chapels of the royal children, the sites also for the German-language sepolcri for Maria Antonia.
The wider European panorama of Tombs in the early modern era is only now coming into focus. The report of the German architect Joseph Furttenbach on a room with a Tomb in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio in the 1610s also noted angels with “sweet music,” possibly some kind of mechanical instruments, designed by Giulio Parigi.22 Around 1700, Bologna hosted an itinerant Sepulcher that visited various churches in annual sequence.23 In the context of royal chapels, Vienna’s practice seems to be unusual; even in the 1686 inventory of the Madrid Alcázar, there is no Tomb listed among the many images present for the Spanish Habsburgs.24 In Rome, such installations were present in some city basilicas, for instance, the yearly constructions at S. Lorenzo in Damaso (done by Pietro da Cortona in 1650 and Alessandro Mauri in 1728, the latter commissioned by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni) or regularly at S. Giacomo degli Spagnoli. However, the mid-Cinquecento Sepulcher in the Vatican’s Cappella Paolina (in the space’s function as the altar of repose for the Sistina) seems to have been replaced by Federico Zuccari’s frescoes in 1580.25 The idea of having a Tomb as a backdrop for dramatic music, and then at some point around 1670 adding some kind of set design to it, seems particularly Austrian Habsburg.
The court traditions of vernacular verses and music during Holy Week have been well studied; such pieces began with Giovanni Valentini’s poetry in the early 1640s.26 But various Sepulchers existed throughout the city, not just in the Hofburg, and these are testaments to the devotion crossing social classes. According to the German Protestant visitor Johann Sebastian Müller, reporting on his experience in 1660, Ferdinand III and Eleonora had been accustomed to visiting all thirty-odd constructions in the various churches and religious houses on Good Friday, even if wooden boards had to be placed in the streets so as to avoid the mud (and Ferdinand’s physical difficulties would also have been an obstacle).27 In Leopold’s reign, these visits were evidently limited and moved largely to Holy Saturday.
The late seventeenth-century edifice in St. Stephen’s Cathedral, with music in the Passion play performed around it on Good Friday, was described in the standard account of cathedral life written down in 1687. The second part of this text took place after the Entombment reenactment, and thus it represented a kind of traditional popular Tomb piece, mixing prose and song in the vernacular.28 At the Jesuit University Church, Johann Baptist Staudt’s arias were performed as part of spoken Latin Passion drama at their Sepulcher on Holy Saturdays in the 1680s and onward, but evidently without a set design, and often in the presence of the royals. The order’s piece for 1685, Patientis Christi memoria, featured six seminarian singers and one professional for eight allegorical roles; its first act starts at the Tomb but moves later to suffering, penance, and redemption.29 The arias are relatively short, probably also because of the mainly amateur performers, and some of the other Jesuit works, of similar stamp, focus on the Name of Jesus devotion. The Ursulines’ church in the Seilerstätte also hosted newly written and composed sepolcri in Italian in the 1690s, and recent work has shown the chronology of these pieces composed by C.A. Badia for performance by the nuns.30 Shortly after 1700, the Viennese Oratorians put on a combination of prose, recitative, and arias in a piece called Schmerzliche Beweinung dess angehessten Heylands Iesu Christi on a Good Friday at 5:00 p.m. in their new chapel Zu der allerheiligsten Dreyfaltigkeit in the Judengasse.31
Outside the city, at the satellite court of Innsbruck and at the command of the recently widowed Archduchess Eleonora Maria (retracing the patronage of her mother, Eleonora Gonzaga) in 1691–93, Badia was also responsible for recomposing Minato’s libretti for the sepolcro La Sete di Christo and two oratorios to enhance devotion at the Sepulcher on Good Friday.32 In Prague around 1705, Jan Dismas Zelenka’s pieces for the Tomb in the Jesuits’ Klementinum college church set textual collages of liturgical and biblical citations in Latin, together with paraphrases and some first-person arias, dealing with penance and punishment (but not the Passion or Entombment), of a somewhat different stamp from Staudt’s works; one of them includes Isaiah’s verse on the glorious Tomb.33
Even farther afield, the dramatic embellishment of Tomb devotion might also parallel the development of spectacle during the Mourning of Muharram in Safavid Iran in the second half of the seventeenth century.34 Although local practice earlier had involved greater amounts of ritual combat (echoing the original Battle of Karbala) or animal sacrifice, the later travelers’ reports seem to indicate a pacification of this social grief, along with greater emphasis on theater and song, not least the lament genres of noha and marsiya, for all that these latter are often battle retellings. The issue of Husayn’s absent body at the physical center of the commemoration (except in Karbala) also resonates with Christian practice. The Habsburg case differs in the restricted public participation in the imperial chapels, and the focus on both the Tomb and the effects of salvation as played out in the music theater.35
THE IMAGINATION OF ENTOMBMENTS
The sepolcri were formed in the intersection of Holy Week experiences of those Italians responsible for the creation of the genre, on one hand, and the court traditions, on the other.36 Those active in the production of the early pieces came from all over the peninsula: Giovanni Pierelli from the Garfagnana; Niccolo Petronio, count of Caldana, from Istria; Camillo Scarano and Giuseppe Tricarico from Apulia; Draghi from Emilia and then Venice; and Antonio Bertali from Verona. They also were of different status: laymen (Draghi, Minato); secular clergy (Pierelli, Petronio, Scarano, Domenico Federici); and the occasional friar (Vito Lepori).37 Pierelli used his favor with Eleonora Gonzaga not only to write the first sepolcro text but later that year to gain a job as the Italian secretary to the imperial general Raimondo Montecuccoli, despite his previous neglect of his duties as a minor agent of the Estense court in Vienna.38 The other librettist of 1660, Caldana, had been a professor at the University of Padua and was later bishop of Parenzo (now Poreč) from 1667 to 1670.39 He had ties to the court and must have been present in midwinter to create a libretto.
Since both were working on what would become a new annual genre, the previous Italian literature involving Deposition meditation takes on salience. In lyric poetry, the primary collection that limned Passion aesthetics for the century was Angelo Grillo’s Dell’essequie di Christo co’l pianto di Maria Vergine (Venice, 1607), of which a copy was held in the imperial library. Although Grillo’s poems were set at a moment before the Entombment, with special emphasis on contemplating the blood, eyes, and ears of the dead Christ, still their placement of lament largely in the mouth of Mary provided a lexical supply for the many occasions in the sepolcri when either the Virgin or the Magdalen would imagine the now-irretrievable Body of the Savior. The traditions of early modern laments in general, along with their classical antecedents, were important to the genre’s vocabulary: this is particularly true for the static and repetitive character of the texts.40
The long heritage of sacre rappresentazioni also offered models for Tomb drama; a fifteenth-century Deposition dialogue from Perugia features Mary, Joseph, John, Longinus, the Magdalen, and the Centurion, while in Aversa, Marco de Vecchio’s Opus super exclamationem Christi begins with a dispute between Nicodemus and a Jew on Christ’s nature.41 All these figures or themes would recur regularly in the Viennese libretti.
Several Seicento plays provided theatrical situations and vocabulary for burying Christ. The gigantic spectacle of the friar Bonaventura (Cataldo) Morone, Il Mortorio di Cristo (Bergamo, 1611), with its fifteen editions up through 1656, circulated widely. This marathon enactment of almost every aspect of the Passion, ranging from 256 to 314 printed pages, offered a host of themes and characters (some twenty-four), many to be found in the early sepolcri: allegorical figures (Justice and Mercy, to recur in the 1661 Gara); resurrected sinners (Il Trionfo); the contrast of Judas and Peter; the Three Marys at the Deposition; Joseph of Arimathea/Nicodemus performing the burial; and the presence of one lament of Mary over the dead Christ and another at the Tomb (the latter scene the starting point
