By Jonathan R. J. Drennan

Requiems by Giovanni Croce and Giovanni Rovetta: The Requiem Mass at St. Mark’s, Venice, in the Seventeenth Century (B238) is the inaugural entry in The Requiem Mass at St. Mark’s, a three-part anthology that explores the high (or sung) requiem mass at St. Mark’s, Venice, over the course of four centuries, from the late sixteenth to the last decade of the nineteenth. The anthology, which represents the first-ever attempt to make critical editions of the requiem masses composed by musicians at St. Mark’s, includes abundant new research. There are various objectives here; primarily, I endeavor to tell the story of the Requiem, but the “package,” taken as a whole, serves to provide an engaging musical-cum-liturgical-cum-historical story of St. Mark’s and, ultimately, Venice.

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