1st Edition
Gregorio Ballabene’s Forty-eight-part Mass for Twelve Choirs (1772)
Neither Spem in alium, the widely acclaimed ‘songe of fortie partes’ by Thomas Tallis, nor Alessandro Striggio’s forty-part Mass is the largest-scale counterpoint work in Western music. The actual winner is Gregorio Ballabene, a relatively unknown Roman maestro di cappella, a contemporary of Giovanni Paisiello, Joseph Haydn and Luigi Boccherini, who composed in forty-eight parts for twelve choirs. His Mass saw only a public rehearsal and was never performed liturgically despite all of Ballabene’s efforts to promote it. On closer inspection, however, the work deserves special consideration as a piece of outstanding combinatory creativity – the product of a talent able to conceive, structure and realise a project of colossal dimensions. It might even be claimed that if Charles Burney had gained knowledge of it, all derogatory comments by nineteenth-century music historians would not have succeeded in extinguishing the interest of later generations. Ballabene’s Mass has remained completely unstudied until today, even though the score survives in prominent collections. This study offers, for the first time, a historical and analytical perspective on this overlooked manifestation of a very individual musical intelligence.
Introduction
1. Twelve-choir performances
2. The presence of a glorious past
3. Burney’s ‘Mass’
4. Ballabene and his Mass in Martini’s correspondence
5. The ‘rehearsal’ and its outcome
6. Consequences for Ballabene’s professional advancement
7. Martini’s approbation
8. Important compositional features
9. Pitoni’s Mass
10. Ballabene and the twilight of an era
11. Fame and posthumous fame
12. The history of the score
13. Unfortunate anachronism or accomplishment of the Roman Baroque?
Appendix I: Documents (in chronological order)
Appendix II: Documented copies of Ballabene’s Mass
Bibliography
Biography
Dr Florian Bassani is a lecturer at the Institute of Musicology, University of Bern, Switzerland.
