The
Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia ( ) is one of
the oldest musical institutions in the world, based in Italy
.
It is
based at the Auditorium Parco della Musica
in Rome
, and was
founded by the papal bull, Ratione
congruit, issued by Sixtus V in 1585,
which invoked two saints prominent in Western musical history:
Gregory the Great, for whom the
Gregorian chant is named, and
Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music.
It was founded as a "congregation" or "confraternity" — a
religious guild, so to speak — and over
the centuries, has grown from a forum for local musicians and
composers to an internationally acclaimed
academy active in music scholarship (with 100 prominent music
scholars forming the body of the Accademia)
to music education (in its role as a conservatory) to
performance (with an active choir and
symphony
orchestra).
The first seat of the Congregation from 1585-1622 was the church of
Santa Maria ad Martires, better known as the
Pantheon.
Successive relocations
were to the church of San Paolino alla Colonna (1622-52), Santa Cecilia in
Trastevere
(1652-61), San Nicola dei Cesarini (1661-1663),
Chiesa della Maddalena (1663-85), and, finally, San Carlo ai
Catinari
in 1685.
During the first century of existence, the Congregation was the
workshop of a number of prominent musicians
and composers of the day, including
Giovanni Pierluigi da
Palestrina. The institution in that period was often in
rivalry with the other important musical
organization of Papal Rome of the day, the
Sistine Choir. Rivalry centred around the
rights to control access to the musical profession, to train
musicians, and to publish music.
The rivalry never really ended and can be
said to have lasted through the entire existence of the Papal States
, that is, until 1870, when the so-called "temporal
power of the Church" was ended by military action of the new nation
state of Italy.
The early 1700s are considered to have been a particularly glorious
time for the Accademia. Among names associated with the
organization during that period are
Arcangelo Corelli,
Alessandro and
Domenico Scarlatti, and
Niccolò Jommelli. In 1716,
Pope Innocent XI decreed that all musicians
practising their profession in Rome were required to become members
of the Congregation. The Accademia suspended operations during the
revolutionary period of the
Napoleonic
Wars but opened regularly again in 1822 a few years after the
Restoration brought about by the
Congress of Vienna.
The years between that reopening and the end of the Papal States in
1870 were ones of great change. The organization opened its
membership to hitherto excluded categories, such as dancers, poets,
music historians, musical instrument makers, and music publishers.
In 1838, the Congregation of Santa Cecilia was officially
proclaimed an Academy and then a Papal Academy. The list of active
and honorary members of the Accademia during that period is
formidable and includes
Cherubini,
Mercadante,
Donizetti,
Rossini,
Paganini,
Auber,
Liszt,
Mendelssohn,
Berlioz,
Gounod, and
Meyerbeer. Among the crowned heads of Europe who
were honorary members was
Queen
Victoria.
After the unification of Italy, the Accademia reestablished itself
with the formation of a permanent symphony orchestra and choir,
beginning in 1895. It went from being the seat of a
Liceo musicale—a music "high school"—to being a
full-blown conservatory; also, it hosts the "Eleonora Duse" Drama
School, as well as a centre for experimental cinema. The most
recent innovation has been the digitisation and cataloguing of
centuries of musical documents — including an important collection
of traditional music in the
ethnomusicological archives — and their
preservation and eventual display in the Accademia's
multimedia library also available to the
public online. The Accademia also maintains a
musical instruments museum (the
MUSA).
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