Divine Love, Death, and Penance in Giovanni Bononcini’s La Conversione di Maddalena

At the end of the seventeenth century, the focus of the Italian oratorio turned toward divine love and the exploration of saints’ longings for intimate communion with God and Christ. As desires for increased devotionality, these expressions were nevertheless replete with erotic undertones. In coetaneous mystic literature and iconography, erotic, celestial rapture was the epitome of the divine love’s potential influence. The coalescence of these themes was central in the oratorios of Giovanni Bononcini and his contemporaries, where saints’ eagerness for death and subsequent envelopment in divine love became synonymous with their pining for religious ecstasy.
In this essay I examine divergent treatments of divine love and its associations with eroticism and death in two oratorios: Bononcini’s La conversione di Maddalena (Vienna, 1701), and Alessandro Scarlatti’s Il martirio di Santa Teodosia (Modena, 1685, and Florence, 1693). Both oratorios feature divine love as a central theme, yet while Scarlatti’s musical treatment of his main character, the martyr Teodosia, reflects the amalgamation of divine love, death, and eroticism that is also prevalent in other contemporaneous oratorios, as well as in Counter-Reformation literary and visual culture, Bononcini’s treatment of his principal character, Maddalena, does not. Through an analysis of the construction of his two main characters, Maddalena and her sister, Marta, I explore how Bononcini skillfully utilized musical affect in order to circumvent the cultural recognition of divine love’s potential eroticism and instead construct an image of the Maddalena that de-emphasized her sexuality in favor of her contrite repentance.