“And his sweat was as it were great drops of blood”
The Relationship between Music and Bible Text in Biber’s sixth Rosary Sonata
Vasiliki Papadopoulou
Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s sixth Rosary Sonata is imbued with the affect of pain, grief and fear, in the context of Christ’s situation at the Mount of Olives. The present contribution is the first one to deal with the piece in the light of the textual tradition of the Gospel of Luke. It is also noteworthy that Biber deploys a great variety of musical means for the semantic transposition of the homogeneous affective situation. The piece can therefore be held as a dense compendium of the possibilities of musical realisation of painful affects, which will be identified and analysed in the text.
