More than 400 years after Italian composer Alessandro Striggio wrote his extravagant 40-part Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno, it has been rediscovered by a Berkeley music scholar who identified the work and rescued it from obscurity. This gigantic choral setting of music for the Catholic Mass was composed in Florence for the Medici family and sent as a gift to the Holy Roman Emperor in 1567. Lasting 30 minutes and composed for a massive ensemble of five eight-part double choirs, it is one of the most extraordinary art works of the Italian Renaissance, but had been lost since 1726.
 
Renowned harpsichordist and Berkeley musicology professor Davitt Moroney had known that Striggio’s grand choral piece had once existed; other scholars had published letters written by the composer to his patron, Francesco de’ Medici, whose father, Cosimo de’ Medici, was Duke of Florence. In late 1566 Striggio embarked on a quasi-diplomatic mission to the leading courts of Europe. He not only gave a presentation copy of the Mass to the Emperor in 1567, but also performed it at the courts in Munich and Paris shortly before he visited Queen Elizabeth I in London. This is an example of Renaissance music being used as a political and diplomatic tool on the international stage.
 
Moroney first found a trace of the lost Mass in 1987 and became convinced it was in Paris, at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. For nearly 20 years he regularly made attempts to find the legendary work. Then in January 2005 he recognized information published by a French scholar as the crucial piece of the jigsaw that enabled him to locate the missing manuscript. Finally holding the manuscript in his hands was “a magical moment,” he says. He is still visibly thrilled from the discovery.
 
The surviving copy is French and was made in about 1620. In 1726 it was donated to Louis XV, but was then mistakenly catalogued under the name of a non-existent composer, “Strusco.” It eventually became part of the Bibliothèque Nationale, but the library’s 1914 catalogue had listed the work not only under this wrong name but also without its title and described as being for “four voices” instead of 40, and so it had become both invisible and unidentifiable.
 
Although most of Striggio’s piece is in 40 different voice parts, the last movement is for 60 separate voices (five twelve-part choirs) and is the only known piece of 60-part counterpoint in the history of Western music. “It’s one of the first great pieces to use architecture and space, with musical phrases physically moving around the ring from choir to choir,” says Moroney, a bright-eyed, animated man, seated in his small Morrison Hall office. “It is an intellectual achievement of the highest order. There are other large choral works, but Striggio’s Mass is unique, with its five eight-part choirs. This is Florentine art at its most spectacular.”

The 40-part piece was probably performed in Florence’s cathedral, the Duomo, under Brunelleschi’s famous dome; or perhaps in the medieval Baptistery, whose mosaic decoration is octagonal on five levels and thus has forty panels. Moroney also concludes that, in view of Striggio’s visit to London in 1567, the Mass must have been the inspiration for one of the iconic compositions of the sixteenth century, the 40-part motet Spem in alium by the English composer Thomas Tallis.
 
In 2007, Moroney received a U.C. President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities to return to Paris. He published a detailed research article for the Journal of the American Musicological Society showing how it seems to have been Cosimo de’ Medici’s intention in 1567 to use the grandiose Mass to impress the Emperor enough to grant Cosimo a royal title. The Emperor declined, but the Duke of Florence’s ambitions were answered by the pope himself, who in 1569 granted him a crown and the title “Grand Duke of Tuscany.”
 
While on the President’s Fellowship in France, Moroney managed to identify exactly where the Paris performance had taken place in May 1567. He also transcribed the Mass into modern musical notation and prepared the first modern performance. In July, as part of the BBC Proms classical music festival, he conducted two of the finest choirs in the world, the BBC Singers and the Tallis Scholars, in London’s Royal Albert Hall. The 7,500-seat hall was sold out and some seven million more listeners around the globe tuned in to listen.
 
“The concert was a huge event,” Moroney smiles. “We got Striggio back on the map. For those of us who do research in the humanities, this is an example of one of the many kinds of musical scholarship we do: not only identifying a lost work, tracing its historical importance, and translating it into practical modern notation, but also taking that extra step that brings the music back to life in a performance, giving pleasure to modern listeners.”