despairing monologue at his first appearance in scene 2.77
In the literary environment, there were even longer treatments of Judas’s fate, such as the forty-five-page poem by Giulio Liliani printed in 1627 under Tasso’s name. Quoting Ambrose, Manni noted in his Lenten sermons that the apostle’s despair was a greater sin (because of its denial of divine mercy) than his betrayal of Christ.78 Obviously, the creation of an allegorical Despair was not original with Scarano, dating as it did to the Mystère de la Passion of the fifteenth-century Parisian organist and author Arnaul Gréban. Giuda’s presence in this piece also reflects an undated oratorio, probably from the 1660s, for the court by the castrato singer and occasional composer Filippo Vismarri, Giuda disperato (score in I-Baf).
As the lineup of characters suggests, La Gara works around paired duets leading to trios, thus imparting an expansive dramatic macrorhythm to the scenes. Like the 1660 Il Sagrifizio, it starts in media res, here with a squabble over precedence between Misericordia and Giustizia, followed by a duet of Giuda and Pietro and then a trio of these two last and Misericordia. The pattern repeats with a duo for the Centurione and Longino, followed by Giuda and Misericordia, and another trio for these two plus Giustizia, featuring the betraying disciple’s most florid music. The final three scenes move from a trio on Giuda’s final despair, to a quartet, to a quintet of characters, as he disappears and penance is enacted by the others. The constructivism of the structure is evident, and the piece marked the first use of the “competition” trope in a sacred context, although the idea had originally been employed for a Viennese opera in January 1652 to celebrate the birth of Margherita Teresa in Spain. The same idea would return in Pierelli’s (?1663) sepolcro La Gara di pietà, which features the Virgin, an angel, and some four allegorical characters (Fede, Amor Divino, Gentilesmo, and Paganesmo), before it went on to a long career in stage works secular and sacred. The Thursday 1661 piece was followed on Friday by Draghi and Bertali’s Il Pentimento, focusing only on penance and calling for fewer (six) singers than did La Gara della misericordia.
How Scarano might have come up with his dramatic scheme is not entirely clear. He had been born into a middle-class family in Taranto, educated in the seminary and taken orders, and at some point made his way to Vienna, where he would collaborate on other dramatic projects before returning home and dying in 1671.79 He might well have known Tricarico in Apulia before ever reaching Austria. His piece marks the first use of New Testament characters in the repertory, and the first reference to a Habsburg relic, by virtue of his inclusion of Longino and thus the Holy Lance which the soldier had wielded to pierce Christ’s side. Rather than having Penance be an actual character, as in the two pieces of the previous year and the other 1661 work—indeed, Penitenza’s “epilogue” to Il Sagrifizio d’Abramo on Good Friday 1660 had turned out as a show-grabbing solo for Vismarri—here remorse is enacted in different ways by Pietro, the Centurione, and Longino, while rejected by Giuda. Thus every nonallegorical figure is a sinner of some sort.
The setup of the first three scenes shows the links to the past tradition of rappresentazioni, while the music is firmly rooted in midcentury styles. The two allegorical figures open by snapping at each other in versi sciolti, with their opening scene falling into the flatter regions of their G mollis tonality. Misericordia points at a Crucifix, while Giustizia places the scene temporally by noting that nothing has been the same for her since Christ’s death. In this
