Cappella musicale pontificia

The Sistine Chapel Choir, as it is generally called in English, or officially the Coro della Cappella Musicale Pontificia Sistina in Italian, is the Pope's personal choir. It performs at papal functions in the Sistine Chapel and in any other church in Rome where the Pope is officiating, including St. Peter's Basilica. One of the oldest choirs in the world, it was constituted as the Pope's personal choir by Pope Sixtus IV (from whom both the choir and the chapel in which it performs take their names). Although it was established in the late 15th century, its roots go back to the 4th century and the reign of Pope Sylvester I. The choir's composition and numbers have fluctuated over the centuries. However, the modern choir comprises twenty men (tenors and basses) and thirty boys (sopranos and altos). The men's choir (Cantori) is composed of professional singers. The members of the boys choir (Pueri Cantores) are not paid when performing at papal functions, but receive a free education at their own school in Rome, known as the Schola Puerorum. Since the late 20th century, in addition to its papal duties, the choir has undertaken international tours, participated in radio and television broadcasts, and recorded for Deutsche Grammophon. Papal patronage of music, and especially singing, dates to the 4th century when, according to 9th-century written accounts, Pope Sylvester I constituted company of singers, under the name of schola cantorum. The schola was reorganized by Pope Gregory I during his reign (590–604). The purpose of the Gregorian schola was to teach both singing techniques and the existing plainsong repertory, which at the time was passed down by oral tradition. Under Pope Gregory the course of study was said to be nine years. When Innocent IV fled to Lyon in the 13th century, he provided for the schola's continuance in Rome by turning property over to it. When Pope Clement V moved the papacy from Rome to Avignon in 1309, he formed his own choir in Avignon. Gregory XI brought the papal court back to Rome in 1377 bringing with him his choir which consisted largely of French singers and amalgamated it with what was left of the old schola cantorum. Pope Sixtus IV, who reigned from 1471 to 1484, established the Cappella Musicale Pontificia as his permanent personal choir. It sang in the chapel of the Apostolic Palace which Sixtus had renovated to become his private chapel, originally called the Cappella Magna and later known as the Sistine Chapel. The choir was and remains all-male and sang without musical accompaniment (a cappella). It initially consisted of between 16 and 24 singers with the men singing the bass, tenor, and alto parts and pre-adolescent boys singing the soprano parts, although from the mid-16th century, adult castrato singers began to replace the boy singers. The choir was to become the most important center of Roman music. Josquin des Prez, one of the greatest composers of the Renaissance, served as its composer and directed the choir from 1486 to 1494. In April 1545, the members of the choir sent a delegation to the choir's maestro di cappella at the time, Ludovico Magnasco, petitioning for a new constitution. It was argued that new constitution was needed because all previous copies had been destroyed in the 1527 sack of Rome. Written largely "from memory" with a few additions, it was completed on 17 November 1545. Five years later, the singers rebelled against Magnasco and appealed to Pope Julius III. They accused him of appointing singers without papal permission and without an audition. The most egregious of such appointments was Ottavio Gemelli who was later suspended for thievery. They also complained that Magnasco held back the salaries of several singers without justification and prohibited others from even entering the Sistine Chapel. In November 1550, Julius III ousted Magnansco as maestro di cappella and replaced him with Girolamo Maccabei. Julius III was also keen to reduce the size of the choir which had been bloated by the patronage system and contained many members who were singers in name only. In an undated motu proprio c.1553, he decreed that no new singers would be taken on until the choir was reduced by attrition to 24 members, after which new members were required to pass a strict audition. However, Julius III defied his own reforms when in January 1555, he appointed his favourite composer, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, to the choir without an audition. Palestrina's time in the choir, which he also conducted, was cut short when the austere Paul IV ascended to the papacy. In a motu proprio promulgated on 30 July 1555, he decreed that married men could no longer be members of the choir. Palestrina and two other married singers, Domenico Ferrabosco, and Leonardo Barré, were dismissed with pensions. Nevertheless, according to musicologist Richard Sherr, Palestrina "more than any other composer was to personify music in the Sistine Chapel." Like his predecessors and his successor, Magnansco was a high-ranking cleric and not a musician. He had been the Bishop of Castro del Lazio and was the Bishop of Assisi from 1543. The situation changed in 1586 when Pope Sixtus V issued a Papal bull which reorganized the choir's structure and finances. It established the College of Singers as a legal entity, required that the maestro di cappella be a singer elected by his peers, and entrusted the secular welfare of the choir to a "cardinal protector". During their first trip to Italy, the 14-year-old Mozart and his father Leopold arrived in Rome on 11 April 1770. It was Holy Week, and that evening they attended a performance of Allegri's Miserere in the Sistine Chapel. Allegri, who had been a singer in the Sistine Chapel Choir, had composed the piece in 1638. A complex nine-part choral work, the Allegri Miserere was considered one of the choir's most famous pieces and was performed during the Tenebrae service on the Wednesday and Friday of every Holy Week. The score was closely guarded, and its publication was forbidden by the choir on pain of excommunication, although Emperor Leopold I, King John V of Portugal, and the composer Giovanni Battista Martini were known to have authorized copies. According to multiple biographies of Mozart and based largely on accounts by his father, the young Mozart wrote down the score from memory after hearing it at the 11 April performance. He later declaimed it to one of the choir's singers who recognized it immediately, a feat which caused a sensation at the time. The Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th century almost led to the disintegration of the choir. The armies of the Papal states were defeated by the French forces who occupied Rome and placed the Pope under house arrest. Travel to Italy, especially for those from the countries at war with Napoleon, became difficult. The number of foreign visitors who once flocked to Rome to hear the choir in the 18th century drastically declined. Following Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo and the renewed interest in Italian history and culture fueled by the writers of the Romantic Era, foreign travelers returned to Rome, and hearing a performance by the choir, especially during Holy Week, was considered on important stop on their tour. The composer and bass singer, Giuseppe Baini, was admitted to the choir in 1795 and unanimously elected as its director in 1818, a position he held until his death in 1844. In 1828, he published an influential two-volume treatise on the life and works of Palestrina, one of the choir's most famous composers. According to music historian Richard Boursy, the book enhanced not only the reputation of Palestrina but also that of Baini and the choir itself, adding to the mystique it still held in the first half of the 19th century. Following Baini's death the choir remained without a permanent director ("perpetual director" in the choir's terminology) for over 30 years. The revolutions of 1848 in the Italian states and the