Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina: The Genius of Liturgical Music turns 500

Within the Church’s tradition is the perennial beauty of his sacred music

By ITV staff

Catholic composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594).

Nowhere on earth is the word “tradition” more venerated than in the bosom of the Catholic Church.

Signifying all that has been “handed down” to us from the Apostles and their successors through the ages, it forms the essence of our Faith and its practice.

There have always been protesters, reformers and innovators. Some of them have been saints; many have been misguided; not a few have been scoundrels.

Nevertheless, 2,000 years of accumulated wisdom and experience have tutored the Church in the sacred ways of raising the human spirit to God.

One of them is through music.

Music has always been thought of as carrying within it something of the divine. It is a work not of utility, but of beauty; and man instinctively knows that as such, it belongs in the realm of the sacred.

Tradition in the Church, therefore, is very much expressed in her sacred music.

And no one embodies the musical tradition of the Church more than the 16th-century Italian composer of sacred music, Giovanni Palestrina.

Readers who have attended Traditional Latin Masses may have encountered the music of Palestrina in the liturgy: it is a polyphonic chant of soaring beauty that all too few Catholics have ever even heard.

In the next few issues of Inside the Vatican, the celebrated conductor, composer and historian of liturgical music, Aurelio Porfiri, gathers experts in the life and work of Palestrina to celebrate the 500th birthday of the great master.