ANTONIO DRAGHI’s L’Humanità Redenta (Humanity Redeem’d) was written in 1669 for the private chapel of the Dowager Empress, Eleonora Gonzaga in Vienna’s Hofburg Palace. It is a Sepulcro: a drama performed in front of a representation of Christ’s tomb, following the reposition of the Host after Mass on Maundy Thursday, and on Good Friday. Its relatively small-scale — with six singers, who also acted as the chorus, strings and continuo — was dictated by the chapel’s limited space.
The three figures at the tomb are Joseph of Arimathaea, Nicodemus, and Simon of Cyrene, sung by bass Joseph Murphy, the tenor Oliver Doyle, and the countertenor Tristan Cooke, doubling as Humanità. One after the other, they lament Christ’s death and the ensuing darkness, their individual verses rounded off with a trio, “E morto il mio Dio. Estino e’l mio Nume”. La Speranza — Hope (Jessica Eucker) — then appears, offering the way to salvation. Enter Humanity, singing of her own fragility, to be reviled for her ingratitude for the gift of Christ’s love by the three in turn, with the refrain “A morir ingrata humanità” (To death ungrateful humanity), repeated four times. The Angel, a bright-voiced Camilla Seale, appears, offering salvation for those who shed cleansing tears of repentance. The six singers join in a final chorus telling those who mourn to rejoice that Christ’s cross has saved them.
Oliver Doyle directed a perfectly paced narrative, which moved along in a mixture of recitative and lilting, mainly triple-time, arias. The small, vaulted interior of Thomas Ford’s Holy Trinity, Rotherhithe, provided an intimate darkened setting for singers who sang with unshowy excellence and clearly audible Italian throughout, over an appropriately scaled-down continuo provided by a pair of theorbos.
The music looks back in style to Monteverdi, with sudden harmonic shifts and significant words extended, repeated, or emphasised with chromatic colouring. Draghi exploits the different ranges of the three male voices most attractively, contrasting them in extended passages of solo recitative before blending them in varied settings of their refrains. The arias are not display pieces, though the more florid passages were tackled with deceptive ease. Hope’s “Sperate mercé” was typical of an aria style that looked forward to the later Baroque, with soloist and strings alternating phrases and the instrumentalists rounding off the piece with the tune on their own.
This was the first performance since Maundy Thursday 1669. On this showing, the work deserves many others.
