By Luca Della Libera
On 1 June 2024, at the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, a dream of mine came true: the first performance in modern times of pieces from my edition of sacred music by Alessandro Melani (Alessandro Melani, Music for the Pauline Chapel of Santa Maria Maggiore, Collegium Musicum: Yale University, vol. 22; A-R Editions, 2017). The point was not scholarly reconstruction but intense musical delectation; the audience was astonished by the impressive beauty of the music and interpretation. The concert was organized by Roma Barocca in Musica, chaired by Régis Nacfaire de Saint Paulet, and by Roma Festival Barocco, with Michele Gasbarro as artistic director, under the aegis of the French Embassy to the Holy See and the Belgian Embassy, and thanks to the generous generosity of Madame Aline Floriel-Destezet, a patron of La Scala and other important Italian cultural institutions.
The success of the event is due to the competence and passion of conductor Leonardo García Alarcón and to the extraordinary performers of the Namur Chamber Choir and Cappella Mediterranea, composed of various instrumentalists and the voices of Mariana Flores, Alice Borciani, David Sagastume, and Matteo Bellotto.
From the monumental nave of San Luigi dei Francesi—on whose altar a magnificent baroque-style backdrop, designed by Philippe Casanova (b. 1965), was set up—and in the fairytale light of hundreds of candles, the ensemble opened the concert by processing toward the altar while intoning the beginning of Melani’s Salve regina a nove voci. The same piece was reprised at the end of the concert as an encore.
The atmosphere immediately became rarefied, leading the listeners through time. After the performers took their places in front of the scenic backdrop, they continued with Melani’s setting of the Litanie per la Beata Vergine, nicknamed Le Pasquine. This title is Melani’s explicit tribute to the great Bernardo Pasquini, organist in both the Liberian and Pauline Chapels. Both the Salve regina and the Pasquine immediately created a celestial, impalpable atmosphere; the Litanie in particular delicately alternates between assertive sections listing Mary’s virtues and passionate prayers for her protection as it leads up to the final invocation of her intercession.
Next came a celebratory setting of the Regina coeli, featuring a dialogue between two solo sopranos—one singing from the pulpit, the other from the altar—with whom the two choirs occasionally join in homophony. This configuration created a particularly high temperature of rapt involvement in the audience.
The most impressive portion of the concert was the still-unpublished Messa Cellesa, which I transcribed from an autograph manuscript preserved in the Library of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome. It probably was composed in memory of Lucrezia Cellesi, wife of Camillo Rospigliosi and sister-in-law of Pope Clement IX, who died in 1668. The Messa Cellesa is a majestic work featuring four four-part choirs, evoking the polychoral style popular in early seventeenth-century Venice that later landed in Rome. The arrangement of the choirs in different parts of the room enhanced the stereophonic effect of the sound. But what emerged most of all from the performance of this piece is Melani’s compositional finesse: he stands out among Roman composers of his time by skillfully combining older polyphonic frameworks with a highly evolved and innovative harmonic language. Even as certain melodic ideas returned cyclically throughout the mass in typical Renaissance fashion, the bold harmonic language and rich timbral color of newer styles came together to highlight the overarching rhetoric of the work, illuminating a standard liturgical text in new ways.
The exquisite work of Leonardo Garcia Alarcón and the ensembles produced memorable results. The audience, made up of enthusiasts who understood and appreciated the program, reciprocated the performers’ efforts with long, enthusiastic applause. At the end of the concert, both the audience and the musicians declared themselves enthusiastic about discovering the sacred music of Alessandro Melani, which none of them had ever sung before. While preparation for this concert was in progress, I had the opportunity to converse with Alarcón about Melani’s music; a video of this interview will soon be published on the Cappella Mediterranea web page. Alarcón hopes to record this repertoire in the future; this would represent the most logical conclusion of a project that has been a significant part of my life for some ten years, as well as the best possible outcome for those who, like me, have worked for years to publish critical editions.
Luca Della Libera, born in Milan in 1961, completed his music studies in Rome, where he graduated in flute at the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia and in music history at the University La Sapienza with Pierluigi Petrobelli. He defended his dissertation at the University of Rome Tor Vergata in “co-tutelle” with the University of Mainz. In 2022 he published The Roman Sacred Music of Alessandro Scarlatti (Routledge, 2022). He is tenured professor of History of Music at the Conservatory of Frosinone and has published various volumes of critical editions of the sacred music of Alessandro Scarlatti and Alessandro Melani. In 2022 he published a critical edition of Alessandro Melani’s L’empio punito (A-R Editions). He has been invited to give papers and lectures at many American and European universities, including Princeton, Harvard, Davis, Stanford, Bloomington, Chicago, New York, Manchester, Birmingham, Paris, Lisbon, Berlin, Mainz, Bremen, Weimar, and Vienna.
