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Scholarly edition of Antonio Bertali's Sacred Dramatic works.

The oratorio La strage degl'Innocenti (1665) and the sepolcro Il Pentimento, l'Amore verso Dio, con il Pianto delle Marie, et de Peccatori (1661) are only surviving sacred dramatic works by the little-known composer Antonio Bertali. Born in or near Verona in c1605, Bertali moved to Vienna in 1624, where in 1649 he became imperial chapel master. Testimonies by his contemporaries and the wide dissemination of his works throughout Europe bear witness to his great popularity as a composer during the seventeenth century. Together the two works represent the composer's mature style which excels in technical skill, rhetorical ingenuity, and musical coherence. The libretto of La strage degl'Innocenti is loosely based on an epic poem by Giambattista Marino with the same title. Il Pentimento is an example of a sepolcro, a typically Viennese sub-genre of the oratorio, which flourished at the imperial court between c1660 and 1705. As in many other Viennese churches, replicas of the Holy Sepulchre were erected in the Hofburgkapelle and the chapel of empress dowager Eleonora during Holy Week. There they served as backdrop for the semi-staged sepolcro performances. As important documents of Austrian music history, the sacred dramatic works by Antonio Bertali are published in the world’s oldest still running Monumenta series, the Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich – DTÖ, established by Guido Adler in 1893. The edition includes an extensive preface, elucidating the context of the works as well as issues of performance practice. A critical commentary contains codicological and rastrological descriptions of the sources now held in the Austrian National Library in Vienna.