Pitoni's Mass

As already mentioned, Giuseppe Ottavio Pitoni (1657–1743) was the only other composer in Roman music history to attempt to write a Mass for twelve real choirs. The score is missing, and one of the most trustworthy documents regarding the work is a biographical sketch drawn by Pitoni’s former student Girolamo Chiti (1679–1759) in 1744. In this posthumous homage, Chiti affirms:

Among his other works, he [Pitoni] began a Mass for twelve choruses, i. e. for forty-eight real voices, in which he wrote down the twelve bass and the twelve soprano parts, and filled in all forty-eight parts of the first Kyrie and the Christe. But he could not finish it, asserting on many an occasion that it would take two years at least to complete. Spending at least two hours a day of serious effort on it, and being of a very advanced age, he was not able to finish that laborious task, so this Mass remained incomplete and is kept at the music archive of the Vatican. ¹

According to this note, Pitoni (who had been maestro di cappella at St Peter’s since 1719 until his death) took on the challenge only very late in his career, 57apparently around 1740, almost as if it were an attempt finally to realise a project to which he had long aspired. Pitoni wrote more than 3,000 sacred works, among them 247 Masses. Besides his official duties and obligations, he dedicated a lifetime to the creation of a gargantuan encyclopaedia of harmonic progressions entitled Guida armonica. ² In light of this enterprise, it seems that he may have contemplated the practical challenge of composing for forty-eight real parts as the ideal culmination of such a theoretical magnum opus. However, like the Guida armonica, the Mass remained unfinished: as Chiti mentions, only Kyrie I and the Christe were completed.