The Cappella Giulia's 500th Anniversary 1513-2013

On 19 February 1513 Pope Julius II signed a papal bull in which he constituted the Cappella Giulia, the Choir of St Peter’s, which has been celebrating its 500th anniversary this year. The Vatican Post Office has released a special set of postcards (see images below) featuring some of the most famous of the Choir’s Magisters.

Ruggiero Giovanelli

Prior to 1512, musical arrangements at St Peter’s were very ad hoc, although from 1509 onwards there were signs of attempts to build up the music with a pool of musicians, of somewhat fluid membership, which provided cantors. Pope Julius II wanted a chapel in which the Divine Liturgy would be celebrated beautifully every day. His Cappella Giulia, which was to be his mausoleum, was intended to be part of the new basilica which was being built at the time. His uncle, Pope Sixtus IV, had built the Cappella di Palazzo, better known as the Sistine Chapel, and it was this which undoubtedly provided Pope Julius with the inspiration to build a new chapel with music to rival that of the Sistine.

At the beginning of 1513, Pope Julius was gravely ill. On 19 February, the day before he died, he signed the bull In altissimo militantis Ecclesiæ founding the choir of the Cappella Giulia and making provision in perpetuity for 12 boys and 12 men to sing in the chapel. Specifically, Italians were to be employed, as opposed to the largely French and Spanish musicians who worked in the Sistine. The Pope died the very next day and his mausoleum was never built. It would have been truly pharaonic, with Michelangelo’s Moses being just one of forty statues. In its place today is the Altar of the Chair. The first few years of the choir were turbulent times: there were financial difficulties in the first years, then the sack of Rome in 1527 followed by the reconstruction of the city, and then a plague.

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

In 1551, Palestrina was appointed as ‘Magister cantorum’ and he immediately increased the number of cantors in the choir. On his departure in 1554 to the Sistine Choir, Animuccia took over. Palestrina’s time at the Sistine was in fact short-lived as he and a number of the cantors there were asked to leave when the new Pope decided only to employ men in minor orders in the Chapel. As a married man, Palestrina was ineligible. Both Palestrina and Animuccia combined their duties with the Chiesa Nuova, the Roman Oratory, just as the current Magister, Fr Pierre Paul, does today.

Animuccia was a very prolific composer, however most of his huge output was lost in the 1700s when his scores were sold to a shopkeeper near St Peter’s to be used to wrap cheese, the music being considered passé. On Animuccia’s death in 1571, Palestrina returned to the Cappella Giulia where he remained until his own death in 1594. In 1979 the Cappella Giulia ceased for financial reasons, but was reinstated with women sopranos in May 2008.

Ernesto Boezi

In many ways the Cappella Giulia is musically more interesting than the Sistine Choir; whilst the Sistine had a relatively limited library of fixed repertoire, such as the famous Miserere by Allegri, the Magistri of the Cappella Giulia, who were all expected to compose, brought a stylistic diversity coming as they did from a range of different cities. There are over 4000 titles in the Cappella Giulia’s archives which were recently catalogued by Canon Dario Rezza. The entire history of the Cappella Giulia has been recorded in a vast and comprehensive book in two volumes, complete with facsimiles of many of the most important documents. The author, Giancarlo Rostirolla has spent 30 years researching this book which will be available early next year.

The 2013 celebrations began at Mass on the Feast of the Chair of St Peter, and throughout the year a number of choirs have been invited by Fr Pierre Paul to sing with the Cappella Giulia for Sunday Mass in the Basilica. My own choir, the Schola Cantorum of the London Oratory School was the first of these choirs and sang with the Cappella Giulia last February at both Mass and Vespers. The complete list of choirs which have sung this year is as follows:

24 February, Schola Cantorum of the London Oratory School, England

10 March, St. Anne Catholic Church Choir, Houston TX, USA

17 March, St. Gregory the Great Church, Chicago IL, USA

7 April, St. Michael Cathedral Boys Choir, Toronto, Canada

5 May, Tokai Male Choir, Nagoya, Japan

12 May, Choir of St. Vincent de Paul, Huntington Beach CA, USA

30 June, Les Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal, Montréal QC, Canada

7 July, Les Petits Chanteurs de Trois-Rivières, QC, Canada

14 July, Assisi Music Festival Choir, Summit NJ, USA

21 July, St. Colman’s Cathedral Choir, Cobh Co. Cork, Ireland

28 July, Osnabrücker Jugendchor, Germany

18 August, Choeur de la Cathédrale Primatiale de Lyon, France

15 September, Monterey Diocesan Choir, Monterey CA, USA

20 October, St. Andrew Camerata, Edinburgh, Scotland

3 November, Combined choirs of Immaculate Conception Church, Durham NC, USA and St. Mark Church, Wilmington NC, USA

10 November, Saint Andrew Catholic Church, Newtown PA, USA

17 November, Saint John Cantius Parish, Chicago IL, USA

Hanging on the wall of Fr Pierre's office at the Vatican in pride of place is this wonderful photograph of him meeting Pope Benedict XVI.

Choirs of sufficient standard who wish to sing at St Peter’s should contact Fr Pierre Paul directly. 

Jeffrey Tucker on: Fr. Paul and his St. Peter's Singers

This is a wonderful report in the Toronto Globe and Mail about Fr. Pierre Paul of Toronto, who is the director of music at St. Peter's in Rome.

Officially appointed in April (though he had already been on the job for a year), he brings fresh appeal to a choir grown tired and undisciplined in recent years. With a chuckle, one priest refers to the old group as the "St. Peter's Screechers," because they were prone to shouting.

Father Paul is attached to traditional music and is a reformer. He is a devotee of the official and pure Gregorian chant - the archconservative Pope Benedict XVI would have it no other way - and yet to get the right sound, he is using female singers at vespers on a regular basis for the first time in the choir's history.

The 45-minute performance is rousing. The 38 or so singers - priests, student priests and laymen along with the women, about two-thirds of them Italians, the rest from elsewhere in Europe and Latin America - have strong, full voices.

The small orchestra is flawless, testimony to Father Paul's insistence on regular practices. A minor miracle: Antonio Vivaldi's Magnificat goes off without a hitch, even though the orchestra had played it only once before.

The article continues to speak more about the issue of using women as singers, which does indeed depart from tradition in the Vatican but the departure is done for musical reasons. Nor is there is any theological issue associated with the change. St. Pius X had forbidden women to sing in scholas in his 1903 encyclical but Fr. Anthony Ruff's new book Sacred Music and Liturgical Reform demonstrates two very important points with regard to this prohibition.

1) The prohibition against women singers was completely ignored all over Europe and especially the United States. The encyclical itself had a huge impact on the Catholic world but for this narrow point. In fact, "indults" to depart from the letter of the law were being issued by the Pope personally just days after publication, and ever more leniency was in effect within a few years at the hands of legislative bodies overseeing the liturgy.

It was nowhere enforced, and one can tell that just by looking at pictures of chant classes conducted by Justine Ward in the United States: more than half the students were girls and women. Indeed, women were at the forefront of the movement. The tradition of women singing at Mass has always been integral to life in a convent, and there are extensive records of women singing polyphony in England. As for the Vatican itself, its practice of using only men and boys to sing reflected a long-standing tradition and not so much an adherence to doctrinal norms. Later, as is well known, Pius XII legislated in favor of permitting women to sing, legislation which didn't change the practice much either since the original edict had not had much effect in any case.

2) Fr. Ruff further demonstrates that the edict of Pius X had nothing to do with discrimination but rather stemmed from a widely held position of the Cecilian movement that the choir performed a clerical roll in the liturgy and hence it should share as closely as possible in the features of the clergy. The Cecilians believed that the singers should be men because the priesthood was limited to men; they further hoped that the vocation of schola member would be lifelong and that singers would, for example, under the ideal, receive tonsures.

And why did the Cecilians hold this view? They were responding in excess to what they saw as the pervasive low view of the choir's role as merely adding a soundtrack to liturgy. They hope to heighten the role of music to being part of the liturgical structure rather than merely an addendum to it. To push this idea further, they latched onto this idea of the clerical purpose of the singing and pushed it as far as it could go. In other words, this view stemmed from a strategic consideration fashioned into a plausible theological one.

Of course this view was later backed away from with another view that was similarly taken too far: the postconciliar view the schola is part of the people. This view led to the critical problem in modern times of viewing the choir and its parts as having no distinct role at all. Here Fr. Ruff is very strong in arguing the contrary case.

Fr. Ruff discusses this back-and-forth tendency to go from one extreme to the other while arguing that the real role of the choir does not have a literal analogy to any other role in liturgy apart from the most ancient view that the choir stands in proxy for the choirs of angels. The issue of women, then, has long proven to be a great distraction from this more substantive issue, and Fr. Paul is certainly to be commended for pushing progress here both in the direction of using the best musical forces available to him as well as fully embracing chant and the classical repertoire.