ABSTRACT
In Chapter 14, Robert Kendrick chooses a very specific chronological stratum and genre demarcation—seventeenth-century European theatrical music, sacred and secular—in order to comparatively address the issue of music theater and state formation in early Absolutist Europe by historicizing and grounding musical practice. For this purpose, the chapter draws the reader’s attention to Vienna, with the aim of deciphering opera and sepulcri; to Versailles, for a discussion on the (re)staging of the concept “la gloire”; to Venice, for the sake of examining history as metaphor; and to Madrid, in order to place theater-music hermeneutics between Christian government and Eucharistic theology.
