Sistine Chapel Choir / Massimo Palombella / Cecilia Bartoli VENI DOMINE

The music collections of the Vatican Library (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana) are among the largest and most significant in the world, and have since the late 18th century been an essential resource for the study of music history and for musicolo- gical research. The finest polyphonic works of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, most of which are to be found in the Cappella Sistina and Cappella Giulia collections, have long been studied by scholars from around the world, but have become even more popular since they were transferred from the Sistine Chapel and St Peter’s to the Vatican Library itself (the Cappella Giulia material was moved in the 1930s and 1940s, the Sistine Chapel material a few decades earlier), when new indices and catalogues made them more easily accessible. The director of the Sistine Chapel Choir is in the fortunate position of having access to all the music resources of the Vatican Library. With that good fortune, however, comes a two-fold responsibility: firstly, that of rescuing long-forgotten works from neglect; and secondly, that of trying out performance practices that translate the notes on the page into patterns of sound, by comparing manuscripts and early print editions, and using all the studies and other information available to us today. 

Given the immense quantity of material housed in the Library, any search of it has to be narrowed down. For this album, for which our primary source was the Vatican Library’s Sistine Chapel collection, we decided to focus on the liturgical period of Advent and Christmas, further refining our search by consulting the various sources that describe papal celebrations over the centuries and the use of music therein. As a final search criterion, we looked at the frequency with which different works were performed as part of these papal celebrations.