Masses

Francesco Foggia (1603–88) was one of the leading composers of liturgical music in seventeenth-century Rome, and was identified both during his own time and in later generations as a historically significant and gifted composer. His almost two dozen extant masses represent the most fruitful engagement with this genre by a Roman composer between the time of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina in the preceding century and Giuseppe Ottavio Pitoni in the subsequent one. This edition provides representative examples of most of the types of masses that Foggia composed, including a small-scale mass, a pastoral mass, a missa brevis, imitation masses, concerted masses, and the grand Missa Tu es Petrus, a work that combines veneration for Palestrina (whose motet serves as the model) with the distinctive nine-voice scoring cherished by Roman composers for their most distinctively Roman compositions.