style="font-size:15px;"> Love: Without You, Who created it, / Just as before [creation] it was naught / the world still would be just nothing.
Faith: Without You, Who redeemed them, / souls would still be slaves / of the devil and of sin.
a2: Whoever does not love You is indeed ungrateful, / Anyone is impious who does not adore You, / God, You Who have given essence to nothingness, / Eternal Creator.
This scene of wonder, with its three-plane set design by Lodovico Ottavio Burnacini, its theatrical text in Italian by Nicolò Minato, and its music by Antonio Draghi, was the opening of a central devotional moment for the Habsburg court in Vienna on Good Friday afternoon in 1697. Its emphasis on divine goodness seems at odds with both its set design—the Cross and the afflicted Job—and its ritual context, the aftermath of the morning’s ceremonies for the Adoration of the Cross and the Deposition of Christ. At the same time, the most important audience—and musical contributor of five arias—for the piece, La Virtù della Croce, was represented onstage by the biblical sufferer: Emperor Leopold I (1640–1705). He had already reigned for almost forty years, and in the preceding months had lost his sister Mariana of Austria and his second-youngest daughter to death, having previously witnessed his brother, his first two wives, three fathers-in-law, and some nine other children suffer the same fate.
With its “sweet” opening sinfonia, such a rounded and duetting moment of meditation on divine infinity, material nihility, and redemption—without any explicit mention of Christ—would also seem an unusual start to Holy Week music theater titled on the power of the Cross. What could have generated this optimism at this most somber moment of the ritual year? Still, the binary patterns of Minato’s text and the hypnotic repetition of the seven-syllable Italian poetic lines confer a communicative stasis suited to the contemplation of God’s nature. In addition, the entire section is musically unified by being pitched on C with two flats, a representation of what for Draghi would have been “church-key [tuono] 1” (here transposed down a major second).
The piece is one of about seventy—most but not all in Italian—written for court performance on Holy Thursday and Good Friday between 1660 and 1711. Although many libretti are titled rappresentazione sacra (sacred play), music—both vocal and instrumental, as this opening suggests—was essential to all of them. The genre is best known today by the name of its prop unveiled to begin the action, a constructed replica of Christ’s Tomb with a figure of the dead Savior inside, and thus as a sepolcro, a term used in a single libretto but otherwise typical only of the modern literature (for convenience’s sake alone, I use this anachronistic term). About forty-seven of the musical scores survive (appendixes 1 and 2), all in manuscript, while the libretti are transmitted largely in print.
This kind of piece had its own norms of genre. From the beginning, its characters were both allegorical and biblical, and dramatic onstage action was sparse; many, if not all, of the texts are set in devotional time after the Entombment. Although the genre seems to have originated at the behest of the dowager empress Eleonora (II) Gonzaga in winter 1660, it was occasionally imitated in other Viennese churches and even exported elsewhere. But in its essential structural nature, most clearly its unipartite overall form (unlike the two-section oratorio, which was normally interrupted by a sermon and performed earlier in Lent or Advent), and its physical/intellectual connection to the representation of the Tomb and to Holy Week ritual, it was a special product of music theater in early modern central Europe, one linked to sepulchral culture in general. Besides meditation on the dead Christ, the form’s thematics also focus on issues from epistemology to economics to aesthetics, in ways beyond that of the court’s large operatic repertory.
For all that they have been considered in a separate category of the sacred—situated as a performative addition to the most intense days of the year—the sepolcri also partook in the theatricality that marked the dynasty’s self-understanding as well as its self-projection. By today’s standards, it might appear that the scholarly issues around the genre are hopelessly dated: allegorical drama in early modern Europe; the all-too-familiar Pietas austriaca (a term that could be nuanced); the insularity and self-projection of the Habsburgs, not to mention the dynasty’s sheer if understandable morbidity; and the obscure post-Marinist conceptualism of the texts. But their production took place at a time of changing and conflicting devotional approaches, notable political shifts, and subtly varying organizations of knowledge; hence the seemingly antimodern stasis of the court was far from monolithic, and the works reflect this. Indeed, the discourse of death, penance, and redemption sometimes went in unexpected directions. The devotional literature circulating at court included Italian, German, Latin, and Spanish texts, and their resonances in the pieces are traced later in this study.
In a wider sense, the mourning of the inaccessible Christ on display in the Tomb paradoxically raises issues of alterity and grief. The difficulty of consolation in the face of Christ’s death recurs in the genre’s discourse, and the universal omission of any mention of the forthcoming Resurrection casts a shadow over their final affect, as the royal audience would have departed to their own final meditations on the Passion that day.
Any discussion of grief and allegory in seventeenth-century Europe is obviously indebted to Walter Benjamin’s considerations of literary voice and devices in Silesian Protestant “plays of mourning”; although the sepolcri are classic theater of lamentation, their theological heuristics are hard to compare to the ideology of Andreas Gryphius or Daniel von Lohenstein. One feature of Minato’s libretti, at least, is the psychological complexity of the allegorical figures. Although the form maintained strong roots in the late medieval tradition, the epistemology and aesthetics of the texts are decidedly modern. In that sense, they are a parallel to, not a replica of, the German tragic repertory analyzed thematically by Benjamin.
There were other generic features that set the Tomb pieces apart. From 1660 through 1686 (Eleonora Gonzaga would die later that year), there were separate works for Holy Thursday and for Good Friday, the former performed in the physical but also the labor space of the dowager empress’s chapel, the latter by Leopold’s own musicians, normally in the Hofburgkapelle. For three years between 1677 and 1682, shorter German-language examples for the chapel of Leopold’s daughter from his first marriage, Maria Antonia (1669–92), were added to the two other performances. From 1687 until 1711, works were produced only for Friday. Like operas, their texts and music, along with fresh sets, were normally created anew each year; this differs from the frequent repetition of oratorios in Vienna. In many years, there was a thematic link or dialectical contrast between the two pieces in any given Week.
Their essential audience was the royals themselves: Eleonora, her two daughters, and her stepson Leopold, together with his three wives: Margherita Teresa of Spain (r. 1666–73), Claudia Felicitas of Tyrol (1673–76), and Eleonore Magdalene of Neuburg (1676–1705). From the late 1670s, Leopold’s various children must also have taken part, including his surviving sons Joseph I and Charles VI plus their spouses. After 1705 (despite his final illness, the emperor seems to have been able not only to experience but also to contribute to the Friday piece that year), Joseph took over, a shift marked by notable changes in thematics and musical style. In the logistical and ritual reconsolidation at court that followed Joseph’s death in 1711, the form disappeared, to return as a somewhat different form, the two-part azione sepolcrale (play at the Tomb), once Charles had established his own norms of dramatic production around 1715.
The pieces were meant to function in a complex situation. Among the sovereigns, both Leopold and Joseph were trained musician-composers; of the empresses and princesses, Claudia Felicitas seems to have been the most musically talented, but all the women from Eleonora Gonzaga onward would frequently have heard new musical styles. The singers and players seem to have been drawn from the two groups of royal musicians, depending on the day of performance, with the empress’s on Thursdays. In their length and number of singing parts (overall three to twelve, but normally five to eight), the pieces were most like the smaller secular works elsewhere in the court repertory
