(It.: ‘sepulchre’).
A 17th-century genre of sacred dramatic music in Italian related to the oratorio and performed on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday at the Habsburg court chapels in Vienna. Other terms used for the genre were ‘azione sacra’ and Rappresentazione sacra. The libretto of a sepolcro is invariably based on the Passion or an Old Testament story interpreted as prefiguring the Passion. The earliest examples date from the 1660s, the latest from about 1705. A sepolcro tends to be shorter than an oratorio and in one structural part rather than the two common for the Italian oratorio. Bearing a close relationship to opera, the sepolcro was characteristically performed with scenery, costumes and action. References to the scenery and action are commonly found in both the printed librettos and music manuscripts of the numerous sepolcri set by Antonio Draghi to librettos by Nicolò Minato. These sources invariably begin with a comment on the replica of the Most Holy Sepulchre of Christ, the main element of the scenery, before which the personages in the drama play their parts. In addition to the Sepulchre, a large painted backdrop often depicted a scene appropriate to the drama. In the Draghi-Minato Il sagrificio non impedito (1692), for instance, the Sepulchre was in the foreground, while the painted scene represented the summit of a mountain on which Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac was in progress. Among the leading composers of sepolcri are, besides Draghi, Antonio Bertali, P.A. Ziani, Antonio Cesti, G.B. Pederzuoli, and the Emperor Leopold I. After 1705 the sepolcro was abandoned in Vienna, but representations of the Holy Sepulchre provided scenic backgrounds for oratorios by Fux, Caldara and others. These works, which were not acted as the earlier sepolcri had been, were identified on the title-pages of their librettos as oratorios ‘at the Most Holy Sepulchre’ (al santissimo sepolcro).
See also Oratorio, §6.
R. Schnitzler: The Sacred Dramatic Music of Antonio Draghi (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1971)
H.E. Smither: A History of the Oratorio, i (Chapel Hill, NC, 1977)
S. Wiesmann: ‘Das Wiener Sepolcro’, Oper als Text: romanistische Beiträge zur Libretto-Forschung, ed. A. Gier (Heidelberg, 1986), 25–31
E. Kanduth: ‘The Literary and Dramaturgical Aspects of the Viennese Sepolcro Oratorio, with Particular Reference to Fux’, Johann Joseph Fux and the Music of the Austro-Italian Baroque, ed. H. White (Aldershot,1992), 153–63
H. White: ‘The Sepolcro Oratorios of Fux: an Assessment’, ibid., 164–230
HOWARD E. SMITHER