the entrance of two soliloquizing sinners, the literary register drops in scene 2, the verses even out into settenari, and the tonal environment shifts abruptly into durus regions around D. Giuda opens with a long, despondent monologue descending to his low E, while Pietro reiterates the depth of his betrayal, and the two squabble as to whose sin was greater, a parody of the opening dispute between the allegorical figures (example 1.1).
EXAMPLE 1.1. G. Tricarico, La Gara della Misericordia e Giustizia (1661; A-Wn 18716), “Uccidetemi omai,” f. 8v.
Perhaps because of the underlying popular tradition of Tomb theater, the opening of this piece, while serious, comes off as livelier than might be expected. It is certainly nothing like the outpourings of unbridled grief that would open some later sepolcri, starting with Minato’s 1670 Sette consolationi. And in its studied ignoring of the actual Sepulcher, it focuses attention from the outset on penance—just as the works of the previous year and Il Pentimento would do.80
The first aria, cast in the two-stanza form that was normative in both sacred and secular dramatic works, is given to Pietro at the end of scene 3, cast in settenari and endecasillabi and based on E, moving to a more distant tonal center. As if to contrast all this, the two Roman soldiers arriving from Calvary frame their penance with duets in scene 4, before we return in the next scene to an increasingly desperate Giuda, who asks Giustizia to kill him with the sword of Justice. Although she lays out the path of penance culminating in hope, the former apostle refuses to take it, despite a duet plea from the two sisters. Misericordia leaves Giustizia to observe Giuda’s downfall, which begins with his aria at the end of scene 6, paralleling Pietro’s three scenes earlier. By this point, the didactic division between “good” and “bad” remorse has been made evident, and Scarano then introduces Disperatione (with Giuda’s reference to her black armor) in another “dialogue of recognition” at the beginning of scene 7. The essential identity of the two characters becomes evident (Disperatione: “[io] son quel che tu sei”), and, still in relatively sharp pitch areas, the two go off together in a bouncy triple rhythm, despite Giustizia’s offstage warning about the horror of Hell. This jocund banalization of suicide seems to come out of the rappresentazione tradition.
Before the scene ends, Giuda becomes the target of an invocation of despair by the devils, with a repetitive sinfonia consisting of only two pitches. The remarkable moment closes with second thoughts from Giuda, and Giustizia’s vow that she will accompany him even in his suicide. To the degree that there is any contemporary model for this scene, it was probably not Liliani’s poem, a series of solo laments for Judas with minimal narration, but rather a moment in Fabio Glissanti’s guide to Hell, L’horribile e spaventevole inferno (Venice, 1617). Here a damned soul is led through infernal regions and passes a mural that depicts the dialogue between Despair and the betraying disciple. As a major creator of allegorical drama, Glissanti also served as something of a model for the early sepolcri.
The reappearance of Misericordia at the opening of scene 8 thus marks the denouement, as she brings mercy to the three repentant sinners. This moment also marks the only recurrence of the piece’s opening pitch structure (G mollis), after most of the central scenes’ placement on A or D durus. Set in the sharp sonorities that had characterized most of the piece, the finale depicts the end of the contest between the two allegorical sisters, as Giustizia shows herself satisfied by the “expense of tears” of Pietro, Longino, and the Centurione. The concluding couplet, set homophonically and not as an imitative madrigale, simply states the point: “Arise, o sinner, and raise your head, for heavenly grace is always ready.” Uniquely in the entire repertory, the sepolcro ends on a different pitch center and system (in Athanasius Kircher’s sense) from that in which it had begun.81
La Gara thus works out the tension between the didactic, neatly paired, duet scenes for sinners, on one hand, and the dramatic confrontation of Despair and Judas in scene 7, on the other. Eleonora’s sepolcro of the following year, La Fede trionfante, kept some emphasis on penance, but moved in a more explicitly operatic direction. It was the third libretto provided to the court by Draghi, who had started with Il Pentimento and then written Leopold’s 1661 birthday opera L’Almonte, dedicated to Eleonora. Both these texts feature shorter line lengths, greater amounts of sdrucciolo and tronco (stress on antepenultimate and last syllables, respectively) line endings, and more frequent soliloquies, with one of which La Fede opens. The character of the post-1661 texts, then, becomes more explicitly operatic and less like a medieval play.
The ethos of the court in 1660 is described by Müller’s travel report. To understand the expectations that Eleonora would have brought to hearing her Thursday pieces, it helps to review the construction of a system for stage music overall, after the obligatory year of mourning for Ferdinand III (1657–58). Besides spoken comedies by G.A. Cicognini, opera came to Leopold’s court at Carnival 1659 with Amalteo/Bertali’s Il Re Gilidoro, followed by a June birthday opera for Leopold but dedicated to Eleonora on one of her favorite themes, namely, virtue, La Virtù guerriera (libretto and music by Aureli/Tricarico, respectively). This massive work featured some nine allegorical characters along with three stock low-register opera figures. Eleonora’s birthday opera that year was the standard Venetian Il Pelope geloso (G.F. Marcello/?Tricarico; dedicated to Leopold and employing mythological/pastoral personages); it was not performed until the end of December in order to avoid conflict with Advent. This interplay between the emperor and his stepmother of dedications and commissionings of music theater would remain constant until Leopold’s marriage.
Notably, 1659 had also marked the first oratorio in Lent, possibly one by Tricarico for Eleonora’s chapel. Some of this activity represents the empress’s own recovery from the deaths of the 1650s, starting with Ferdinand IV and III, her stepmother-in-law Eleonora (I), and her own son Ferdinand in 1658; as she reported back to Mantua after the last loss, “In all this time I have felt not ordinary suffering.”82 Her other solace was writing back to her mother about her daughters’ talents, as they grew up.
The following year, featuring the first sepolcri, began musically at Carnival with a resetting (after Cesti’s for Innsbruck a few years earlier) of Cicognini’s Orontea as composed by Vismarri. The Mantuan ambassador Antonio Calori reported back home on the other offerings during that winter of commedie dell’arte (which might explain the sacra rappresentatione approach to the sepolcri of 1660–61), but then the summer/fall 1660 festivities took place on a smaller scale, largely one-act introduzioni.83 Why these entertainments were more modest is not immediately clear, but the pattern continued until summer 1661. Hence, the two sepolcri of that year were relatively major events that spring, however brief they might seem; Tricarico’s Gara could have lasted up to forty-five minutes.
The pattern of large-scale operas with multiple sets by Burnacini resumed only later in 1661, with two three-act pieces for the royal birthdays. The first of these, L’Almonte (Draghi/Tricarico), is the only Italian opera anywhere to this point whose prologue features allegorical/artistic figures constructing an opera set, a kind of metatheater.84 As the performance seems to have marked the return of the stage designs to the repertory, this thematic choice reinforces the reinstitutionalization of opera. The other novelty of this year was the import of oratorios, including Roman pieces by Carlo Caprioli and Marco Marazzoli that the dowager empress seems to have had sent from the Eternal City, thus reinforcing the sense of her chapel’s activity.85 She arranged for their performance in Advent 1661 and Lent 1662, although these pieces run shorter than the sepolcri. At Carnival 1662, the musical intermezzi for Cicognini’s spoken drama Marienne took on greater length, and Amalteo/Sances’s Roselmina was a long, complex Venetian opera, a pattern repeated later that year in Sbarra’s important Generosità d’Alessandro. Thus the sepolcri fit
