ABSTRACT
According to Hanns-Berthold Dietz, Provenzale's Missa defunctorum a 4 con violini is his 'major surviving work of church music', but it represents a cultural climate superseded by the next generation of composers in the latter part of the seventeenth century. Provenzale's use of the stile antico here may have been justified by the work's genre and function, but it is also revealing in that this is his earliest surviving composition. This chapter examines the general structure of the Missa defunctorum. The structure is typical of a seventeenth-century Requiem and is perhaps even more archaic, closer to models of Flemish Renaissance polyphony. For the period 1620–1750, some 325 Requiem Masses survive, but very few from Naples. The Archivio della Congregazione Oratoriana dei Padri Girolamini in Naples preserves in manuscript the only surviving collection of Francesco Provenzale's psalm settings for Vespers.
