Fruits of the Cross: 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—...