The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 22 (2016) No. 1

Published 2017

Martyr Saints on Stage in Light of Papal Exhortations during the Thirty Years War

Virginia Christy Lamothe*

Abstract

Although Aristotle’s Poetics served as a model for Jesuit drama, two Jesuit scholars at the Collegio Romano felt that dramas with saintly protagonists could fulfill the purposes of tragedy. Alessandro Donati’s Ars Poetica (1631) and Tarquinio Galluzzi’s Rinovazione dell’antica tragedia (1633) argued that audiences moved to fear and pity by the representation of a suffering martyr would be inspired to acts of faith and service. The court of Cardinal Francesco Barberini commissioned operas with saintly protagonists as propaganda, presumably meant to inspire dignitaries in the Holy Roman Empire to acts of service to the Pope during the Thirty Years War.

1. Introduction

2. Aristotle’s Poetics in the early modern era

3. Jesuit dramatic theory: Galluzzi and Donati

4. Alessandro Donati, Ars Poetica (1631)

5. Tarquinio Galluzzi, Rinovazione dell’antica tragedia (1633), on Aristotle

6. Galluzzi on Christian tragedy

7. The problem of tragicomedia

8. Jesuit drama and connections to the Barberini court

9. The Barberini saint operas and the Thirty Years War

10. Conclusions

Acknowledgments

Figure

Table

References

1. Introduction

1.1 During the Carnival season of 1632, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, nephew of Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini), held a celebration that included performances of Sant’Alessio, with music by Stefano Landi and libretto by Giulio Rospigliosi (future Pope Clement IX).^[1] The opera was revised and performed again in 1634. It was the first of many operas performed at the Barberini court in Rome to feature the tragic life of a saint.^[2]

1.2 Sant’Alessio, like many other plays for the Barberini court, combines elements of many genres. This and other “saint” operas were inspired by the comedia de santos plays, especially those of Lope de Vega, whose saint drama Lo Fingido verdadero San Genesius (1618) was witnessed by Rospigliosi while he accompanied Cardinal Francesco in Spain from February to October 1626. When Rospigliosi began to write his own plays in Vega’s style, he received favorable notice, even from Vega himself.^[3] The Barberini operas also borrow from the commedia dell’arte of Giovambattista Andreini and the actors of his troupe, the Compagnia dei Fedeli, an influence seen in the 1634 production of Sant’Alessio in the antics of Martio and Curtio.^[4] There is yet another genre suggested in the 1634 printed score, which calls Sant’Alessio a “Historia Sacra.”^[5] Still another is mentioned in the praise the opera receives from Barberini courtier and scholar of ancient music Giovanni Battista Doni, who refers to Sant’Alessio in his Trattato della musica scenica as a “rappresentazione spirituale,” one of Doni’s categories of  tragicomedia, an ambiguous genre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as we shall see.^[6]

1.3 One of the most important genres to influence these Barberini saint operas was tragedy. Still, while Alessio’s death in the opera is certainly tragic, this opera, along with other operas about martyrs and saints performed for the Barberini court, is not a true tragedy as defined in Aristotle’s Poetics. Rather, the Barberini saint operas embody an ideal of tragedy held by contemporary Jesuit playwrights and polemicists that has been overlooked by scholars of seventeenth-century opera, one that rejects some of Aristotle’s ideas.

1.4 Upon opening the 1634 score of Sant’Alessio, one finds a preface containing an anonymous letter that praises the opera in part for its unities of time and place that conform to ideas in Aristotle’s Poetics. The letter goes on to praise the choice of protagonist, Saint Alexis, who the author says is a character of eminent goodness and sanctity.^[7] In this praise we see a contradiction: Aristotle states in his Poetics that the protagonist of a tragedy must be “a man not outstanding in virtue or justice, brought down through vice or depravity, who falls into adversity … because he errs in some way.”^[8] How then can a tragic opera about the life of a saint truly follow Aristotle’s ideals for tragedy? Two Jesuit scholars at the Collegio Romano, Alessandro Donati (1584–1640) and Tarquinio Galluzzi (1573–1649), sought to justify saintly characters as acceptable protagonists of tragedies, and even as superior examples that would serve the Church in a time of war and Reformation. Exploring their ideas will reveal a history of Jesuit dramatic theory in Rome that is directly relevant to operas performed at the Barberini court.

2. Aristotle’s Poetics in the early modern era

2.1 Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 330 BCE) was used by dramatists of the sixteenth century as a means for cultural renewal in that it aided them in imitating the ideals of ancient Greek drama, in particular the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (fifth century BCE). They traced these ideals, codified by Aristotle, from ancient Greece to the Roman Empire, where Aristotelian ideals influenced the dramas of Seneca (first century CE). They then followed the ideas of the Poetics through the commentary found in the Codex Etruscus, an eleventh-century source for Seneca’s plays; their “rediscovery” in Padua in the late thirteenth century; and their increasing popularity and abundant appearances throughout Italy in the fifteenth century.^[9] Although a Latin translation of the Poetics was made by Hermann in 1256 from the Greek version of Averoës, it was virtually ignored. It was not until the sixteenth century that Aristotle’s Poetics received sustained attention and sparked new debates in translations, commentaries, and even published academic lectures by Gregorio Valla (1498), Alessandro de Pazzi (1536), Francesco Robortello (1548), Vincenzo Maggi and Bartolomeo Lombardi (1550), Ludovico Castelvetro (1570), Alessandro Piccolimini (1572), Piero Vettori (1576), and Martin Antonio Delrio (1593–95), among others.^[10]

2.2 Today’s scholars of early modern drama must be careful to understand tragedy in the way that it was viewed by scholars and dramatists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although Aristotle, in chapter 11, lays out three necessary elements for the plot of a tragedy, namely recognition (anagnorisis), reversal of fortune (peripeteia), and suffering from a destructive or painful act (pathos), the most important and indispensable of these elements in the early modern era was pathos.^[11] This is evident in the fact that many dramatists and polemicists, including Robortello, Vettori, and Piccolimini, were quick to point out that some classical tragedies, such as Sophocles’s Ajax, contained only pathos without the other two elements.^[12] In his discussion of Aristotle’s Poetics in 1545, Bernardino Tomitano distinguished tragedy from other dramatic arts by stating, “As for the passions, tragedy imitates hopes, desires, despair, weeping, deaths remembered, and deaths.”^[13] Some early modern audiences valued tragedies that consisted of little more than scenes of suffering and woe. They valued pathos above all else because they felt it was the best way to achieve the primary aim of tragedy—what Aristotle called catharsis: a purgation of fear and pity brought about by arousing those very feelings in the audience.^[14]

3. Jesuit dramatic theory: Galluzzi and Donati

3.1 In the sixteenth century Jesuit colleges throughout Europe began to perform dramas as part of yearly school exercises. All Jesuit institutions eventually adopted the Ratio studiorum (1599), an educational system that promoted the study of Latin history, oratory, drama, and poetry, for the purpose of eloquent expression.^[15] Jesuit theoreticians of this time began to codify the values reflected in traditional classical sources for drama by examining the works of Horace, Cicero, Seneca, and most of all Aristotle. Aristotle’s treatise met dramatic theorists’ new need to understand dramatic poetry in terms of form and function. Yet not all Jesuit tragedies were mere restagings of ancient classical plays. Around the turn of the seventeenth century, Jesuit writers such as Bernardino Stefonio began to write dramas with saintly protagonists. This new type of tragedy led to new theoretical discussions.

3.2 Tarquinio Galluzzi and Alessandro Donati were apologists for Jesuit drama that did not necessarily fit the ancient ideals, as well as scholar-teachers who influenced drama in Rome both inside and outside the Collegio Romano. They sought to classify as well as explain Jesuit dramas by means of creating a comparison to Aristotle’s model of tragedy. Both men were highly learned and well-versed in contemporaneous literature concerning Aristotelian tragedy, and they would have known many translations of and commentaries on the Poetics, including the works of Robortello, Maggi, Vettori, Castelvetro, Piccolimini, Delrio, and others. These works were especially crucial to Donati, who was himself an author of Jesuit dramas.^[16]

3.3 Both Donati’s Ars Poetica (1631) and Galluzzi’s Rinovazione dell’antica tragedia (1633)^[17] approached the problem of saintly characters as protagonists in tragic dramas and argued that the rules of Aristotle were too rigid. Both treatises also deal with the aim of catharsis by stating that a representation of a saintly character, specifically one from the early Christian era, can indeed bring about pity and fear in the spectators.^[18] Both treatises were influenced by the works of Bernardino Stefonio, the “father of Jesuit drama,” whose plays Crispus (1597) and Flavia (1600) have saintly protagonists and were performed many times in Rome and in Jesuit institutions throughout Europe during the seventeenth century.^[19] Their treatises became part of a long tradition of Aristotelian criticism that continues to the present day, questioning whether saints or martyrs can be tragic heroes.

3.4 Just as Galluzzi and Donati wrote their treatises in commemoration of the works of their mentor Bernardino Stefonio, their former pupil Cardinal Francesco Barberini, to whom both Galluzzi and Donati dedicated their treatises, stood at the center of this discourse on Christian drama. The frontispiece to Donati’s treatise (which may be seen at Google Books) is particularly evocative: it depicts Truth, wearing a laurel, with one hand pointed upward and the other held over a bee-hive offered by a cherub, with three bees in the style of the Barberini coat of arms. A globe upon a book sits at her feet, and to her right stands another cherub offering an artist’s palette holding symbols representing a paragon of the arts, including a viol, a dagger, and a mahl stick. The edition itself was granted its imprimatur by Giulio Rospigliosi, secretary to Francesco Barberini, in his role as a secretary of the Roman Curia under the permission of Niccolo Riccardi, Master of the Sacred Palace under Urban VIII.^[20] As Cardinal Francesco was both the Cardinal Protector of the Collegio Romano and the patron of tragic operas about the lives of saints, a connection can be made between Galluzzi’s and Donati’s treatises and the Barberini saint operas. A closer look at each treatise helps us better understand not only Jesuit drama but also its influence on the operas of the Barberini court.

4. Alessandro Donati, Ars Poetica (1631)

4.1 Alessandro Donati may have been best known to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers for his invaluable guide to the ancient sites of Rome, which was dedicated to Pope Urban VIII in 1638.^[21] He was a Jesuit professor of rhetoric at the Collegio Romano as well as a writer of poetry and drama. His Svevia (1629) was performed and widely disseminated at Jesuit institutions throughout Europe.^[22] The libretto to the opera David musicus, performed in 1613 with music by Ottavio Catalani, is attributed to Donati.^[23] He is the author of the play Pirimalus Celiani princeps, which premiered in 1622 during the festivities for the canonizations of the founders of the Jesuit order, Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier. In addition to his guide to Rome dedicated to the Barberini Pope, he wrote three volumes of poetry dedicated to Cardinal Francesco Barberini in 1625. His final work was a Latin epic published in 1640 and titled Constantinus, Romae liberator, which served both the Jesuit didactic causes and the political agenda of Barberini Rome by depicting a Christian-converted hero of the Respublica Christiana.

4.2 Donati’s Ars poetica is a comprehensive treatise on all types of dramatic poetry. Originally published in Rome in 1631, the Ars poetica was reprinted in Rome and Cologne in 1633, Bologna in 1659, and Venice in 1684. In his treatise, Donati is less interested in the pure, Aristotelian idea of tragedy than in the actual range to be found in the corpus of then-extent classical tragedies. His chapters on tragedy show us that he does not want to deny the influence of Aristotle’s ideas, but he does intend to expand them, most importantly in which types of characters could act as protagonists for the purpose of effective catharsis. He states that a protagonist need not have an inherent tragic flaw (hamartia) or commit any tragic errors.^[24] He gives as examples Hippolytus, the children of Heracles, Thyestes, Alcestis, Iphigenia, and others.^[25] These particular characters should be of interest to scholars of opera and drama as they occur in many musical dramatic works written from the seventeenth century to today. Because these innocent characters suffer while displaying exemplary virtue, they stimulate spectators to imagine themselves in the drama and imitate the good example set by the character:

So far, mercy has to do with the evil of another … undeserved and unmerited. But a good man is most unworthy of that torment. And since people pity those whose misery they see to be tied up with themselves and with their fortunes, to the extent that they see a just man tortured by evil, even more justly do they judge that they are to be tortured by it.^[26]

Donati goes on to explain how fear and pity come to be transformed:

But what is to be said about the martyrs? … Here there is not fear, and pity appears. For they fear neither torments nor death…. Wherefore, contrary to what usually happens, hate and flight from imminent evil is removed from them, and the ultimate horror, death, is sought. When this happens, the hearer is hardly able to easily feel fear from the one not fearing, or to pity the one rejoicing in torment … and he proclaims the martyr blessed.^[27]

Donati relocates the act of catharsis in this statement so much that he moves from fear and pity to the act of rejoicing—all because of a shared faith held by the martyr and the spectator. How then can the audience be allowed to feel fear and pity? Donati says that this happens because of the tyrant who is the saint’s tormentor:

Because the cruel one-time Caesars and kings, together with the boldest fighters, tried to extinguish a religion not yet fully grown, we vehemently burn with them.^[28]

Fear and pity, in the eyes of Donati, occur as an empathetic response by the audience, imagining themselves to be in the place of the martyr, suffering at the hands of a cruel tyrant. According to Donati, this response is brought about best by a suffering character who is wholly good and innocent.

5. Tarquinio Galluzzi, Rinovazione dell’antica tragedia (1633), on Aristotle

5.1 Tarquinio Galluzzi became a professor of humanities and rhetoric at the Collegio Romano in 1606 and later also a professor of ethics. In 1621 Galluzzi wrote a treatise defining different genres of classical poetry.^[29] Galluzzi was Stefonio’s pupil, and most likely witnessed the first of many performances of Crispus as a student at the Seminario Romano.^[30] While Donati’s treatise relocates the source of the fear and pity that are necessary to bring about the intended catharsis, Galluzzi takes a more progressive, historical view in his treatise in two parts, the Rinovazione dell’antica tragedia and Difesa del Crispo, published in 1633.^[31] The term “Rinovazione” has a two-fold meaning in Galluzzi’s title. First, it refers to a revival of ancient classical theater, and second, it represents a modern Christian reform of a dramaturgy that was once conceived by and performed for pagan audiences.^[32]

5.2 Galluzzi begins by focusing on the idea that Aristotle was unable to utilize protagonists who were wholly good because of the political climate of Aristotle’s time. Galluzzi, like “others” (we can assume Donati to be one of them), finds it saddening that the laws of tragedy given by Aristotle are too narrow to allow the subject of a tragedy to come from the history of the Faith. Galluzzi argues that Aristotle was not the only author to illustrate tragedy’s true principles, and that he, in fact, changed the original purpose of tragedy.

5.3 Tragedy, Galluzzi declares, “was born in the Republic and in the state of liberty.”^[33] He states that before Aristotle’s Poetics, Plato contended in his dialogue Minos that poets in Athens invented tragedy to evoke their hatred for Minos, King of Crete, who had forced them to pay a horrible tribute: seven young men and women to be devoured by the Minotaur.^[34] Minos was portrayed as a tyrant, and the representations of this horrible tribute reflected hatred of his rule.^[35] From this point of view, the “ancient and original” purpose of tragedy, according to Galluzzi, was to purge the fear and hatred of tyranny.

5.4 Galluzzi contends that these first tragedies were created during the rule of Theseus after he returned to Athens, and were thus born in the days of a republic, not a monarchy. Here he cites a biography of Theseus written by the ancient Greek historian Plutarch, which differs from other accounts, including those of Pherecydes, Demon, Philochorus, and Cleidemus, in that it states that after Theseus returned from Crete, he consolidated power in Athens and ordered that a republic be established.^[36] Galluzzi chose to focus on Theseus’s reign in Athens in part to make the point that poets “in a state of liberty” felt free to write as they wished, and in part because it served his purpose of defending Bernardino Stefonio’s Crispus, a Christian adaptation of the myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus. The character Crispus appears in the place of Hippolytus, the son of Theseus, who is wrongly accused by Theseus and put to death. In Seneca’s telling of the story, which may have served as a model for Stefonio’s drama, Theseus is immediately remorseful for Hippolytus’s death and has all of Athens recognize him as innocent and undeserving of such a punishment.^[37] It is this focus on the martyrdoms and deaths of innocent characters that Galluzzi is arguing for in Jesuit drama.

5.5 Galluzzi’s treatise weaves together the histories of republics and monarchies in Athens with those of the Hebrew judges and the ancient rulers of Rome.^[38] In providing a history of ancient governments, Galuzzi observes that the nature of all monarchies is to tend toward tyranny. Here he may well have looked to Vincenzo Gramigna’s history of tyrannical governments, Del governo tirannico e regio (1615). Like Gramigna, Galluzzi lays out his evidence first by stating that the earliest governments were the monarchies established by the God of the Old Testament. He states that all of these monarchies, although subject to powerful kings, were in some part elective in nature and lacked the absolute power necessary for tyranny.^[39]

5.6 In a chapter titled “Per qual cagione Aristotele cambiasse il fine, e lo scopo all tragedia,” Galluzzi argues that by the time of Aristotle, monarchs had begun to assume more and more power, and tragic representations were suppressed in states where republics were dissolved. Alexander the Great, who had been Aristotle’s pupil, had taken control not only of Athens but also of most of Western Europe, North Africa, Asia Minor, and Persia. Aristotle had witnessed the Emperor arrest and torture to death (“by ravenous lion”) Aristotle’s great-nephew Callisthenes, whose history of Athens displeased Alexander since it argued against the Emperor’s adoption of Persian customs.^[40] Tragic poets had the ability to defame the rulers of their time but would certainly face grave danger in doing so. Thus, Aristotle avoided mentioning the “true aims” of tragedy in his Poetics because he lived in fear of upsetting Alexander, whom Galluzzi names as a tyrant.^[41] In order to avoid punishment, Aristotle was forced to develop a new model for tragedy that aimed at the purgation of terror and pity, but not at the ruling monarch’s expense:

Hence, in order to avoid the many very dangerous pitfalls that seemed to lay ahead, he undertook to prescribe for Tragedy a different purpose, elicited by a certain inherent quality: to arouse pity and terror, and to purge them, that is, to heal and diminish these two passions that often disturb the soul more than they should, and beyond appropriate measure.^[42]

Aristotle’s model, of course, codified a type of play that was already well established:

The more he saw quite a few poets who wrote tragedies setting aside the former objective, the more reasonable it became for him to decide not to render the tyrant odious but instead to offer people a pitiable case, one worthy of human compassion. Hence it was easy for him to change that rule and to say that the emergent character of tragic drama was its goal, and what it mainly seeks to do.^[43]

As we have seen, the hero in Aristotle’s model, while not an odious tyrant, is flawed. As Galluzzi puts it, he is midway between innocence and guilt, between vice and goodness.^[44]

6. Galluzzi on Christian tragedy

6.1 Galluzzi expressed the hope that in defending tragic dramas that feature Christian martyrs, he would inspire more writers to create sacred tragedies. His aim was to give audiences examples of virtuous men and women whose lives would inspire them to live out acts of faith. Moreover, it is important to realize that Galluzzi imagines audiences being inspired to virtue as citizens of a new Christian Republic. These martyrs are not seen merely as examples of faith but also as warriors defending a state that is threatened by tyranny. In this way the sacred dramas fulfill tragedy’s “ancient and original” (i.e., pre-Aristotelian) purpose. In defending Crispus, Flavia, and other contemporary Roman Jesuit dramas, Galluzzi draws a parallel between a tyrant who would deprive his citizens of liberty and one who would seek to take the citizenship of heaven from a virtuous man through temptation:

Therefore, that disgust [in secular tragedy] arose and increased against the tyrant who intended to remove the liberty of the republic, or life from the body, or the goods and wealth from the citizens. But this [disgust in sacred tragedies] is against him who seeks to deprive us of the life of the soul, and the communion of heaven. ^[45]

Here, Galluzzi is giving voice to the Respublica Christiana, an ideal world united under a single Christian faith. The benefits of Christian tragedy are therefore intended not only for the individual but also for a larger Republic:

Thus, whoever will put on the stage and in the theater such miraculous examples of bravery and religion will share a singular benefit with the Christian Republic, given that he offers to the people most efficacious and powerful reasons to establish and confirm them in their Faith.^[46]

As far as Galluzzi is concerned, it does not matter if the saint onstage is “too good” in Aristotelian terms, as long as he or she has the ability to move the audience by a depiction of martyrdom. Moreover, seeing cruelty inflicted on an innocent person causes the spectator to imagine such a thing happening to himself, and to identify with the hero.^[47] In this way, the representation of the martyrdom of an innocent person is the most effective way to inspire audience members to acts of faith.

6.2 In the end Galluzzi rejects the Aristotelian notion of the flawed hero: Christian heroism is a free and complete surrender to Divine will. Yet the persecution of such a hero by his enemies allows for a powerful opposition between good and evil. Galluzzi is in effect refuting the ancient notion of fate at the hands of a cruel tyrant found in pagan tragedy, and resorting to his own Christian, Jesuit heritage, which presents (as Marc Fumaroli has put it) “a providential notion of human experience, in which death, suffering, and unhappiness are only trials, and salvation is their final meaning, their happy future.” The stage, according to Galluzzi’s vision, is a crossroads where Heaven and Earth, and Time and Eternity, meet in a battle for souls.^[48]

6.3 Elena Tamburini has identified Galluzzi as the author of the anonymous prefatory letter printed in the 1634 score of Sant’Alessio. Arnaldo Morelli agrees with her, in an article examining the political implications of the opera’s patronage.^[49] As evidence they cite Galluzzi’s own words:

With this observation [of the excellent production of the opera] I have confirmed the worth of my Discorso, which I have already written, wherein I approve of tragedy that accepts for its subject a character of eminent goodness and sanctity, although it appears that Aristotle had decreed the contrary. The discourse is dedicated to the Very Eminent Cardinal, by whose authority I have been many times encouraged to have it printed. Upon seeing this [opera]—so devout, spiritual, and yet so well validated by performance—I have decided to allow it [the Discorso] to be seen [by the press]: nothing else restrains me, except a passage upon which I am working where I am trying to discover the author of the “Tragedy of the Patient Christ,” commonly attributed to Nazianzeno. As soon as I have solved this problem, I will immediately bring it to His Eminence, and Your Lordship will indulge me by accepting from me my endeavor.^[50]

The attribution is supported by the chronology of events: the first performance of Sant’Alessio in 1632, the publication of Galluzzi’s treatise in 1633, and the publication of the score in 1634 (though Galluzzi’s prefatory letter was evidently written well before publication). This letter, where Galluzzi praises Sant’Alessio as the model of a perfect tragedy, directly connects Jesuit polemics on tragedy with the operas of the Barberini court.

6.4 Galluzzi’s defense of the “Christian Republic,” and not of any particular secular government then in power, as well as his dedication of the treatise to the cardinal-nephew of the reigning Pope, show us that he values the power and control of the papacy over those of other monarchs. But Galluzzi does not stop there. He goes on to argue that all past rulers who broke away from the voices of the people of their republics and absorbed absolute power changed into tyrants. It is not hard to imagine that the electoral nature of the papacy within the College of Cardinals would be seen favorably by Galluzzi.

7. The problem of tragicomedia

7.1 One reason Alessandro Donati and Tarquinio Galluzzi dedicated their treatises to Cardinal Francesco was his personal interest in the recreation of ancient theater. Most music historians are familiar with Giovanni Battista Doni and his work on ancient music and drama under the sponsorship of Cardinal Francesco Barberini, but they are less familiar with the Giovanni Battista Doni who, like Cardinal Francesco, was Tarquinio Galluzzi’s pupil.^[51] We know from a letter written in 1629 that Doni admired Galluzzi as a mentor.^[52] Doni also inscribed a presentation copy of his Trattato de’ generi e de’ modi della musica to Galluzzi.^[53] Doni presumably witnessed a performance of Sant’Alessio since he praises the opera. As we have seen, he refers to it in his Trattato della musica scenica as a type of “tragicomedia.”^[54]

7.2 While there might, on the surface, seem to be a contradiction between Doni’s description of the genre of Sant’Alessio as a tragicomedia and Galluzzi’s praise for the same opera as a tragedy, I would argue that they actually agree about the nature of the opera. It was the term “tragicomedia” that was treated inconsistently at the time. In calling Sant’Alessio a tragicomedia, Doni envisioned a drama mingling comedy, in the commedia dell’arte inspired roles of Martio and Curtio, with pathos, in the life and death of the saint. Most polemicists, including both Donati and Galluzzi, defined a number of tragedies as tragicomedie in accordance with plays (now lost) described by Aristotle as not having tragic endings. Galluzzi himself refers to these in his first treatise of 1621 as plays such as those on the theme of Odysseus where the suitors of Penelope take their leave peacefully, or of Orestes and Aegisthus who depart as friends.^[55] Donati observes that these tragedies that move from suffering to joy remain tragic in that they can still move the audience to fear and pity and evoke catharsis; this is because the prospect of an impending evil can move us as powerfully as a present one.^[56]

7.3 But the notion of “tragicomedia” was nebulous at best well before the writings of Galluzzi and Donati. Giovan Battista Giraldi argued in his discourses of 1554 only that a tragicomedia should be performed in a way that keeps the spectators suspended between horror and pity until the very end.^[57] Nevertheless, Giovanni Battista Guarini, author of Il pastor fido (1585) and the greatest theorist of tragicomedia, states clearly that tragicomedies were different from tragedies with happy endings. In the version of Il pastor fido published in 1588, Guarini identifies the characteristics tragicomedia takes from tragedy:

the great personages, but not the action; the verisimilar plot, but not the true history; the end [goal] of moving the passions, but only to blunt them; delight, but not one that is melancholy; danger, but not death.^[58]

By Guarini’s definition, Sant’Alessio would not be a tragicomedia. The story of Saint Alexis does come from a true history documented in the Golden Legend, and the passions of the audience are moved, even to catharsis, not only through the dangers of Alessio’s trials but also by his death.

8. Jesuit drama and connections to the Barberini court

8.1 There were many connections between the performances of the Jesuit plays at the Collegio Romano and the operas of the Barberini court. The operas are connected to Jesuit theater not only in their similar subjects but also in the connections between the creators of the Barberini operas, the Collegio Romano, and (as we have seen) one of its polemicists, Tarquinio Galluzzi. The subjects of the Barberini “saint” operas—Saints Alexis, Didymus and Theodora, Boniface, and Eustace—were carefully chosen for propagandist purposes, either by Giulio Rospigliosi, whom Cardinal Francesco had known from his studies at the University of Pisa between 1620 and 1623 and had made his secretary, or by Cardinal Francesco himself. Rospigliosi had also recently been appointed by Urban VIII as the secretary of the Sacred Congregation of Rites. As a member of this organization, it was Rospigliosi’s responsibility to review the litanies of celebrated saints.^[59] Tarquinio Galluzzi, who clearly argued for the importance of sacred dramas, would also have known many stories of the lives of saints since he was chosen by Pope Urban VIII to compile and verify saints’ legends for the reforms made by Giulio Rospigliosi and the Sacred Order of Rites to the Proper and Ordinary of the feasts for the new Brevario romano in 1629.^[60]

8.2 There are also connections between one of the composers of the music for some of these operas and the Collegio Romano. Virgilio Mazzocchi taught music at the Collegio Romano from 1626 until 1629. He composed music for the intermedi for a performance of Crispus in 1628. He was also the composer of the music for San Bonifatio in 1638 and Sant’Eustachio in 1643; the lost music for La Genoinda, 1641, is also attributed to him.

9. The Barberini saint operas and the Thirty Years War

9.1 The creation of these operas and their propagandist messages occurred at a crucial time at the turning point of the Thirty Years War (1618–48; See Table 1). It is the saints’ steadfastness that sends a message of Catholic orthodoxy and the indisputable authority of the Pope. In their treatises Donati and Galluzzi locate the means for catharsis in the cruel acts of a tyrant. The tyrants who torture and kill the innocent saints in the Barberini operas are not always visible on stage, but their presence is felt and creates the turmoil necessary for the saints to be tempted to give in to the heretical forces that surround them—a plot device that clearly symbolizes the position of the Catholics in the Thirty Years War. Initial battles of the war had gone favorably for the Catholic armies in the Holy Roman Empire. But in autumn of 1631, the tide had begun to turn as Catholics faced a powerful new enemy with the entrance into the war of Gustavus Adolfus of Sweden, whose forces outmaneuvered and outnumbered the Catholic army in the battle at Breitenfeld. Catholic princes saw their situation as grim as his forces also aided in the seizures of Leipzig, Prague, Würtzburg, Mainz, and Frankfurt within the span of only a few weeks (See Table 1).^[61]

9.2 To make matters worse, Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II found himself deeply in debt and unpopular with Protestant princes, because in his Edict of Restitution (1629) he had financed efforts to revoke the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, thus reclaiming Protestant landholdings for Catholic nobles and ecclesiastical princes, in order to reunite a Catholic Empire. The premiere of Sant’Alessio was performed in honor of Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg, a politician and statesman hand-chosen by Ferdinand II to act as chancellor of the Empire. Throughout the war, Eggenberg made a number of trips to Rome on behalf of the Emperor to seek the aid of the Pope. It is important to remember that honored guests such as Eggenberg, to whom many of the saint operas were dedicated, were the same officers and ambassadors who would influence many of the crucial decisions for continued war or peace during the numerous phases of the Thirty Years War. Even more important, the Pope was unwilling to allow any concessions to be made by Catholic nobles to Protestant forces in order to heal and restore peace to a war-torn and poverty-stricken Germany. Eggenberg’s visit in January of 1632 was most likely a reaction to a letter dated December 13, 1631, written by Francesco Barberini and sent to Vienna, stating that under no condition would the Pope accept the proposed concessions for a treaty with the Protestant forces.^[62] Like the saints brought to life in the dramas before them, these ambassadors, their rulers, and their countrymen back home were to remain steadfast and accept the authority of Rome (that is, of the Pope) wholly and unconditionally, even when aid was denied them. Meanwhile, Jesuit writers and dramatists such as Galluzzi and Donati saw the creation and performance of drama during the Thirty Years War as a means for rejecting the “tyrannical” overpowering Protestant forces and achieving universal orthodoxy in a Respublica Christiana.

9.3 The operas Sant’Alessio, Santi Didimo e Theodora, San Bonifatio, and Sant’Eustachio, like the Jesuit plays before them, are all examples of tragic dramas that focus on the life, suffering, and often sacrificial death of early Christian saints who, although tempted, remain steadfast and wholly good.^[63] In Santi Didimo e Theodora of 1635 and 1636, and San Bonifatio of 1638, we hear of ancient Roman pronouncements against Christians that led to the martyrdoms of the operas’ protagonists. The apotheosis scene in San Bonifatio is a ballet of the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant, who declare their victory—ironically at a time of defeat for Catholic forces throughout the German lands.^[64] The final saint opera performed at the Barberini court was Sant’Eustachio in 1643. This opera tells the story of the second-century Saint Eustace, a Christian convert and general to the pagan Roman emperor Hadrian. The opera’s tyrant is more visible here than in the other saint operas, and the plot makes use of Aristotle’s devices of anagnorisis and peripeteia. The opera closes with the martyrdom of Eustachio and his entire family at the decrees of Hadrian, and the appearance of an angel who tells of their triumph in heaven.

9.4 While Saint Alexis’s death does not come at the hands of a tyrannical ruler, the idea of tyranny is not forgotten in the first opera, Sant’Alessio. A detailed engraving in the printed score (Figure 1) shows a woman in the garb of a warrior, standing upon trophies of the spoils of war and surrounded by a chorus of shackled slaves. She is an allegorical representation of a “New” (“Nuova”) Rome, and from her recitative in the opera’s prologue, we learn that through the ages Rome has been a powerful empire that conquered not only foreign lands but also hearts in the name of Christ. As a final gesture, Rome tells the audience that she is no tyrant. She frees the slaves from their chains and tells them she will be beloved as a gentle ruler:

Roma Ma, sè tanto son vaga mostrare in mille modi la pietà, che m’appaga, sciolgansi pur delle catene i nodi: che vogl’io non severo solo ne’ petti un mansueto impero.

Rome But, given that I so desire to demonstrate in a thousand ways the piety that pleases me, let these bonds of chains be loosened: for I want not a harsh rule but only a gentle one in your breasts.

This propagandist representation of Rome as the head of the Respublica Christiana would not have been lost on Galluzzi or Donati.

10. Conclusions

10.1 Jesuit drama came into its golden age with the creation of the Ratio studiorum at the turn of the seventeenth century. This method of study standardized the instruments of Jesuit education, including that of drama, so that students could better understand Latin history, oratory, drama, and poetry, for the purpose of engaging in rhetoric’s art of persuasion and edification. The Ratio studiorum came about in an era when scholars published new ideas and engaged in debates concerning the revival of ancient classical tragedies. Alessandro Donati’s Ars poetica and Tarquinio Galluzzi’s Rinovazione dell’antica tragedia explain the political and religious implications of sacred subjects in tragedies in seventeenth-century Rome, most especially through their discussions of saintly characters appearing as tragic heroes; to accomplish this, they rationalize the divergence of contemporaneous drama from Aristotelian orthodoxy. Both Donati and Galluzzi assume that the author of a Christian tragedy must evoke deep passions, first from his own soul and then in the audience. The visual rhetoric of the suffering, death, or martyrdom of a saint on stage underlines and reinforces the verbal and musical rhetoric of the drama. Donati and Galluzzi contend that virtuous protagonists (as opposed to flawed ones) can better serve the ultimate goal of tragedy: to move the audience to fear, pity, and wonder by dramatizing a mortal action filled with pain and suffering. In this way, Donati and Galluzzi believed these tragic representations would inspire audiences to acts of faith and service to the Christian Republic.

10.2 By focusing on saintly characters, librettists such as Giulio Rospigliosi were able to give their operas both a spiritual dimension and a political one. The cathartic aim of the saint operas of the Barberini court was demonstrative of a type of religious orthodoxy, but their persuasive end was presumably meant to inspire specific dignitaries attending the operas to acts of faith and service to the Pope, despite the hardships their Catholic forces endured during the Thirty Years War. Donati and Galluzzi identify the idea of tyranny in their treatises, and it is this idea that is woven through the plots of the Barberini saint operas as a means of propaganda in favor of the Catholic Church.

Acknowledgments

I should like to thank Junius Johnson for his assistance with the translations and interpretations of Donati’s text; Dino Cervini for his time and patience in teaching me to translate Galluzzi’s text; and Francesca Muccini for additional helpful suggestions on Galluzzi’s text. I would like to thank Tim Carter as well for all his guidance in the creation of this article, and the anonymous readers for their insightful suggestions. I also greatly appreciate Lois Rosow’s expertise and careful reading of this article in the editing process.

Figure

Figure 1. Roma in prologue to Il Sant’Alessio, engraving in printed score

Table

Table 1. Major battles of the Thirty Years War