in the preceding decades using more. But their topoi of lament, sin, and loss, together with their most somber ritual context, set them apart from these former. The composers—Antonio Bertali, Giuseppe Tricarico, Leopold himself, Giovanni Felice Sances, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, and most prolifically Antonio Draghi—typically made modest instrumental demands: normally two to five parts of various strings (with occasional use of cornetti muti (mute cornets), whose somber timbre befitted the season) plus basso continuo, with trombones in a few pieces, and then a more varied instrumentation after Marc’Antonio Ziani took over their composition in 1701.
Like all vocal music of the time, though, the settings were meant to deliver the text with affect and persuasion, above all the omnipresent call to penance. The seeming disjunction between the texts’ importance and their quickly changing librettists in the 1660s will be investigated presently. From Minato’s arrival in Vienna in autumn 1669, this Venetian opera professional would take over writing most texts for the two days, imparting not only his European renown and remarkable status for a court servant, but also a conceptual complexity verging on the hermetic, especially after 1690. This aspect was reinforced by Burnacini’s sets, documentable from about 1671 but possibly in place earlier, and continued by his son as late as 1709 (the very first ones for any secular theatrical work date back as far as 1659). Insofar as they often do not relate explicitly to the intellectual trajectory of the texts, the sets thus create the kind of emblem culture of which the genre was a dramatic manifestation (appendix 3). Minato also wrote most of the texts for the major court operas and important, if shorter, secular pieces, but both these forms sometimes lack the intellectual virtuosity of the sepolcri.
For all that the pieces might seem aimed at the royal family, and to the degree that the viewing space in the chapels could accommodate them, other courtiers, local nobles, and European ambassadors were among their audience, and the printing of almost all the libretti, followed by the posthumous reprint of Minato’s “collected sacred works” in 1700 after the poet’s death, shows the public nature of the texts. One mark of the Habsburgs’ desire to make them comprehensible to local nobility was the publication of—surprisingly well-wrought—German translations from about 1685 onward. Still, it was the sovereigns themselves who were at the center of the pieces’ messages: the various case studies at the end of each chapter here attempt to convey what a given member of the family might have heard in a given piece in a given year, and issues of the Habsburgs’ social identity were constantly on display.
The circulation of the libretti also publicized the dynasty’s role as custodians of the Passion and of its relics, including a Nail from the Cross, a Thorn from Christ’s Crown, and a particle of the Cross (the copy of Veronica’s veil now in the Vienna Schatzkammer would not make its way to the court until later in the eighteenth century). These material proofs of Christ’s suffering were instantiations of salvational agency, and in Minato’s libretti they were joined by two numerical conceits: prime-number symbolism (Three Nails, Five Wounds, Seven Sorrows) and astronomical/temporal mechanics (the eclipse at Christ’s death or biblical stoppages of time), particularly in the works of the 1670s.
The central theme linking the Passiontide pieces to other Lenten and Advent works was the Incarnation, or “Dio humanato” as it appears in some ten of Minato’s texts. The degree to which this idea of Christ’s two natures—technically, the Hypostatic Union—was also an attack on Islam is not explicit in the libretti, although the political situation with the Ottomans could be quite pressing (e.g., in 1660, 1663, 1683–84, and 1687). In terms of differentiating Christianity from another Abrahamic faith, there is a recurrent—revoltingly so, to modern sensibilities—amount of anti-Judaism in the sepolcri texts, no matter what their temporal origin or destination, with multiple mentions of Hebraic “guilt” in about half the libretti. These ideological issues are discussed further in a later chapter.
The performances happened amid busy Holy Week ritual in Vienna itself, not least the Tomb installations in some thirty churches outside the court. The sepolcri were acts of recollection of Christ’s life and the Passion; only in a few are the events of Good Friday narrated in anything like real time. In most, the Savior is presumed already deposed and buried. They thus look toward the past, in their performance of memory (not for nothing was a sepolcro by Minato and Schmelzer of 1678 entitled Le Memorie dolorose), and toward the future, in their call for personal penance. Their degree of textual intersection with the ritual readings of the week thus deserves examination; from the libretti of Francesco Sbarra in the mid-1660s onward, there is some liturgical/biblical citation, and this is footnoted—and massively extended to both patristic and classical literature—in Minato’s works.
For all the fascination of the devotional and literary aspects of the texts, still the theatrical music of the Viennese court has suffered music-analytical neglect. In the widest sense, it is not easily comparable to Lully’s far more extrovert and tractable work, and even in terms of contemporary Italian opera north and south, the Viennese pieces take a midcentury aesthetic as their foundation. Perhaps the most evident sign of this is the moment of emotional stasis embodied in the normal lyrical form of the two-stanza aria, sung by a single character or shared by two (there are some cases of single- and three-stanza arias; da capo forms make their appearance only late in the repertory). In this form, textual parallelisms between the stanzas are underscored by the music’s repetition, normally with an intervening instrumental ritornello. Much of the musical projection of the texts was in standard recitational delivery, the stile recitativo, with only a few ensemble numbers. It was in this midcentury school that Leopold himself had been trained, and his own aesthetics seem to have continued unchanged. Thus it is difficult to isolate an unusually good—or bad—passage or aria in, for example, Draghi’s output at first hearing, and the uniformity of the musical surface, largely recitational with a respectable number of arias, reinforces the seeming predictability of the texts.
Although musical means changed sooner in the Viennese opera and oratorio repertory, it was only with the switch in court composers to Ziani that sepolcri took on a different shape, more like other stage works of that decade. Scores for eight of this composer’s works between 1704 and 1711 survive and mark the changes, spanning the dynastic break as well as the transition in librettists from Minato’s self-proclaimed follower Donato Cupeda to Pietro Antonio Bernardoni.
Clearly the interaction between the play of poetic meters and their musical projection is important, as are the tonal dichotomies often applied to this repertory. Indeed, the cantus durus/mollis (pitch systems based around natural/flat sonorities) binary, as found in the works of Athanasius Kircher seems to have relevance to the Viennese repertory, given the Jesuit scholar’s close relationship to the Habsburg court. Still, the overall pitch structures have their parallels in north Italian theories of “church-keys,” combinations of pitch centers and inflections. For all the different structures that appear in the sepolcri—and here the operatic repertory runs parallel—many can be explained as transpositions of these tuoni according to various Seicento schemes (the opening of La Virtù della Croce is in one such organization). In this study, two different systems are used to get at the overall pitch structure of sepolcri: G.B. degli Antonii’s 1687 list of eight church-keys and their transpositions, along with Angelo Berardi’s 1689 idea of twelve modes, plus his later examples of these constructs’ possible transpositions (see appendix 2). Even as late as Ziani’s 1707 Il sacrifizio d’Isaac, the use of a hexachord device in a modern aria shows the genre’s debt to tradition.
FIGURE 1. Frans Luycx, Crucifixion with Habsburg Mourners, c. 1662, Vienna, Kirche am Hof. (Photo: UNIDAM database, University of Vienna, by permission.)
In some ways, sepolcri are epiphenomenal of the ways in which Habsburg culture seems both overdetermined and understudied. Although they have a timeless quality, due to both their generic norms and the events of the Passion, they are also linked to specific moments of devotion, royal self-portrayal, and conceptualist aesthetics. Given the money and effort that evidently went into their production, they should
