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Poets praise her as the patron of music and musicians, Catholics revere her for her harrowing martyrdom, and one of Rome's loveliest churches, Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, is dedicated to her. Built over the site where her house once stood, the church contains her tomb, marked by an exquisite statue. But St. Cecilia hasn't always rested in peace--her body has been buried, exhumed, moved and re-buried at least three times. Cecilia herself is a haunting, almost fairy-tale figure whose story is a marvelous Roman mix of facts and fables, religion and romance.

No one can agree on even the most basic aspects of Cecilia's biography. The sixth-century "Passion of St. Cecilia" gives a spirited account of her life and death so full of detail and dramatic dialogue that it reads like an adventure novel, but offers no clue to when she lived. We should be able to fix the time from the mention of the part played in her life by Pope Urban I (222-230), but modern scholars assert that the anonymous author of Cecilia's life introduced the pope-saint into his story to add authenticity to his largely legendary narrative. Some writers claim Cecilia was martyred during the reign of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, who died in 180 AD, or his son Commodus (died 192), while others place her martyrdom in the time of Alexander Severus (222-235) or Decius (249-51), or perhaps as late as the last major persecution of Christians, by the emperor Diocletian, in the early 300s. The only sure evidence is the position of her original tomb, in the Catacombs of St. Callixtus, on the Via Appia Antica near the southern outskirts of Rome, close to the very ancient Crypt of the Popes. The earliest portions of the catacomb date from the late second century, and from that time to the middle of the third century is the most likely period for St. Cecilia's life and death.

According the "Passion of St. Cecilia," the future saint was born into a noble family in Rome and became a Christian early in her life. Nevertheless, her family arranged for her to marry a pagan nobleman named Valerian, a union she agreed to unwillingly, because she had vowed her virginity to God. (The association of Cecilia with music, and specifically with the organ, comes from a line in her "Passion" which describes Cecilia at her wedding feast: "cantantibus organis in corde suo soli domino decantabat." This means she sang a song to God alone in her heart--in which she asked divine help in preserving her chastity--but a mis-reading gave us the persistent legend that Cecilia was a musician and organ-player.)

After the wedding the couple retired to their bedroom, where Cecilia told Valerian of her vow and asked him to respect it. She added that an angel guarded her virginity. When Valerian expressed a wish to see the angel, Cecilia sent him out to the third milestone on the via Appia, where he instead encountered the Bishop of Rome, Pope Urban I, who converted and baptized him. He returned to his wife a committed Christian and the angel obligingly appeared to both of them. Valerian then attempted to convert his brother, Tibertius. When Tibertius, struggling with Christian ideas, asked his brother if he was dreaming or if it was possible that such things as salvation and eternal life were really true, Valerian replied: "We have dreamed all our lives, brother. Now we have awakened to the truth!" Valerian's zeal won over his brother and the two men became active in the early Christian community of Rome. This brought them to the attention of the city prefect, Turcius Almachius, who condemned both of them to death, but the officer appointed to execute them, named Maximus, was himself converted and suffered martyrdom along with the two brothers. The widowed Cecilia buried their remains in a single tomb.

The "Passion" narrative now returns to Cecilia's story, noting that her burial of the three martyred men led to her arrest and condemnation to death by Turcius Almachius. He ordered her to be suffocated in the "sudarium," or sweat-room, of the bath-house located in her own residence. The authorities made every effort to turn the room into an execution chamber, sealing off the vent in the roof and heating all the furnaces to the limit. When no sound came from the room the next day, the executioners were convinced their work was done--no one could survive such heat--but when they opened the door they found Cecilia not only alive but fresh and radiant, kneeling in prayer without so much as a bead of sweat on her forehead.

Outraged, Turcius Almachius ordered Cecilia beheaded. The executioner summoned to the site approached his victim reluctantly--he had heard about her survival in the steam. But he had his orders and he struck three times, the maximum number of strokes allowed by Roman law. When he did not succeed in severing the girl's slender neck he fled in terror and left Cecilia lying on the bloody floor. She survived three days, never moving from the spot where she had fallen under the blows of the axe. During that time, the "Passion" tells us, she prayed and taught, offered encouragement to her fellow Christians, left her possessions to the poor and indicated that her house should be dedicated as a church. After her death, which is said to have occurred on November 22, Pope Urban buried her in a tomb in the Catacombs of St. Callixtus.

Dramatic and appealing as the story is, even Catholic historians agree that most of it is legend. The Catholic Encyclopedia calls it a "pious romance." The Italian authors of a recent book on the cult of St. Cecilia, published by the Centro di Spiritualità Liturgica in Rome, declare that the story is "without any solid evidence of authenticity" and assert that there is no historical connection between Cecilia and the three male martyrs so closely associated with her in the "Passion" narrative. But modern rationality did not impede the spread of Cecilia's fame in the early centuries of Christianity and on into the medieval and Renaissance eras. By the fourth century her feast day of November 22 was being celebrated in Rome. In the seventh century the "Itineraria," or guide books to the sacred places of Rome, mention the tomb of Cecilia in the Catacombs of St. Callixtus and there were once nearly a dozen Roman churches dedicated to her. The celebrated monastery of Montserrat, in northern Spain, founded in the ninth century, had Cecilia as its original patron saint and in France the tenth-century cathedral of Albi was dedicated to her, as was the first cathedral in Cologne, Germany. In 1560 Cecilia became the patron saint of music and in Rome in 1584 Alessandro Marino founded the Confraternity of St. Cecilia, an association of Roman musicians.

The only surviving church in Rome dedicated to Cecilia is her beautiful basilica in the eastern sector of Trastevere, built over the site of the saint's house. Apparently the home was adapted for use as a church in the fifth century, but today no trace of that structure remains above ground. The present church of Santa Cecilia owes its existence to Pope Paschal I, who in 821 located the tomb of Cecilia in the Catacombs of St. and had the saint's body "translated" (moved) from there to the church in Trastevere, which he re-built in her honor. According to Paschal's own account, visions and miracles accompanied his search for Cecilia's remains. He reports that while he was praying at the tomb of St. Peter she appeared to him and told him where her tomb was located. (Apparently to protect it from invading barbarians, all traces of an earlier inscription had been removed from the tomb centuries earlier and its location had been forgotten.) Guided by the saint herself, Paschal found Cecilia's coffin and declared that her body was "incorrupt" as it had been on the day of her death.

He prepared a white marble sarcophagus to hold the tiny cypress-wood coffin that contained Cecilia's remains. The original coffin is only 4 feet-4 inches long, 13 inches wide and 17 inches high! Paschal had her body wrapped in gold brocade fabric and covered with a silk veil, then had the coffin interred beneath the high altar of the newly-reconstructed church. Paschal had also rediscovered the remains of Valerian, Tibertius and Maximus and re-buried them in a single coffin next to Cecilia's, placing "each in a separate winding sheet." He had a third coffin made for the body of Pope Urban, but fearing that the dead pope "might be lonely" in it, he translated the body of one of Urban's successors, Lucius, and placed it in the coffin beside Urban, although he is careful to tell us that, despite their proximity, each had "a separate winding sheet."

Pope Paschal also ordered the apse of Cecilia's church decorated with magnificent mosaics that are still among the finest in Rome. Against a deep blue sky punctuated with orange, red and paler blue clouds Christ stands at the center in robes of glittering gold. On the Lord's right St. Paul, St. Cecilia, and Paschal appear (the latter carrying a model of the church and wearing the square halo that indicates he was alive when the mosaic was made), and on Christ's left are saints Peter, Valerian and Agatha. Below them, against a gold sky, are twelve lambs that symbolize the faithful and in the lowest band is Paschal's proud inscription, in which the pope announces to the world that he has "reunited the bodies of the saints" and restored Cecilia's once-ruined house to an even greater richness and beauty.

The next time anyone disturbed Cecilia's sleep was almost 800 years later. At that time the cardinal assigned to the basilica, Paolo Sfondrato, was involved in restoring the church and had initiated some excavations under the main altar, in the hope of finding the bodies of Cecilia and her male companions interred there by Paschal. On October 20, 1599, Sfondrato's workmen brought to light the marble coffin of the saint. In the presence of several witnesses, the cardinal himself opened the little cypress-wood inner coffin, revealing the saint's body still wrapped in the precious fabric supplied by Paschal, shielded by Paschal's silken veil, and with several small cloths stained with blood at her feet. The witnesses were surprised by the saint's extremely small stature (she was barely four feet tall.) Since nothing could be seen of her head, it was assumed she was lying with her face turned toward the ground. But out of a sense of reverence, no further investigations were made. Pope Clement VIII, absent from the opening of St. Cecilia's tomb because of ill health, sent Cardinal Baronio, who wrote a detailed description of the event for the ailing pope. Baronio's account ends with words that sound like a Christian version of Julius Caesar's terse "I came, I saw, I conquered;" Baronio wrote: "We saw, we recognized and we adored."

But whether the awed prelates examined the body of St. Cecilia and found it "incorrupt" is open to question. Both Cardinal Baronio and Antonio Bosio (the latter a noted scholar of the time best known for his explorations of the catacombs) report that the assembled churchmen did not look at the body directly, but only through the "veil of dark silk" with which Pope Paschal had covered it centuries earlier. Modern scholars consider it likely that there was little left of Cecilia but her bones and the rich fabrics in which Paschal had ordered her remains wrapped. Pope Clement commissioned an elaborate silver coffin adorned with gold to contain Cecilia's cypress-wood coffin and a still larger marble one to hold them. He refused to allow a more detailed examination of the martyr's remains.

The reappearance of the relics of St. Cecilia created a sensation in Rome. The enthusiasm of the crowds that thronged the basilica was so great that Cardinal Sfondrato was almost crushed to death. Pope Clement finally had to send in his Swiss Guards to restore order. On November 22, 1599, Clement came to the basilica to celebrate a Solemn High Mass in honor of the saint's feast-day, accompanied by 42 cardinals, including the future saint Roberto Bellarmine and the pope's old friend Cardinal Baronio, as well as two future popes, Alessandro de' Medici (Leo XI) and Camillo Borghese (Paul V). After the Mass Cecilia's body was re-interred beneath the high altar, in the same place where it had been found.

Another legend concerning St. Cecilia--this one a product of the 1600s--is that Stefano Maderno carved his extraordinarily beautiful white marble statue of St. Cecilia, which now adorns the high altar of her church, on the basis of his direct experience of seeing the saint's "incorrupt" body during the month in 1599 when it was displayed in the basilica. Nineteenth-century papal historian Ludwig von Pastor, a devout Catholic but a historian first, warns us against seeing Maderno's statue as a document of how the body of Cecilia actually looked. He reminds us that the pope had forbidden any examination of the body, that Cardinal Sfondrato did not permit anyone to open the coffin in his absence or even while he was present and that no one was allowed to disturb the silk cloth that veiled the corpse, adding that "we are ignorant of whether the bones alone were preserved, or also some bits of desiccated flesh clinging to the bones."

Only 23 years old when he received the commission from Pope Clement to carve a statue of St. Cecilia, Maderno never surpassed his early masterpiece. The sculptor had no need to study the saint's mortal remains, whatever their condition. He drew sufficient inspiration from the story of Cecilia's martyrdom, particularly the part about her lingering for three days after receiving the axe-blows to her neck. But Maderno had no interest in portraying blood and protracted suffering. He envisioned Cecilia as if she were asleep, a slender, graceful girl dressed in a modest garment and with her head swathed in a veil. She reclines on her right side with her knees slightly drawn up, her arms extended and her hands crossed at the wrists. What gives the statue its emotional impact is the way Maderno has shown her head, turned away from the viewer so the face is hidden, but with her delicate, vulnerable neck exposed and revealing the stroke of the executioner's axe as a fine gold line.

Sfondrato's investigations brought to light not only the coffins of Cecilia and her companions but also what the cardinal concluded were the remains of the bath-house where Cecilia had been imprisoned. Deep beneath the present church his workmen uncovered a marble floor, a huge boiler and the remains of clay and lead pipes, presumably those through which the live steam poured into the sudarium where the Romans attempted to suffocate Cecilia. These steam conduits are still partially visible in the south aisle of the church. However, not all archeologists agree that this room was part of a bath-house. Some consider it the remains of a tannery. There seem to be two Roman buildings under the church, one of which may have belonged to Cecilia. Certain scholars believe they have also found the remains of an early Christian church, while others point to the recent discovery of a room beneath the church that contains a relief sculpture of the Roman goddess Minerva as evidence that the site was occupied by pagans. Subterranean Rome yields up its mysteries reluctantly and the ruins beneath the church of Santa Cecilia still have not been fully identified and explained. More recent cardinals attached to the basilica have contributed financial support to carrying on the archeological work at Santa Cecilia, among them Cardinals Meyer and Cody, both of Chicago.

In the 1700s and 1800s the church underwent still more restorations. During the first half of the 1700s Cardinal Francesco Acquaviva commissioned from Sebastiano Conca the candy-colored fresco of St. Cecilia carried up to heaven that adorns the ceiling over the nave. At this time most of the medieval church disappeared, inside and out, under a profusion of florid decoration. In the 1820s another cardinal, Giorgio Doria Pamphili, noted that the church was beginning to lean dangerously and there was a threat of collapse. His report took note of columns "out of line" and other "diverse decrepitations," all of which were repaired at his orders. At this time the ancient columns supporting the nave were enclosed by piers, thus completing the transformation of Santa. Cecilia from a medieval church to a relatively modern one.

Although there are those who regret the disappearance of the ancient basilica under a "skin"
of later decorations and supports, the church of Santa Cecilia remains remarkably attractive. The eighteenth-century replacement of the gloomy galleries just below the ceiling with large windows

created an interior filled with light, a bright, aory atmosphere unusual among Roman churches. The style of decoration -- all white with touches of gold -- might fairly be described as feminine, although this was the prevailing style of the early 18th century rather than any concession to the sex of the saint. But there fineness and delicacy about the church that seem appropriate to this young and beautiful female marytr.
Today the convent adjacent to Santa Cecilia is occupied by a severe order of Benedictine nuns, who keep a close watch on the church entrusted to their care. It must surely be the cleanest church in Rome, its marble floors scrubbed and polished to a shining perfection. During my most recent visit, I spotted a hand-lettered sign at the entrance: "Please during the Holy Mess don't be any touristic visiting." While smiling at the nuns' earnest efforts at English, I couldn't help thinking that masses holy or otherwise, are the last thing one will find in this ancient, peaceful and immaculate church.
Judith Anne Testa, PhD

Hail! Bright Cecilia..........................Welcome to all the Pleasures

Susan Hamilton & Siri Thornill, s; Robin Blaze, Martin van der Zeijst, c-t; Mark Padmore, t; Jonathan Arnold, Peter Harvey, Jonathan Brown, bs; Collegium Vocale Orchestra & Chorus/Phillippe Herreweghe harmonia mundi 901 643

The great popularity of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians, with 17th century painters and composers - from Rubens to Poussin and from Blow to Purcell - stems from an erroneous interpretation of the legend of this virgin martyr who was supposed to have converted her husband to Christianity on their wedding night before being persecuted and put to death by the Romans. In the Latin narrative of her life the phrase cantantibus organis, Cecilia Domino decantabat refers to the presence of musical instruments while Cecilia is addressing her song to God on her wedding. A poor translation of these words at the end of the 15th century is probably at the root of the confusion, and Cecilia became the patron saint of music, with her feast day celebrated on November 22. Although the Latin term organum designates all instruments, it is the organ, "the noble Organ," of the Ode, "Hail! Bright Cecilia," that has come to be regarded as her principal attribute.

In England musical tributes to Saint Cecilia took on an original form in 1683 with the founding of The Musical Society. This assembly of gentlemen lovers of music and teachers and masters of art decided on the annual celebration of this feast day to stage a divine service and a concert to promote the progress of "this divine Science," according to the words of a contemporary, Peter Motteux in The Gentlemen's Journal. The composition of the first Ode was entrusted to the 24 year old Henry Purcell. He had been appointed Charles II's Composer in Ordinary for the Violins in 1677 and was beginning to be highly esteemed for his anthems and royal odes. The publication of Welcome to all the Pleasures a few months later is indicative of the success of the concert given at the Stationer's Hall on November 22, 1683. To words by Christopher Fishburn, the Ode invokes the power of music, this gift of the gods, and these words were a much greater source of inspiration to Purcell than the grandiloquent panegyrics of the royal odes. This work, modest in scale, and in number of performers called for, owes much of its charm to the graceful air for alto and continuo, "Here the deities approve," whose enchantment is prolonged in a long ritornello.

After an interruption under the reign of James II, the Cecilian celebrations were revived in 1690, encouraged by a music-loving queen, Mary, the wife of William III. In 1692 The Musical Society once again approached Purcell, who was by then at the peak of his career and of his art. A year after the success of King Arthur and six months after that of The Fairy Queen, it was a composer of high renown both in the city and the court who produced this magisterial work. Purcell could now call upon the much larger and more varied vocal and instrumental forces in the theater and in his Odes for Queen Mary. The score calls for six soloists, a six-part choir and an orchestra of strings and continuo as in the 1683 Ode, but with the addition of three recorders (one of them bass), two oboes, two trumpets and kettle drums. Once again it was a spectacular success according to Motteux. Hail Bright Cecilia "was sung twice and universally applauded."

The richness of the work, which was constructed like a large cantata or an opera act, is manifest from the majestic overture in six sections, one a fugal Canzona on two subjects, an Adagio in the form of a dialogue between the violins and oboes and a brilliant Allegro with trumpets and kettle drums. In the spirit of John Dryden's poem to St. Cecilia, From Harmony (1687), Nicholas Brady's verses make successive references to the different musical instruments, suggesting their obbligato [an essential instrumental part accompanying or vying with a vocal part] appearance in the music. For instance in the duo over an ostinato [the incessant repetition of a theme with varying contrupuntal accompaniment] bass, "Hark, each Tree," which describes the trees suddenly endowed with the gift of speech, thanks to the violins and the flutes made from the tree's wood, there's a subtle play of the echoing answers of the violins and the flutes. Always attentive to the words, Purcell employs all of his resources in the service of their emotional connotations. In the ornamented recitative [a speech-like aria with music], "Tis Nature's voice" each word suggests a different emotion which the music underlines with an original figure of great evocative power: drawn out melisma, imitative rhythm, languorous or dissonant chromaticism. According to Motteux, this fantastic alto solo was sung with extremely virtuosic ornamentation by Purcell himself. The adventurous refinement of the airs is partly due to the fact that Purcell was able to call upon the highly competent skill of some of the professional singers who performed his operas from the beginning of the 1690s. One of these singers was the young soprano Mrs. Ayliff, whose talent he had discovered the previous summer, and for whom he wrote the solo in minuet time, "Thou tun'st this World" with its fearsome vocalizes [vocal music without text] on the words round and more.

After the reference to "the perfect Harmony" that music introduces into the universe, the Ode culminates in a eulogy on the organ which is directly associated with St. Cecilia. To this "Wondrous Machine," whose notes were given from heaven, "the warbling lute," "the airy violin," the "lofty Viol," "the Am'rous Flute and soft Guitar," and the "marital" fife - the instruments of secular music that excite the human passions - must all yield. Combining ostinato and da capo (to repeat from beginning to end) forms, the solo for bass and oboe, "Wondrous Machine" celebrates the superior of this noble instrument. [The organ is often called the King of Instrments.] After a series of solos and duos, contrasted by the surrounding of the obbligato instruments, the Ode concludes on a triumphant "Grand Chorus" uniting all the voices and the orchestra in a final salute to the Saint.
Two years later Purcell composed an even more lavish scared work, a Te Deum and Jubilate, for the same occasion. And then, in the last encounter with the patron saint of his art, he died on the eve of St. Cecilia's Day, November 21, 1695.
Marielle D. Khoury

(These notes for Two Odes for St. Cecilia's Day -HM 901 643 were translated from the French by Derek Yeild)

The source of the connection between Cecilia martyred in Sicily around 176 AD and the art of which she has become the patron saint is obscure almost to the point of extinction, and does not seem to date back much before the 15th century. Innumerable paintings and stained glass windows depict her gravely installed at the organ (inevitably one several centuries more advanced than any she could possibly have known), and yet no specific events during her life have ever come light that satisfactorily explain the association. But wheresoever it arose, it soon became impregnably lodged in folklore, and by the second half of the 16th century substantial festivals and celebrations in her honor (and that of music in general) begin to be recorded, the earliest of them in Normandy. It was just over 100 years before the fashion crossed the channel [to England] with the festivities of 1683 which attracted three celebratory Odes, all set to music by Purcell.

The two works in Cecilia's praise by Handel dating from just over 50 years later, are both settings of Odes by John Dryden. The first of them, Alexander's Feast which appeared in 1736 had been a notable success, and on a considerably more lavish scale than the traditional Ode, embellishing the expected rhetoric with an unusual narrative element. It is an easy mistake to see in the more confined aims in Ode for St. Cecilia's Day, written three years later and setting the first of Dryden's two Cecilian Odes, symptoms of a work of lesser value; to expect, and therefore not likely to find, a less committed response from Handel to a text that simply follows the received tradition of praising in turn the various instruments of music, is the power that will restore order and happiness to the universe, given a chance. But with each instrument Dryden associated a human characteristic, and it was this twinning of the two strands of characterization, musical and human. than particularly appealed to Handel.

The three years since the appearance of Alexander's Feast had been painful ones for Handel. He had suffered what was most certainly a stroke which had paralyzed his right arm, to his imaginable alarm and despair as we may concluded from contemporary reports that chronicle, in addition to the "paralytick stroke" itself, "the most violent deviations from reason." In the event he was completely cured but returned to London virtually penniless. In early 1739 Israel in Egypt, a mighty work now happily rehabilitated, failed disastrously, running to only three dismally-received performances. Two lessons Handel drew from that failure point to St. Cecilia's Ode: that the public had no tastes for long compositions heavy in contrapuntal choruses, and that august sacred oratorios were no longer fashionable. Within a year war had broken out with Spain (sparked off finally by the alleged tearing-off of a British mariner's ear by a Spaniard into whose hands he had had the misfortune to fall), and the combination of the changed social climate that war immediately created with Handel's lessons from Israel in Egypt all dictated a work of concision, of passion. and of readily identifiable characterization rather than the greater subtlety of Handel's finest operas. Just such a work is the Ode for St. Cecilia's Day, composed in just nine days and premièred during that legendary winter when the Thames froze, oxen were roasted whole and travel about the capital became so inhibited, as much by practicability as by comfort, that Handel's theater was forced to close for two months (despite newspaper advertising that it was being specially heated) until the thaw brought relief.

The Ode opens with a sturdy overture in three sections, in part indebted, as it is in a great deal of music, to a set of recently published harpsichord pieces by Muffat. More remarkable, however, than the use of Muffat's music is the way it is adapted to carry and depict the text so intimately that its origins become , in the finished Ode, a matter of merely historic interest. The tenor aria, "When nature underneath a heap of jarring atoms lay. . ." presages Haydn's Creation in its uneasy view into the primordial abyss. In the following chorus "From harmony" Handel reveals in constantly varied and juxtaposed textures, the energetically syncopated orchestral accompaniment being set against the simpler and more declamatory choral writing. There then follow the varied and epigrammatic solo invocations of the passions associated with six musical instruments, interrupted only by a miniature instrumental march in which the solitary trumpet, rather curiously, adds its contribution only to the repeats of each half. The Ode ends with one of Handel's noblest final chorus, and one of Dryden's most visionary verses, celebrating together the all-embracing glory of music itself. It is much the substantial movement of the Ode, and reminds us that the composition of Messiah was only two years away. -Anthony Sargent in the liner notes for Ode for St. Cecilia's Day w/ Jill Gomez, Robert Tear; the Choir of King's College, Cambridge; the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Philip Ledger on ASV 512.

For his Nonesuch recording (H- 71398) "Vespers of Saint Cecilia" Denis Stevens has written of the little-known oratorio Il martirio di Santa Cecilia that Alessandro Scarlatti wrote it in 1708 and followed up with a Mass and Vespers in 1720. For his performance Stevens edited the work. Jerzy Chwialkowski, in his Catalog of Classical Music Compositions, says the music was lost. Denis Stevens says, "The music was written for Cardinal Acquaviva and first performed at the Roman shrine. In England, the saint was to be celebrated by Purcell then Handel in music, and in verse by Dryden, Congreve and Pope. Provincial centers copied London, and by the middle of the 19th century the French have joined in with their annual masses at St. Eustache in Paris, while the Germans began to react against church music described by Anne Louise Germaine de Staël as "more martial than religious" by forming branches of a Caecilienverein (friends of Cecilia) that would promote the polyphony ( the combination in harmonious progression of two or more independent melodies) of the golden age. When all this was taking place, Romans witnessed the excitement caused by rediscovery of the Crypt of the Popes and of St. Cecilia in the Calixtine catacombs, both considerable and religious and historical importance."

"Rarely can St. Cecilia's Day (November 22) have been so Triumphantly celebrated as at her church in Rome on that day in 1720 when Scarlatti at the height of his powers, directed this tonal monument in the presence of Cardinal Acquaviva. The scoring is brilliant and varied and there are many changes of tempo and meter corresponding with the emotions expressed in the words; and the words often moved Scarlatti to tears. Some of his greatest music can be heard in the work that he wrote, surely with love and devotion, for the patron saint of music."

A 1514 Image of Cecilia at the organ

Index

Variants from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
· Cäcilia (German)
· Caecilia (German)
· Cecelia (English)
· Cécile (French)
· Cecília (Portuguese), (Slovak)
· Cecílie (Czech)
· Cecilie (Czech), (Danish), (Norwegian)
· Cecilija (Slovenian)
· Cecily (English)
· Cecylia (Polish)
· Celia (English)
· Celie (French)
· Cicely (English)
· Cili (Hungarian)
· Cilka (Slovenian)
· Cilla (Dutch), (Swedish)
· Cille (Danish)
· Cissolt (Manx)
· Sheelagh (English)
· Sheila (English), (Irish)
· Shelagh (English)
· Shelia (English)
· Síle (Irish)
· Sìleas (Scottish)
· Silja (Finnish)
· Silje (Danish), (Norwegian)
· Sille (Danish)
· Sisel (Yiddish)
· Sissie (English)
· Sissy (English)
· Tsetsiliya (Russian)
· Zisel (Yiddish)