The texts are either in Italian or
Latin, and are written mostly in ottava
rima. The subject matter consists of stories from the Bible combined with
secular, mythological, allegorical, and comic elements, which frequently have
very little to do with the themes of the plays themselves. The plays often
received sumptuous productions involving stage machinery, music, costumes, and
dancing. A Russian visitor to the 1439 Council of Florence described the
combination of staged drama, music, and dancing in the following words: “God
the Father was surrounded by angels and children carrying musical instruments.
The Angel Gabriel flew on a cord to the Virgin Mary, singing spiritual songs
...” A description of the 16th-century Rappresentazione
di Santa Uliva reports that the performance lasted two days and was given
an opulent production with magnificent costumes, impressive stage machinery,
musical insertions, and ambitious choreography. Set melodic phrases were used
to recite the stories, and were interspersed with laude, frottole, canzoni, and madrigali. There were also dramatic interludes (similar to intermedi) between the scenes, which
served the purpose of broadening the subject matter and introducing more
variety into the plays.
There are more than 100 rappresentazioni
sacre texts surviving from the 15th and 16th
centuries, by poets such as Feo Belcari, Castellano Castellani, Lorenzo de’
Medici, and Bernardo Pulci. Some tell the stories of the lives of saints (Sacra rappresentazione di Santa Caterina,
Sacra rappresentazione di San Lorenzo,
Sacra rappresentazione di San Giovanni),
while others bear titles such as Rappresentazione
del Giudicio universale, Rappresentazione
del Figlio Prodigo, and Rappresentazione
della Vita e Morte. The Rappresentazione
della gloriosa Passione di Cristo was printed in Rome in 1672.
From the mid-16th century onwards, the
Jesuit colleges in Rome took the lead in mounting regular productions of rappresentazioni; these were performed
by young boys from the colleges, and most of them featured elaborate
stage machinery. Emilio de’ Cavalieri wrote his Rappresentazione di Anima, et di Corpo (Rome, 1600) in order to
revive interest in the rappresentazione
sacra, which by then was beginning to go out of favor. The rappresentazione sacra was the most
important element in the development of
both opera and oratorio. Soon after the
birth of opera, the first oratorios in both Latin and the vernacular (the oratorio latino and the oratorio
volgare) were created in Rome in about 1630. These were based on similar
subjects to the 16th-century rappresentazioni:
for instance, Marco Marazzoli’s Santa
Caterina, Luigi Rossi’s San Giuseppe,
Giacomo Carissimi’s Daniele,
and the first example of an oratorio about
Christ’s Passion, Rossi’s Oratorio per la
Settimana Santa. This work is of particular interest in that it begins with a scene in which devils
attempt to break down Christ’s resistance to temptation. In the second half of
the 17th century, the main center for Italian rappresentazioni outside Italy itself was Vienna. Descriptions of
Viennese performances bring to mind the laude
spirituali of the Middle Ages as well as the rappresentazioni sacre of the Italian Renaissance. Actor-singers
carried the cross, wept, and covered the body of Christ with a veil. Biblical figures such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Abraham, as
well as the Angel and Lucifer, appeared in the sepolcri and interacted with the main characters (the Virgin Mary,
Mary Magdalene, Judas, and Pontius Pilate).
One of the chief representatives of this form was Giovanni Felipe Sances, who is known to have written six sepolcri: Le lacrime di S Pietro (1666), La morte debellata (1669), Le sette consolationi di Maria Vergine (1670), Il trionfo
della croce (1671), Il paradiso aperto per la morte di Cristo
(1672), and L’ingiustitia della sentenza
di Pilato (1676). In Italy, the spirit of the medieval laude popolare lives on even today, and Passion plays are performed
during Holy Week in southern Italy, Sardinia, and Sicily. The performers are
villagers, who carry the cross and reenact the story of Christ’s Passion. The
audience becomes emotionally involved in the performance, commenting on it,
weeping, and drawing parallels between the actors and the roles that they play.
The figure of Lucifer has symbolized death ever since the Middle Ages. In one
very beautiful anonymous text set to music by Orazio Michi dell’Arpa in his Sonetto de la Morte di Xsto (ca. 1635),
Death rises up out of hell and kills Christ with his arrow. But through the
death of the son of God, Death kills himself, for in dying, Christ gives
eternal life.
The
Mystery Play in the German-Speaking World
Originally written in Latin, the various types of mystery plays were soon also
provided with German texts. German manuscripts containing fragments of two
Passion plays survive from the 13th century. The first of these, Ludus paschalis sive de passione Domini,
contains a few German verses, while the second is entirely in German. The
oldest Easter play created entirely in German comes from the Benedictine
monastery of Muri in Switzerland and also dates from the 13th century. Easter
plays from Innsbruck (14th century,
Middle-German), Redentin (1464), the Rhineland (15th century, Mainz),
and Erlau (15th century, South-German) have also been preserved. Later
transcriptions, from the Frankfurt Passion Play to the Low-German Marienklage, for the most part derive
from older sources.
Easter plays depicting scenes from the Resurrection can be traced back to the
High Middle Ages. They grew out of the Quem-quaeritis-Tropus,
which appeared for the first time in a
10th-century manuscript from the monastery of St. Gallen in Switzerland and is
regarded as one of the sources of the medieval theater tradition. This text
describes how the grieving women
visited Christ’s tomb, only to find
it empty. Originally quite brief, over time these scenes acquired more complex
plots in which extra characters such as Mary Magdalene and Herod were
introduced and the whole story of Christ’s Passion retold, eventually taking
several days to perform.
In these plays, the story is given a melodramatic treatment. Spoken texts
alternate with sung sections in which Latin hymns are performed at length, and
the action is enlivened with comical and even farcical episodes, for example
from the life of Mary Magdalene before her conversion or the three Marys’ buying of ointment and spices before
visiting Christ’s tomb. Some scenes could be quite ribald, for example that of
Pontius Pilate and the Jews, the scene of the Devil and the chorus of sinners,
or the race of the apostles to the tomb. The plays often lose sight of their
original educational purpose, and a love of spectacle for its own sake gains
the upper hand. The representation of Christ’s Passion is often introduced by
other episodes (which occasionally go back as far as the Creation) or is padded
out with Dances of Death and scenes from the Last Judgment.
Passion plays are still performed in the
Catholic parts of Germany, especially in Bavaria, as well as in Austria. The
most famous are those that take place every 10 years in Oberammergau, and every
year on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday in the Möll Valley in Carinthia,
Austria; in the latter, the Passion play is performed in old costumes, and the
ceremony of carrying Christ’s cross is done mainly in dumb play. For some years
now, an amateur dramatic society has performed the Via Crucis in the southwest German town of Saarlouis.
Holy Week
in Corsica
Corsicans celebrate Holy Week with a whole range of religious ceremonies, in which Christian traditions are
combined with ancient rituals. On Good Friday, processions take place
throughout the island, but clear regional differences can be discerned. Three
distinct types of procession are held in northern Corsica: the cerca, the parafa, and the granitula.
All three are accompanied by traditional songs and are imbued with the rich
symbolism of Holy Week. The cerca
(from the verb circà, “to seek”) is a
rural procession in which the entire population of the locality takes part. It
begins at daybreak on Good Friday, covers several kilometers, and ends at
midday. Children carrying rattles walk at the head of the procession; after
them, and led by the mazzeri (the
word for “magician” in some villages), come members of religious
confraternities wearing white robes. The men take the lead and are followed by
women dressed in the traditional costume known as the faldetta, a dress worn only on feast days, with a dark blue skirt
that is short at the front and long at the back. Dark blue used to be the color
of mourning in Corsica, and it was traditional for the faldetta to be worn at funerals. During the cerca procession in the Brandu district, the religious
confraternities set off for several different villages at once, pausing at all
the sepulchres attached to the various churches and chapels, without meeting
each other during the course of their perambulations. On this occasion, the
confraternities also display the pullezzula
or large palm leaf, that they have woven into a plait in the days leading up to
the ceremony; the pullezzula is
attached to the top of the crucifix that is carried at the head of the
procession.
The parafa
procession (from the verb parà, “to
stop”) is held on the evening of Good Friday. The houses and streets are lit up
with candles placed on windowsills, low walls, and ledges. Whereas during the cerca the inhabitants of individual
villages follow each other from one place to the next, during the parafa the villagers visit each other.
The inhabitants of the visited villages line the streets while the visiting
procession passes by. They all then set off together for the sepulchres, where
hymns are sung, after which reciprocal ceremonies are held in other villages.
The granitula (“periwinkle”)
represents the highpoint of Corsican Easter rituals and is also performed by
the religious confraternities. Led by a mazzeru,
the granitula imitates the spiral
shape of the sea creature it is named after; it coils around itself, forms a
compact middle-point, then spreads out into a circle that rotates and finally
disintegrates.
In southern Corsica, the Holy Week processions are known as casci and catenacciu. Casci refers
to the statues or shrines devoted to patron saints, which in Bonifacio are
believed to protect different areas of the town, with their small chapels and
confraternities. At daybreak on Good Friday, the inhabitants join the
confraternities in visits to the saints’ shrines. When one procession
encounters another, the confraternities greet each other in silence by touching
banners and then continue on their way. At midday, they have a ritual meal
consisting of herrings and green beans. In the evening of Good Friday, the
confraternities carry the reliquary casket of their patron saint—which can be
extremely heavy—to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. The catenacciu procession (the name means “the chained one”) is held on
Good Friday in various localities; the most famous example takes place in the
village of Sartène.
In this dramatized version of the Way of the Cross, variants of which can also
be found in other Mediterranean cultures, the catenacciu (whose identity is
kept a strict secret), wearing a red robe and with his face covered by a hood,
carries a heavy cross barefoot through the streets. He climbs a hill, on
top of which there is a rough altar, stops there for a moment, and then returns to the church, followed by a crowd of
villagers. He is surrounded by nine hooded figures dressed in black, one
of whom represents Simon the Cyrenian, who helps him to carry the cross. The
procession ends at the foot of the altar, where
the catenacciu falls onto the cross.
The faithful walk past him, touching him and making the sign of the
cross before they leave the church. The catenacciu
is then locked up in a cell, where he spends three days in silence and fasting,
after which he leaves the village as secretly as he arrived.
The
Sacred Cradle-Song in the 17th Century
Throughout Europe, there can be found examples of liturgical and
semi-liturgical cradle-songs that relate to
the feast of Christmas. One of the earliest examples is a medieval lullaby with
a Latin text, Dormi fili, dormi mater.
In 17th-century Italy, the cradle-song often had a folk-like character. Though
the majority were originally intended for a single voice and to be sung
unaccompanied, more advanced compositional techniques were later brought to
bear and the pieces were elaborated so that they became fully harmonized works
of art, with little left to suggest any folksong origins they might once have
had. When Mary and the shepherds summoned by an angel sing a “ninna nanna” to
the bambin Giesù (the baby Jesus),
they often imitate the sound of the zampogna
(a kind of bagpipe still played in southern Italy), and popular melodies are
worked up into fully harmonized pieces or dialogues. Giovanni Francesco
Anerio’s Dialogo pastorale al presepio di
nostro signore is a collection of 17 three-part laude dating from 1600, which describe scenes from the shepherds’
visit to the manger.
The connection between the birth of Christ and his Passion can be traced back a
long way in the iconography. In accordance with the tradition of ways of
representing the membra Jesu nostril
(“limbs of our Lord Jesus”), symbols such as a goldfinch, a cross, or a bunch
of grapes were placed in the hand of the newborn child as a symbol of his
future sufferings. Madonna-and-child images showing the child with a
cross—indicating that Mary knew from the moment of her son’s birth that he
would one day be crucified—appear as far back as the 11th century.
—Christina Pluhar