Heinrich Schütz
Historia der Geburt Jesu Christi
(Historia of the birth of Jesus Christ)
with Intermedia by A. Hammerschmidt, S. Otto, and J. G. Carl

Giovanni Battista Pederzuoli (?–1692)
Trialogo nel natale del Signore
(Trialogue on the Birth of the Lord)

In the seventeenth century, opera was not to be performed during Advent and Lent, neither in Protestant Saxony nor in Catholic Austria, but the courts in Dresden and Vienna worked around this prohibition. In 1664, Elector John George II of Saxony commissioned his court composer Heinrich Schütz to set the Nativity story in the “Italian dramatic recitative style.” Schütz, who had written the first German opera Dafne (now lost), responded with his joyful Weihnachtshistorie or Historia der Geburt Jesu. Around the same time, in Austria, the celebrated opera composer Giovanni Battista Pederzuoli, Kapellmeister of Dowager Empress Eleonora, rescued the Viennese court from operatic fasting with his delightful Trialogo nel Natale del Signore, an allegorical celebration of Christmas.

Corresponding Lecture for the Houston Seminar