Robert L. Kendrick 
Fruits of the Cross [EPUB ebook] 
Passiontide Music Theater in Habsburg Vienna

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 Content

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

About the author

Robert L. Kendrick teaches music history and ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago.