Convent Music and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Vienna by Janet K. Page (review)

Serious and sustained research on nuns and music in the early modern period began in earnest in the mid-1990s with the publication of two ground-breaking books: Craig A. Monson’s Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1995) and Robert L. Kendrick’s Celestial Sirens: Nuns and their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford, 1996). Those monographs set the standard in the field and inspired subsequent investigations of seventeenth-century convent music in other Italian cities as well as in Spain and New Spain. Relatively little scholarship, however, has been directed at the activities of holy women in German-speaking lands, perhaps because the Reformation had such a devastating effect on convents in those regions. Janet Page’s new monograph on the nunneries of Vienna during the period of their revival in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is thus significant because it broadens the geographical sphere and widens the time period of current literature on monastic musical culture.

Page has organized the volume by topic, although she also follows a rough chronological trajectory. The book begins with an overview of the rites that were so important to women embracing the monastic life—those associated with entering the cloister, taking on the clothes of a novice, and professing dedication to the monastic life. In chapter 2, Page examines the works of Maria Anna von Raschenau, the only female monastic composer in Vienna whose music appears to have survived; the following chapter looks at the music of Raschenau’s male contemporary, Carlo Agostino Badia, written for a sister convent, St Ursula. Paraliturgical entertainments and music for Holy Week form the subjects of chapters 4 and 5 respectively, and chapter 6 traces the gradual decline and decay of music in the convents of Vienna, which led to their eventual dissolution at the end of the eighteenth century.

The author identifies two characteristics that distinguished monastic culture in Vienna from that found elsewhere in Europe. First of all, since fewer women in the imperial capital were forced to accept the cloister as their destiny, the number of convents (seven) and the population of nuns (c.400) were relatively small compared to, for example, contemporary Italian urban centres. The second and perhaps most important feature was the lively Habsburg interest in and support of those convents. As Page shows, the roots of that close relationship went back to the very foundation of at least five houses by or for Habsburg empresses. Nuns’ musical performances were intended to embody imperial religious devotion and to glorify the family’s rule. Because the emperor was the ultimate authority on what went on in the female monastic institutions of his city, the positive attitude towards music-making emanating from the royal family resulted in a golden age of composition for and performances by nuns c.1660–1710. What is more, the tradition of presenting the emperor with copies of the music performed during his visits to nunneries and preservation of those scores in the imperial collection has given Page access to a great deal of music associated with Vienna’s holy women.

Through an examination of various ceremonies, rites, and genres, the author traces the interaction of music and piety in Habsburg politics. The Habsburgs called attention to their own religious virtue by erasing the borders between the convent and the court. Clothing ceremonies, for example, resembled the weddings of ladies-in-waiting: a noble girl who was to enter the cloister wore the empress’s jewels and was transported to the convent in the imperial carriage. The emperor and his family were present in the role of parents and the trumpets and timpani of the imperial chapel performed, sometimes alone and sometimes as accompaniment to the voices of the cloistered nuns (whose members could include female basses). As Page emphasizes in her chapter on music at St Ursula, Viennese...