Orazio Benevolo

Orazio Benevoli or Benevolo (19 April 1605 – 17 June 1672), was a Franco-Italian composer of large scaled polychoral sacred choral works (e.g., one work featured forty-eight vocal and instrumental lines) of the middle Baroque era.

He was born in Rome, to a French baker and confectioner, Robert Venouot or Vénevot, which name was Italianized to Benevolo. Benevoli was a choirboy at San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome (1617–23). Later, he assumed posts as maestro di cappella at Santa Maria in Trastevere (from 1624); then, at Santo Spirito in Sassia (from 1630); and, eventually, at his old church, San Luigi dei Francesi (from 1638). Benevoli served as Kapellmeister in the court of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria from 1644 to 1646. In 1646, Benevoli returned to Rome, where he remained for the rest of his life, and where he served as choirmaster at Santa Maria Maggiore and at the Cappella Giulia of St. Peter’s Basilica. He was made Guardiano of the Vatican’s Congregazione di Santa Cecilia in the following three years: 1654, 1665 and 1667.

His pupils included: Ercole Bernabei, Antimo Liberati and Paolo Lorenzani. See: List of music students by teacher: A to B#Orazio Benevoli.

Benevoli composed Masses, motets, Magnificats, and other sacred vocal works. Much of his fame as a composer has rested largely on his supposed composition of the fifty-three part Missa Salisburgensis, which musicologists long believed was written by Benevoli in Salzburg Cathedral in 1628. Nevertheless, external and internal evidence subsequently demonstrated that the Mass is in fact the work of composer Heinrich Ignaz Biber, and that it dates not from 1628 but from 1682.

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