Fruits of the Cross

Passiontide Music Theater in Habsburg Vienna

Robert L. Kendrick

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780520421127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Opera Music

In this first detailed study of seventeenth-century sepolcri — sacred operas written for court performance on Holy Thursday and Good Friday—Robert L. Kendrick delves into the political and artistic world of Habsburg Vienna, in which music and ritual combined on the stage to produce a thoroughly original art form based on devotion to Christ’s Tomb. Through the use of allegorical characters, the musical dramas ranged from the devotionally intense, to the theologically complex, to the ugly anti-Jewish, but played a unique role in making Passion piety relevant to wider cultural concerns. Fruits of the Cross suggests that understanding the sepolcri has implications for the theatricalization of devotion, the power of allegory, the role of queenship in court ideology, the interplay between visuality and music, and not least the intellectual centrality of music theater to court self-understanding.

Table of contents

• Subvention
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Music Examples
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and Notes on Sources
• Introduction
• 1.  Passion and Theater
• 2.  Devotional Strategies
• 3.  Social Others and Selves
• 4.  Music and Its Affects
• Epilogue: The Power of the Cross
• Appendix 1. Checklist of Sepolcri, 1660–1711
• Appendix 2. The Preserved Repertory, 1660–1705, and Its Possible Tonalities
• Appendix 3. Possible Burnacini Drawings for Sepolcri
• Notes
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Index of Sepolcri by Short Title