St Mel's Roman Holiday

This year, the St Mel music ministry will be participating in the 2009 International Church Music Festival in Rome, Italy.

One of the pieces we will be performing is the Messa di Gloria by Puccini. During rehearsal, I was struck by the beauty of this work and decided to do some research about it. Here's what I found from the Istanbul European Choir homepage:

"Puccini's Messa di Gloria
Though Giacomo Puccini is famous for his contribution to the world of opera through such works as La Boheme, Tosca, Madame Butterfly and Turandot, he actually began his musical career playing and composing church music. The son of a well known composer and organist, he followed the family tradition, becoming organist of San Martino in Lucca, Italy, at the age of 14.

As his musical studies progressed, it was clear that young Giacomo had leanings towards operatic writing and possessed the talent to become one of the world's greatest operatic composers - one need look no further than the Messa di Gloria itself for evidence of such promise!. Puccini himself wrote: "the Almighty touched me with his little finger and said, 'Write for the theatre - mind, only for the theatre!'"

It is probably due to Puccini's preoccupation with opera that the Messa di Gloria remained unperformed for a further 72 years after its first performance, in spite of its undoubted quality and the rapturous critical reception it had first received. The manuscript remained undiscovered until 1952 when Catholic priest and musicologist, Father Dante del Fiorentino unearthed it while researching in Lucca for a new biography of Puccini.

Puccini's Mass for Four Voices and Orchestra, as it was originally known - probably derives its Messa di Gloria designation from the importance this setting gives to its wonderful second movement, the Gloria, which accounts for almost half the performance time of the whole work. Written as his graduation thesis from the Institute Musicale of Lucca, Italy when he was only 22 years of age, the Messa di Gloria is an unmistakably youthful work, but shows a mature grasp of musical conventions.

It prefigures many of Puccini's operas in the lyrical freshness of its themes, its sense of drama and the range of its expression. Four years earlier, in 1876, he had demonstrated his mastery of the orchestra in his Preludio Sinfonico; in the Messa di Gloria he combined this flair for orchestration with a similar command of vocal writing in a style which opera aficionados will recognise as unmistakable Puccini."

Choral director, Francesco Alleruzzo, plans on having the choir sing the Messa di Gloria at a summer concert for the community on Saturday, June 6, 2009 at St Mel Church) in Woodland Hills.