Divine Wisdom and Dolorous Mysteries: Habsburg Marian Devotion in Two Motets from Monteverdi's Selva morale et spirituale

2007 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-271
Author(s):  
ANDREW H. WEAVER
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Marian Devotion ◽  
Divine Wisdom ◽  
Large Complex ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Immaculate Conception ◽  
Religious Writings ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
Habsburg Court

Despite recent scholarly interest in Monteverdi's Selva morale et spirituale (1641), many aspects of this large, complex print remain enigmatic, and the intended context for much of the music in the collection has long been a matter of pure conjecture. Yet two of the most anomalous features of the Selva morale, the solo motets Ab aeterno ordinata sum and Pianto della Madonna, can now be placed into the context of the Habsburg court in Vienna during the reign of Ferdinand III (1637––57). Both of these works play directly into the most important aspects of Habsburg Marian devotion. Ab aeterno is a setting of Proverbs 8:23––31, a text that although very rare for seventeenth-century motets would nonetheless have been widely understood as a celebration of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin. The Pianto, a Latin contrafactum of Monteverdi's celebrated Lamento d'Arianna, would have been perfectly suited for the Habsburgs' Fifteen Mysteries Celebration, a Lenten devotion in praise of the Most Holy Rosary. Various types of evidence, including liturgical and other religious writings, Habsburg sermons, and additional musical works, support these interpretations of Monteverdi's motets and reveal their importance to the imperial court. That the composer did indeed include the motets in his print with the Habsburg court in mind is further indicated by similarities between the Selva morale and an earlier publication stemming directly from Ferdinand III's court: Giovanni Felice Sances's Motetti a voce sola of 1638.

The Musical Discourse of Servitude

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry White
Keyword(s):  
Johann Sebastian Bach ◽  
George Frideric Handel ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
Musical Discourse ◽  
Work Concept ◽  
Musical Genres ◽  
Church Service ◽  
Late Works

The Musical Discourse of Servitude examines the music of Johann Joseph Fux (ca. 1660–1741) in relation to that of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. Its principal argument is that Fux’s long indenture as a composer of church music in Vienna gains in meaning (and cultural significance) when situated along an axis that runs between the liturgical servitude of writing music for the imperial court service and the autonomy of musical imagination which transpires in the late works of Bach and Handel. To this end, The Musical Discourse of Servitude constructs a typology of the late Baroque musical imagination which draws Fux, Bach, and Handel into the orbit of North Italian compositional practice. This typology depends on two primary concepts, both of which derive and dissent from Lydia Goehr’s formulation of the “work-concept” in The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (1992), namely, the “authority concept” and a revised reading of the “work-concept” itself. Both concepts are engaged through the agency of two musical genres—the oratorio and the Mass ordinary—which Fux shared with Handel and Bach respectively. These genres functioned as conservative norms in Fux’s music (most of Fux’s working life was spent in writing for the church service), but they are very differently engaged by Bach and Handel. To establish a continuity between Fux, Bach and Handel, and between the servitude of common practice and the emerging autonomy of a work-based practice in the early eighteenth-century musical imagination are the principal objectives of this study.

Claiming Nobility in the Monarquía Hispánica: The Search for Status by Inca, Aztec, and Nasrid Descendants at the Habsburg Court

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 171-198
Author(s):  
Karoline P. Cook
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Military Service ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Royal Court ◽  
Military Orders ◽  
Habsburg Court ◽  
The Military

By the early seventeenth century, petitioners at the royal court in Madrid who claimed descent from the Inca rulers of Peru, the Aztec rulers of Mexico, and the Nasrid emirs of Granada found ways to acquire noble status and secure rights to their ancestral lands in the form of entailed estates. Their success in securing noble status and title to their mayorazgos (entailed estates) rested on strategies, used over the course of several generations, that included marriages with the peninsular nobility, ties of godparentage and patronage, and military service to the crown. This article will examine the networks formed in Madrid between roughly 1600 and 1630 when the descendants of the Inca and Aztec rulers interacted with peninsular noble families at court, obtaining noble status and entry into the military orders and establishing their mayorazgos. Their strategies for claiming nobility show striking parallels to those adopted by the Morisco nobility, and one aim of this article is to suggest how knowledge of such strategies circulated among families both at the royal court in Madrid and in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru.

‘A More Unobserved and Convenient Location’: A Derbyshire School Reopened

2008 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-194
Author(s):  
Richard H. Turner
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Catholic Schools ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Recent Contribution ◽  
Immaculate Conception ◽  
Jesuit College

Of the forty-two clandestine Catholic schools Beales lists as documented in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, none has been more graphically described or frequently recalled than the Jesuit school at Stanley Grange near West Hallam in south-east Derbyshire. Unmasked by Government in 1625, it survived there for a further decade before its abrupt suppression in 1635.A few deliberately but tantalizingly vague references show that the school continued to operate on a small scale elsewhere in Derbyshire, under the aegis of the fledgling Jesuit College of the Immaculate Conception (CIC). From that time, and particularly since the foundation of Mount St. Mary’s College at Spinkhill by the CIC in 1842, there has been speculation as to whither this precursor school moved and how it fared after Stanley Grange. The most recent contribution is a significant reassessment by Hendrik Dijkgraaf in 2003 of the anonymous but painstaking editorial article in the Mount St. Mary’s magazine The Mountaineer for 1912, written in rebuttal of a suggestion that the school had remained at Stanley Grange into the mid-1640s.

Measuring Discrimination of Complex Musical Events

1977 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warren F. Prince
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Judgment ◽  
University Student ◽  
Perceptual Judgment ◽  
Reasonable Accuracy ◽  
Musical Compositions ◽  
Large Complex ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
Reliable Instrument ◽  
Acceptable Reliability ◽  
Reliability Coefficients

This study describes the development of a reliable instrument to measure perceptual judgment in listening to large, complex musical compositions. Paired excerpts from existing compositions in a diversity of historical styles were taped and played to a panel of “expert” listeners. Some pairs were identical, some highly similar, some slightly similar, and some extremely different. The panel's codings were sorted for high and low consensus; the revised instrument was administered to university student samples, producing acceptable reliability coefficients. The study concludes that perception, memory, and comparative judgment in listening to complex musical works can be measured with reasonable accuracy by the instrument.

scholarly journals Sophia — Divine Wisdom, and justice in seventeenth-century Russia

2009 ◽  
Vol 50 (50/2-3) ◽  
pp. 409-429
Author(s):  
Christoph Witzenrath
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Divine Wisdom

Original Holiness

2019 ◽  
pp. 485-502
Author(s):  
Sarah Jane Boss
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Marian Devotion ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
Immaculate Conception ◽  
Pius Ix ◽  
Pope Pius Ix

The nineteenth century saw an upsurge in Marian devotion and Mariological enquiry in Western Europe. Of particular note is the Bull of Pope Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus (1854), which defines the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception as an article of Catholic faith. Developments of this kind may be seen partly as an example of the Catholic Church’s reaction against increasing secularization. However, methodologically, Marian theology was part of the tendency towards a more historical approach to theology, with greater emphasis on the participation of the ordinary faithful in the articulation of doctrine. Attention is drawn to the importance of the tradition in which Mary is identified with the Old Testament figure of Wisdom, and the relevance of this for the understanding of Mary’s pre-election as the Mother of God, immaculately conceived. Finally, there is discussion of some of the nineteenth century’s most prominent Mariological thinkers, such as Newman and Scheeben.

‘What enchanting Sound salutes my Ear?’: Gerusalemme liberata and the early development of opera in England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Development ◽  
Native Form ◽  
Musical Adaptations ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
London Stage

By the 1620s, the romantic episodes in Gerusalemme liberata had become popular as a source for operatic libretti. The story of Rinaldo and Armida proved to be the most popular, and eventually, by the end of the seventeenth century, this phenomenon had reached the stage in England, via Italy, France and even Germany. The fourth chapter explores ambitious musical adaptations of the episode for the London stage in the native form of dramatic opera in John Dennis’s Rinaldo and Armida: A Tragedy (1699), with music by John Eccles, and in the through-sung Italianate form in Handel’s Rinaldo, with a libretto by Giacomo Rossi, first performed to great acclaim in 1711. It will also examine the idiosyncratic interpretation, by Paolo Rolli, of a different romantic episode in Tasso, that of Erminia and Tancredi, as the source for another Italianate London opera, Giovanni Bononcini’s L’Erminia favola Boschereccia (1723). These musical works founded, often closely but sometimes more freely, on the Italian poem demonstrate the breadth of Tasso’s impact in England, both chronologically and across a range of art forms.

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