Above: Napoleon’s invasion of Rome, 1798. On October 21, 1775, Giuseppe Baini, an important figure in 19th-century sacred music, was born. In 2025, we celebrate both the 500th anniversary of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s birth and the 250th anniversary of Baini’s, a fortuitous convergence, as Baini was Palestrina’s first biographer. As the first “Perpetual Maestro Director” of the…
