palestrina

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina The greatest composer of liturgical music of all time, born at Palestrina (ancient Praeneste) in 1514 or 1515, according to Baini, Riemann, and others, according to Haberl, in 1526; died at Rome, 2 February, 1594. His early history is practically unknown. Giusseppi Ottavia Pittoni (1657-1743), in "notizie dei maestri di cappella si di Rome che altramontani", 1600-1700", a manuscript in the Vatican, relates that young Pierluigi sang in the streets of Rome while offering for sale …

…lies not so much in his unprecedented gifts of mind and heart, his creative and constructive powers, as in the fact that he made them the medium for the expression in tones of the state of his own soul, which, trained and formed by St. Philip, was attuned to and felt with the Church. His creations will for all time stand forth as the musical embodiment of the spirit of the counter-reformation, the triumphant Church.