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CANCELLED: Music in Honor of San Gennaro: Early
Modern Martyr, Miracle Worker, and Musical Protagonist
TIME:
March 4, 2018 12:45 PM
EVENT DESCRIPTION:
DUE TO THE INCLEMENT WEATHER, THIS LECTURE HAS BEEN CANCELLED. WE HOPE TO RESCHEDULE.
"Music in Honor of San Gennaro: Early Modern Martyr, Miracle Worker, and Musical Protagonist" is the sixth lecture in our Sunday series.
The story of San Gennaro begins in the early fourth century, during the Great Persecution under the emperor Diocletian. Bishop of Benevento, Italy, Gennaro was imprisoned for visiting other Christians imprisoned in the early years of the persecution. As legend has it, Gennaro was tortured and thrown into a fiery furnace, yet emerged unharmed. At the end of his tortures, he was publicly beheaded. An old man wrapped his body and head in a burial cloth, while the women of Naples soaked up his blood with a sponge, enough to fill two glass phials. Four decades later, a slave woman named Eusebia, who had been Gennaro’s wet nurse, carried the phials in a procession as the faithful transferred the martyr’s remains to the catacombs of Naples. It was during this procession that the liquification first occurred. Since that time, the miracle is said to have occurred three times each year: on the first Sunday in May, on September 19 (the saint’s feast day), and on December 16 (to commemorate the saint’s protection against the threatened eruption of the volcano at Vesuvius).
Anthony R. DelDonna is Professor of Musicology and Director of the Music Program at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He is a specialist in eighteenth-century topics and in particular Neapolitan music, musicians and culture. He earned the Ph.D. in Historical Musicology “with distinction” from The Catholic University of America (1998). His research has focused primarily on the dramatic stage (opera, oratorio, cantata), archival studies, performance practice and ballet. Prof. DelDonna’s research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as The Journal of Musicology, Acta Musicologica, Quaderni d'Italianistica, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Early Music, Eighteenth-Century Music, Recercare, Studi musicali and Civiltà musicale as well as numerous essays in scholarly volumes dedicated to the eighteenth century. DelDonna is the author of the monograph Opera, Theatrical Culture and Society in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples published by Ashgate Press (2012); co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); co-editor of Music as Cultural Mission: Explorations of Jesuit Practices in Italy and North America (St. Joseph University Press, 2014; with Anna Harwell Celenza) and editor for Genre and Music in the 18th century (Ann Arbor: Steglein Press, 2008). Together with Antonio Caroccia, DelDonna is publishing the complete works for clarinet by the nineteenth-century virtuoso Ferdinando Sebastiani (1803-1860) for Castejon Music Editions. His critical edition of the oratorio Trionfo per l’Assunzione della Santissima Vergine is published by Fondazione Arcadia (2015). Prof. DelDonna’s forthcoming publications include the critical edition of the opera, Il zelo animato ovvero Il Gran Profeta Elia (1733) by Francesco Mancini (Società editrice di musicologia)
There will be a brunch and the lecture following the 11:30 mass at Our Lady of Lourdes. Brunch will begin at approximately 12:45 with the lecture beginning at 1:30.
The suggested donation for the brunch and lecture is $15 per person and $35 per family.
Babysitting will be available for children 10 and under for $1 per child.
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