The sepolcro—a semi-staged, sacred, dramatic musical genre that formed an integral part of Holy Week observances at the Habsburg court in the second half of the seventeenth century—has long been recognized as a unique cultural product of Habsburg Austria and as an important chapter in the history of the oratorio; yet the genre has never been the subject of a book-length study. At long last, this deficiency has been remedied by the appearance of Robert L. Kendrick's masterful book. Based on close readings of the text and music of the seventy surviving works (forty-seven with music) alongside an impressive array of contemporaneous archival, manuscript, and printed documents, the book places the genre into a variety of contexts, claiming that the sepolcro reflects the “changing and conflicting devotional approaches, notable political shifts, and subtly varying organizations of knowledge” (3) of the later seventeenth century. Kendrick convincingly argues that the Habsburgs created the sepolcro to serve both external and internal aims: It both projected a new dynastic image in post-Westphalia Europe and staged their personal journeys of grief, hope, and faith. With its wide scope, Fruits of the Cross is of value not only for musicologists and theater historians but also for scholars of religious and political history, and it is required reading for anybody interested in the Habsburgs.

The book is organized into four long chapters (plus an introduction and epilogue), each of which focuses on a broad topic that pertains to the sepolcro repertoire as a whole and concludes with a detailed examination of one work from the perspective of a member of the imperial family (in turn, the Dowager Empress Eleonora Gonzaga [an important force in the establishment of the genre], Emperor Leopold I, Leopold's first wife Margherita Teresa, and his second wife Eleonore Magdalene). The first chapter, “Passion and Theater,” places the genre into its theatrical context, considering such issues as which antecedents in sacred musical drama served as potential models for the sepolcro, the spaces in which the works were experienced, and the meaning of visual aspects of the staging (in which seemingly incongruous images on the painted backdrop are shown to have deep—but often esoteric—symbolic connections to concepts in the libretto and music). The second chapter, “Devotional Strategies,” considers the genre in its religious context, relating the works to contemporaneous trends in Habsburg piety and devotion. Topics range from the theology of mercantilist language to the innovative approaches to allegorical personages (in which Kendrick draws upon Walter Benjamin's Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [1963; reprint, Suhrkamp, 1972]) and allusions to scripture and other religious writings found in the libretti. Chapter 3, “Social Others and Selves,” deals with the social context, examining how the genre reflects the Habsburgs’ perception of themselves and others. It considers the political messages in the plots (including allusions to specific events as well as lessons from contemporaneous political theory) and tackles head-on the thorny issue of antisemitism, while also discussing how the works engage devotional aspects of the Habsburg image, such as relics owned by the imperial family, number symbolism, and reverence of saints. The fourth chapter, “Music and Its Affects,” focuses on the works themselves, considering them within their musical and poetic contexts. After a consideration of the available evidence for practical production decisions and the creative process, it offers a detailed discussion of the dramatic function of poetic meters and harmonic language, especially the expressive significance of shifts between tonal areas.

This chapter summary barely scratches the surface of the plethora of approaches Kendrick offers to understand these works and the impressive range of primary source material he brings to bear. Such a wide-ranging approach, however, does not come without its drawbacks. Readers hoping to find a chronological survey of the repertoire, with pithy overviews of each work, will be disappointed, as the topical approach results in works being discussed in piecemeal fashion over the course of the book. Those seeking information on specific works, however, are aided by two indexes (a “General Index” and an “Index of Sepolcri by Short Title”) and three valuable appendices: a “Checklist of Sepolcri, 1660–1711” (with useful information drawn from the libretti); a list of “The Preserved Repertory, 1660–1705, and Its Possible Tonalities”; and a list of drawings that may have been models for stage sets. I would have liked to have also seen a fourth appendix offering plot summaries. Another drawback to the topical approach is that concepts often appear well before they are addressed at length. This is especially true of poetic meters and harmonic language; by the time these are discussed in chapter 4, they have already appeared in many analyses in the preceding chapters, and some readers may find it beneficial to read chapter 4 first. At times, sections do not hang together as coherently as one might like, with digressions into material that seems tangential to the matter at hand; in particular, two discussions of twentieth-century revivals (in 1917 and 1950), while interesting, seem more like vignettes than integral components of the argument.

The book is definitely not for the neophyte, especially someone brand new to the topic: Many concepts and terms (poetic, musical, theological, devotional, theoretical, etc.) are introduced without explanation or definition, and Kendrick also assumes the reader already possesses a firm knowledge of the pre-history of the genre and of Habsburg politics and seventeenth-century political, cultural, and religious history in general (the extensive bibliography is helpful for those who need to brush up). Nevertheless, this valuable contribution to our knowledge of early modern musical theater and the political, devotional, and personal lives of the Habsburgs in the late seventeenth century will undoubtedly become a touchstone for all who examine the court of Leopold I and the wider world of the Habsburgs for generations to come.