Recontextualizing 17th-century Music

At the court of Leopold I, operatic spectacles functioned as a primary medium for monarchical iconography. These spectacles often contained far more explicit political messaging than the _tragédies en musique_ of Philippe Quinault and Jean-Baptiste Lully, which presented panegyric through veils of allegory and allusion. The idiosyncratic political role played by operas and ballets in Vienna constitutes an important and still underappreciated facet of the history of musical theater in the age of absolutism. 
In this paper, I discuss how the spectacles of Leopold's Vienna prominently staged certain types of monarchical iconography that were treated as sacrilegious in other contexts. The devout emperor exemplified the Habsburg emphasis on Catholic tradition and modesty, and cultivated an image that precluded self-glorifying public monuments like Louis XIV's equestrian statues. However, stage monuments of Leopold and his family appeared frequently in the operas and ballets of his court, often as objects of worship in _balletti_. Even more surprising, the librettists frequently described these monuments with terms typically linked to sacrilege, including "Idol" and "Simolacro." Remarkably, these terms never occur in any livret that Molière or Quinault penned for Lully (though both authors used the terms in their non-musical dramatic works).
The inclusion of idolatrous language and imagery in Viennese spectacles evinces a decades-long (and unparalleled) strategy to use the musical language, supernatural settings, and ephemeral nature of lyric theater to insulate such elements from controversy. Such imagery also reflects the influence of Spanish theater (in which idolatry is often a theme or character), Arcadian debates about visual and sonic representation, and the underlying cultural difference between French preferences for euhemerist understandings of pagan mythology as compared to the Viennese emphasis on allegorical interpretation. To illustrate the unusual nature of these scenes, I compare the strikingly different uses of idolatrous imagery in Lully's _Bellérophon_ (1679) and Viennese works including _L'Almonte_ (1661), Penelope (1670), _Il Tempio d'Apollo in Delfo_ (1682), and _Pigmaleone in Cipro_ (1689). Such comparisons demonstrate an unrecognized radical difference between the operatic spectacles of Vienna and Versailles.

My paper interrogates a little-known sacred concerto, "Ich bin schwarz, aber gar lieblich" ("I am black, but beautiful"), published in 1664 by Württemberg kapellmeister Samuel Capricornus, as a composition that illuminates early modern German views on blackness. As historian Kate Lowe has shown, the text on which this concerto is based (Song of Songs, Chapter 1, Verses 5-6) was not only read as a spiritual allegory of the Christian Church's love for Christ, but also emerged as an influential religious and cultural model through which black Africans were viewed. In particular, the adversarial character of the formulation "black, but," Lowe argues, has significantly contributed to the history of racial formation through its implied contrast between blackness and beauty. While historians of race have begun to examine religious and literary texts adopting this formulation, they have not yet considered musical settings as equally revealing sources.  
As I will demonstrate through my analysis of textual and musical aspects, comparison with other composers' settings, and discussion of the piece's courtly context, Capricornus conceived his concerto primarily as a musical commentary on blackness. The composer chose to set only those parts of the verses to music that are entirely concerned with this theme, and further emphasizes its importance by repeating the word "schwarz" no less than twenty-two times. Musically, the piece enforces the contrast between "black" and "beautiful" through the means of its musical rhetoric and highly unusual scoring for solo bass voice, five recorders and continuo. The word "schwarz" is represented by off-beat rhythms and melodic fragmentation through rests (abruptio), echoing a common association of blackness with deformity, and timbrally by the low register of the solo voice, contrasted with high-pitched, overtone-rich instruments. 
I argue that this concerto's musical rhetoric resonates with the deeply ambiguous views on blackness prevalent in seventeenth-century Germany, oscillating between the extremes of desire for and abjection of black bodies. These views become tangible in the "collections" of black court servants, especially musicians, as exoticized commodities that were assembled not only in Württemberg, but also at other German courts during Capricornus's lifetime.

Across his oeuvre, Dieterich Buxtehude exhibits strong interest in canon and learned counterpoint, techniques that David Yearsley has proven synonymous with seventeenth-century alchemical practice among Hamburg-School contrapuntists. We find explicit artifacts of such "Hermetic" musicianship in Buxtehude's immediate circle: in the 1670s, his close friend Johann Theile compiled a _Musikalisches Kunstbuch_, a collection of contrapuntal riddles and puzzle-canons demanding a gnosis of composition as transformative magic. This work's format, epigram, and canonic technique closely resemble Michael Maier's seminal alchemy treatise _Atalanta fugiens_ (1617), whose _unio mystica_ exegesis hangs on geometrical concepts demonstrably apparent in Buxtehude's craft. 


An intersection of seventeenth-century philosophy, number theory, and Lutheran mystical theology, this study examines interactions between textual content and structural proportion in Buxtehude's _Sicut Moses exaltavit serpentum_ (BuxWV 97). An analysis alongside writings of Robert Fludd, Michael Maier, and Andreas Werckmeister illuminates the cantata's geometrical design: major division points consistently align with the Pythagorean ratios 1:2 and 3:4, while these philosophers' most championed "figural" numbers form the foundation for Buxtehude's embedded motivic, musical-rhetorical, and _ostinato_ schemes. The textual _unio mystica_ climax accompanies an extended musical quotation from Buxtehude's setting of Psalm 73--a thematically related cantata in which he "solves," through identical dimensional juxtapositions, the infamous mathematical impossibility of "Squaring the Circle," the favorite alchemical symbol for divine unification.


For scholars of Buxtehude's vocal music, speculation about his mystical tendencies typically focuses not on geometry or alchemy, but on the German Pietist movement. Olga Gero's 2018 discovery of the unique, previously unidentified text of _Fallax mundus_ (BuxWV 28) in a Jesuit emblem book deepens existing questions about Buxtehude's and his patrons' religious proclivities. Ultimately, my discovery of extensive Rosicrucian, not Pietist, textual and numerical tropes in _Sicut Moses exaltavit serpentum_--as substantiated by a little-known Rosicrucian manuscript in the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg--provides a new bridge between elements of Christian theology, alchemy, and counterpoint already well established within Buxtehude's milieu. Recognizing esoteric aspects of Buxtehude's work as conceptually foundational refocuses his image within exoteric historiography and challenges prevalent Enlightenment-bound notions of intellectualism during the Age of Exploration.