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…
Two hundred fifty years ago, on February 26, 1770, “following a gangrene that developed in one foot,” the one who at the end of his career was called the “first violin-player in Europe” and “master of the nations” died in Padua (P. Petrobelli, Giuseppe Tartini — Le fonti biografiche, Universal Edition 1968, p. 13-14): Italian…
If he lived today, would Mozart have composed a cantata like Davide penitente (The Penitent David), K. 469? Performed successfully for the first time on March 13, 1785 in Vienna’s Burgtheater, it was soon forgotten. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was asked by the Vienna Musicians’ Society (Wiener Tonkünstler-Societät), a pension fund founded in 1771 to…
A theological dispute between Catholic and Protestant students in a tavern in Wittenberg? It happens in the second scene of the German opera Doktor Faust by Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924), complex figure of German-Italian musician, pianist, composer, and writer, “the most extraordinary performer that piano literature has had” (G. Cattaneo, Esperienze intellettuali del primo Novecento, Mondadori…
On January 30, with the first assembly in Frankfurt, the “Synodal Path” of the German Catholic Church reform begins — a “journey” without the observance of canonical regulations that a real synod would require. During the next two years, the 230 members, including 69 bishops and 69 lay persons (progressive) of the Central Committee of…
