Musical-Rhetorical Prosopopoeia and the Animation of the Dead in Seventeenth-Century German Funeral Music

Abstract

Personification was already recognized as an effective oratorical trope during rhetoric's formative years ancient Greece and Rome, and judging from Baroque rhetoric manuals, it had lost none of its persuasive force by the seventeenth century. In the Triumphus Bibliorum Sacrorum of 1625, Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588-1638), rhetorician, composer and champion of Calvinism, observes that prosopopoeia, in serious matters, for instance admonitions and vehement reproaches, is a remarkable figure (Alsted 1625: 9. 9. 483).' Johann Matthaus Meyfart (1590-1642), his Teutsche Rhetorica oder Redekunst of 1634, illustrates his definition of prosopopoeia with an example taken from the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium where the dead Lucius Brutus is invested with the ability to speak (Meyfart 1634: 1: 387). Fortyeight years later, the same example, this time the original Latin, is used to illustrate the definition of prosopopoeia given the Compendium Rhetorices of 1682 by Christoph Kaldenbach (1613-98), who at that time was active as a composer and as a professor of rhetoric at the University Tubingen (Kaldenbach 1682/1709: 137). Prosopopoeia thrived what Ferdinand van Ingen refers to as the Augenkultur (visual culture) of Baroque Germany (van Ingen 1966: 299). In his book Vanitas und Memento Mon der deutschen Barocklyrik, van Ingen examines the literary and visual arts their capacity to provide a representational nexus between the here and now and the hereafter. In the visual arts this union was achieved with dramatic effect through the realistic depiction of celestial scenes paintings typically found Baroque churches and chapels. In the ceiling frescoes particular, the eye is often beguiled by the artist's skilful handling of colour and perspective as architectural lines of the church are extended into the painting itself. Consequently, and powerful visual terms, the church becomes the median a continuum that reaches from the congregation of worshipers to the portals of Paradise. The paintings, serving more than a purely decorative function, part provided the contemplative Christian with visual stimuli to stir the imagination towards sublime thoughts of liberation and salvation, resurrection and eternal life. In the literary arts a similar effect was achieved through prosopopoeia, evoking comparable prophetic images the minds of the listeners. When personifying the dead the context of the seventeenth-century funeral ceremony, the pastor was not speaking his own behalf, but rather was acting the capacity of a medium transmitting to the congregation consolatory and admonitory messages from beyond the grave. The clearer, the more vivid the images set forth by the orator, the easier it was for him to move the affections of the audience. The success of prosopopoeia was the result of allowing rhetorical persuasion to take place simultaneously on logical, ethical and pathetic levels - the three Aristotelian means of persuasion (Rhetoric 3. I).2 Through the prosopopoeial evocation of the dead, the rhetor donned the persona of the deceased, speaking as though he were fact the deceased. In so doing, the implied premises are laid out for an effective quasi-syllogistic argument or enthymeme. Though untenable terms of strict syllogism, his rhetorical argument was logically sound nonetheless. It thus follows that if the personified voice of the deceased was actually heard to profess the reality of resurrection and the existence of eternal life, one could only deduce from the premises that the testimony must be true. By adopting the identity of the deceased the writing and delivery of a funeral sermon, the pastor as rhetor was able to strengthen the ethical side of the oration, that is, to enhance his own character the eyes of the congregation. Through animating the dead, the pastor would immediately become associated with the deceased (Rhetoric 3. …