La cuna del Redentore a Wolfenbüttel (1685) e i tentativi di conciliazione religiosa in Germania

Abstract

During the second half of the seventeenth century at the Palazzo Apostolico Vaticano in Rome, it became customary on Christmas Eve to perform music, generally in the form of cantatas, concertos, or sacred compositions. This repertoire is imbued with the Arcadian sensibility, as the choice of the Nativity theme makes clear, and has an explicitly didactic aim: to edify the listeners through reference to Holy Scripture and to the basic principles of Christianity, both ethical and religious, quite often accompanied by a desire to celebrate the greatness of the Pope himself.
One of these compositions, Li pastori tributarii alla cuna del Redentore, set to music by Giuseppe Pacieri, had a strange fate: in 1685, two years after its performance in Rome, with the new title "Musica alla vigilia del S.to Natale", it was performed in the Ducal Chapel in Wolfenbüttel. Thus the praises of Innocent XI, placed at the end of Pietro Giubilei's text (the libretto was printed for the occasion) were sung at a Lutheran court.
An exceptional witness to and commentator on the event was the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, whose interest in musical events and constant commitment to the cause of religious reconciliation between the different Christian churches in Germany are well known. It can be surmised that the 1685 performance was not at all accidental, being rather a sign of the desire for political renewal (if not a long-term plan) on the part of Prince Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, who had been appointed Regent to the Duchy that very year. An enquiry into the context of theological disputes concerning the reconciliation between the various churches on the one hand, and the alliances between the German principalities on the other, helps to make clear the singular importance of this episode. The performance of La Cuna del Redentore represents, therefore, an extraordinary event in the history of music at German Protestant courts, just as it does for the court of Wolfenbüttel itself, where the Prince's passion for opera was later to encourage other types of performances, thus making of his Duchy one of the centres most obviously influenced both by Italian and French art.