Life
His entire creative trajectory, from training to full maturity, unfolded consistently and exclusively within the period of the Italian Baroque.
Born in Bevagna around 1600, Odoardo Ceccarelli came from a modest family, with a butcher father and a physician and genealogist grandfather. He soon moved to Rome, where he entered as a choirboy at Santo Spirito in Sassia and then in the German College. He studied with Giacomo Carissimi, of whom he was a close collaborator and interpreter of his motets.
From 1628 he entered the Sistine Chapel choir, of which he became camerlengo and later chapel master. Simultaneously, he sang at the Barberini court, performing roles in operas by Michelangelo Rossi and Luigi Rossi. He was appreciated for his flexible voice, capable of spanning both tenor and bass registers.
In the 1640s, he collaborated on the revision of Palestrina's music for new breviaries, along with Allegri and Landi. He wrote cantatas and sacred texts, in addition to literary works dedicated to the Marian cult. In his final years, he was chapel master at San Marcello al Corso. He died in Rome in 1668.
Aneddoto
The double voice
Some sources described him as a tenor, others as a bass; his vocal flexibility made him a unique interpreter, perhaps capable of using falsetto naturally.Works
Ceccarelli sang in Michelangelo Rossi's Erminia sul Giordano (1633), Luigi Rossi's Il palazzo incantato (1642), and other Roman operas. He composed the cantata Ecco il re del cielo immenso (preserved at the Casanatense Library), a five-voice idyll, and a lyric drama in Latin. In 1647 he published La miracolosa immagine della Madonna delle Gratie and the Breve racconto della manifestatione della devotissima immagine della santissima Vergine. In 1644, he collaborated on the Hymni Sacri of the Roman Breviary.
Briciole di storia
Pubblico dominio (Commons)
