Music academic publishes new research on an unknown composer

On 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation, the congregation of a small church in Oxford heard music by Paolo Papini for the first time in over four hundred years. Ensemble Res Sacra led by Thomas Neal sang three pieces by Papini that I transcribed from manuscript as part of my research on music at the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Sassia in Rome. The hospital was a large charitable institution founded to care for abandoned infants and orphans and the sick poor but was also musically active employing a professional choir and organist.

While carrying out research for my book, Music, Medicine and Religion at the Ospedale di Santo Spirito 1550-1750 (Boydell, 2024) I discovered that several large choirbooks from Santo Spirito were located in the Diocesan Library in Regensburg. Although they were catalogued and had undergone conservation, the music they contain has, until now, not been subject to any critical enquiry, even though they had been used as a source for one of the earliest editions of Palestrina’s music made by the original owner of the collection, Franz Xaver Haberl (1840-1910) in the late-nineteenth century. In the manuscripts the music of Papini is second only to Palestrina in terms of quantity. Papini was previously a composer known only for a handful of printed devotional songs. My work (some of which was funded by OpenARC)on the Regensburg manuscripts and another manuscript located in Bologna  that had been noted in a lexicon of sources dating from 1901 but never studied has increased is known output from six pieces to over fifty.

In my new article ‘Tridentine reform in action: Paolo Papini at the Ospedale di Santo Spirito’ which has now been published in the Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle I connect evidence about the life of Papini that I found in the administrative documents from the hospital held in the State Archive in Rome with the music in the Regensburg choirbooks. Archival records show that Papini was working at the Ospedale during the period in which Bernardino da Cirillo was Commendatore – the equivalent of the CEO – and Cirilo was an eloquent campaigner for reform in liturgical music whose letters to major players in the Council of Trent are well-known to musicologists. My transcriptions and subsequent analysis of the music, indicates that Papini’s music exemplifies the ideals for liturgical music that were promulgated by the Council of Trent. At the same time, the music suggests that he was composing for the musicians that were available to him at the Ospedale, some of whom may have been children trained in its school for orphans working with professional singers from outside the institution.

The recent performance by Ensemble Res Sacra proved that the music is still usable within the liturgy, within the capacities of the average church choir and has a simple beauty in a style that emulates Palestrina.