Robert Kendrick's book reveals the many meanings of the sepolcro, a genre of musical drama that was the innovation of the Habsburg court in Vienna in the second half of the seventeenth century. Performed on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, the sepolcro took its name from the replica of Christ's tomb around which the works were staged. Approximately seventy sepolcri survive, some with musical scores in manuscript. In other cases, only the published libretti remain. Kendrick explores this repertory in remarkable detail, supplementing musical and textual analysis of the sepolcri with extensive research in a wide range of other sources, especially the archives of the Habsburg court and contemporary Catholic devotional literature.
Performed between 1660 and 1711, the sepolcro was intended to encourage devotion at one of the most significant moments in the Christian ritual year. Yet as Kendrick reveals, the sepolcro's creators did not limit themselves to the biblical narratives of betrayal, crucifixion, and entombment. Rather, they took up a wide range of allegorical subjects, particularly surrounding the themes of penitence, mourning, and redemption. Kendrick argues that these allegories, together with the musical setting of the sepolcri and their staging in the spaces of the Hofburgkapelle and the dowager empress's chapel, reveal new understandings of Habsburg “self-understanding” and “self-projection” during this period (3).
Each of Kendrick's four main chapters approaches a distinct set of themes in the sepolcro repertory. The first establishes the sepolcro as an expression of passion piety particular to the Habsburg court and its place in the political landscape of post-Westphalian Catholic Europe. As he traces the genre's development, Kendrick reveals the central role of penitence in seventeenth-century Habsburg piety, and he demonstrates how the sepolcro drew upon models of devotional contemplation in contemporary international Catholic texts. Against this background, Kendrick's next chapter treats the use of allegory to elaborate a broad range of devotional themes in the sepolcro, including penance, rapture, and the economics of salvation in the age mercantilism, to name just a few. Chapter 3 turns to the Habsburgs and the meanings they found and fashioned in the sepolcro. Kendrick examines how the sepolcro constructed the identity of the Catholic ruler, particularly through the incorporation of relics from the royal collection, and the development of themes of gendered grief at moments of personal loss in the Habsburg family. This chapter also sheds light on the antisemitic themes that appeared prominently in some selpolcri after the expulsion of Vienna's Jewish population in 1670. The final chapter turns to music and affect, with a focus on the use of poetic text, rhythm, and pitch to create affective experiences in sepolcri across the reign of Leopold I.
Kendrick aims to balance breadth and depth in his analysis. Each chapter first incorporates examples from across the surviving corpus of sepolcri. Having thus developed his central themes, Kendrick then turns at the end of each chapter to more detailed analyses of individual sepolcri. These case studies reveal the remarkable integration of music, text, and drama in the performance of the sepolcro, but because they are not followed by any more general concluding remarks, the reader must draw together the threads of wide-ranging themes. Readers who are not specialists in a narrow subfield may face obstacles to drawing these conclusions. Kendrick's rich musicological analysis provides new insights into how composers used meter and pitch center to create devotional experiences for the sepolcro's audience, but those without extensive musical training will likely struggle to see the significance of these details, especially when they are sometimes mentioned incidentally. One's appreciation of Kendrick's argument at some points is significantly enhanced by the ability to mentally reconstruct sounds on the basis of close descriptions of tonality and meter. Readers must also come to the book with knowledge of Habsburg family connections, the structure of the court, and the historiography of the so-called pietas austriaca, which Kendrick critiques in passing but does not take up. Still more broadly, Kendrick aims to ground the sepolcro in contemporary political theory and mercantilist philosophy, but rarely discusses these at any length.
The book's intervention in such a broad range of fields, as well as Kendrick's efforts to connect seemingly disparate realms of seventeenth-century culture, are among its most impressive contributions. It has much to offer not only musicologists but also historians of early modern political culture, art historians, and scholars of drama. For readers who share Kendrick's interdisciplinary vision, or those who want to venture beyond the boundaries of their own fields, Fruits of the Cross offers new insights into the intricacies of dramatic performance in the seventeenth century, the changing dynamics of Catholic identity and devotion in the post-Reformation period, and the political, social, and emotional world of the Austrian Habsburgs.
