La Cappella Giulia 1513-2013

One of the major institutions of sacred music, the Cappella Giulia at St. Peter's Basilica, can look back on a five-hundred-year history. Now Giancarlo Rostirolla brings this turbulent and spellbinding history to life using original documents from the Papal Library and the chapter archives of Saint Peter in the Vatican.

The Cappella Giulia was founded by Pope Julius II in 1513. Its chapel masters were the most important representatives of Roman vocal polyphony, above all Giovanni Animuccia and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Francesco Soriano, Virgilio Mazzocchi, Orazio Benevoli, Paolo Lorenzani and Pietro Bencini. Also employed there were such opera composers as Domenico Scarlatti, Niccolò Jommelli and Nicola Zingarelli, the proponents of Italian Cecilianism up to Armando Renzi, and such renowned organists as Girolamo Frescobaldi.

In this documentary history, as comprehensive as it is exciting to read, Giancarlo Rostirolla pays tribute to the Cappella Giulia as a musical institution of extraordinary historical importance and the vehicle for half a millennium of sacred music. For decades the author, an internationally acclaimed authority on Rome's musical traditions, has immersed himself like few others in the church and chapel archives, libraries and music collections of the Eternal City.

– For the first time these two volumes explore the history of the Cappella Giulia with information on all the musicians known to have worked there, together with their biographies, lists of compositions and documents on the chapel's history.