When introducing the instrumental works of a composer to a musically untrained audience, a bit of trepidation naturally sets in. Tastes in music are often entrenched and become even more so where instrumental music is concerned. People are naturally more responsive to the sound of the human voice in music, while the modern era of…
A late romantic, restless, and sentimental Russian composer, was born 180 years ago, on May 7, 1840, at Votkinsk, a town in Russia’s Ural Mountains: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893). He studied composition, we read in the biography, at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Anton Rubinstein, pianist and composer attached to German Romanticism. After earning his…
Twenty twenty is the 640th year since the death, on April 29, and the 50th since the proclamation as Doctor of the Church, on October 4, of a woman who played a primary role in the Church of her time: St. Catherine of Siena (1347–1380). How can we fail to be filled with wonder at…
On April 11, 250 years ago, on Holy Wednesday, when the Eternal City is the most crowded with pilgrims and visitors, attracted by the papal liturgy of Holy Week and Easter, that musical genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, fourteen years old, and his father Leopold, a good musician, arrive in Rome. The young Amadè — as…
I wanted to learn how to chant. Those inky little square notes zigzagging across the four-line staff were as exciting to me as the markings on a pirate treasure map. My first attempts were in large scholas in which experienced chanters guided the whole group the same way foreign guides shepherd timid tourists: they know…
On the night between March 26 and 27, 250 years ago, the great painter, interpreter of the splendors of the Venetian aristocracy, died suddenly: Giambattista Tiepolo (1696–1770). While the Vatican Post Office celebrates him with a stamp, we approach the greatest artist of the eighteenth-century Venetian painting in our usual way: through passion for music.…
This year marks the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio, 1483–1520), the painter who left us a vast legacy of inestimable beauty and grace. This outstanding artist died, “having sunk under continuous acute fever which carried him off in eight days” — as Alfonso Paolucci sadly writes in Rome to Alfonso…
There is a select group of composers who seemed to anticipate and ultimately embody John Paul II’s Letter to Artists, somehow also achieving great international prominence and influence despite their industry’s general hostility to all things Christian. They prove that a vital Christian musical art was possible even in the age where most subscribed to…
This year — traditionally, he was born on March 15, 270 — marks the 1,750th anniversary of the birth of the bishop of Myra in modern-day Turkey, whose relics have been resting in Bari since 1087, equally venerated for his holiness and his intercession to God both in the Greek and Slavic East and in…
Those looking for an incredible upcoming musical experience that is also safe and edifying for the entire family should look here. Now I give you the background story of how this vital collaboration came about. Conversations I have had in recent years with fellow artists and musicians have often come back to a single topic:…
Two hundred and ten years ago, on March 2, 1810, Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci, who would remain in the memory of the Church as the great pope of the “social question,” was born in Carpineto Romano, south of Rome — Leo XIII (1810–1903). The wisdom and foresight of this supreme pontiff was well underlined by Benedict…
