Drammatizzazioni devozionali del Venerdì santo a Milano in età post-tridentina: la processione con Misteri dei Barnabiti

My Thesis concentrates on the processione dei misteri organized by Carlo Bascapàƒ¨, superior general of the Barnabites, in Milan on the night of Good Friday since 1587. The Archivio Storico of Barnabites (Milan) contains several documents that are evidence of this important rite and represent the sources of this research. This processione was a huge public meditation in which music played a primary role. The aim of my writing is first to account for the dramatic and devotional reasons of the processione, then to investigate the significant meaning that the music would have had in the rite itself. In the first chapter I introduce Carlo Bascapàƒ¨ (1550-1615) emphasizing his historical constitutive experiences, that means presenting the city of Milan during Saint Carlo Borromeo and the Clerics Regular Order of Saint Paul. In the second I investigate the devotional roots under the processione, the concepts of devotion and oration, and I focus on the role of the music in relation to the religious experience of Barnabites and in particularly of Carlo Bascapàƒ¨. In the third I concentrate on the main representation and meditation mode of the Christ Passion. In the fourth chapter I reconstruct the different aspects of the processione and its protagonists (religious people, Milan noblemen, musicians) through the reading of sources and deepening the late sixteenth devotional literature, and lastly I underline the devotional and dramatic features. In the fifth chapter I analyze the survivor sheets music concluding that every musical detail would have been conceived in order to respect two different aspects of the processione: on the one side, the Passion Drama and, on the other side, the believersࢠidentification. The last part of the thesis consists in the transcriptions of the archive documents.