Cecilia lived early in the third century. According to an account composed 300 years later she belonged to an aristocratic family celebrated for their military exploits. She has become the patron saint of music.
Although her parents were Christian, Cecilia was persuaded to marry a noble pagan called Valerian. On her wedding night, however, she informed her husband that she had previously espoused an angel jealous of her chastity, and urged him to join her in a vow of perpetual virginity.
Valerian obediently acquiesced, and was subsequently baptised, together with his brother Tiburtius. Soon afterwards both young men were beheaded for refusing to sacrifice to Jupiter. Next, Cecilia herself was arrested, and condemned to die by suffocation from the vapours of the furnace which heated her family’s private baths.
As an instrument of martyrdom this technique signally failed; indeed, Cecilia declared herself refreshed by the experience. The authorities, not to be baulked, then decreed that she should be decapitated. Somehow she survived three blows of the executioner’s axe, albeit expiring three days later. Her body was then buried with her relatives near the Via Appia.
Some 600 years on Pope Paschal I (817-824) announced that Cecilia’s place of burial had been revealed to him during Mass in St Peter’s. He removed her remains to a monastery which he built, supposedly on the site of Cecilia’s family’s house, in the area of Rome now known as Trastevere.
Another 800 years later, in 1599, a Cardinal Sfondrati ordered Cecilia’s tomb to be opened. Her body was found to be intact, wrapped in a white vestment quilted with gold. Pope Clement VIII came to visit her remains and asked a sculptor, Stefano Maderno, to make a statue of Cecilia in the exact position in which she had been discovered.
Maderno created a stunning work in white marble, which, showing the wound on Cecilia’s neck, lies before the high altar in the church that Pope Paschal had founded.
The building has been much altered; under it, nevertheless, lie the ruins of a second-century house – perhaps the one that Cecilia’s family owned – complete with the baths which tradition holds to be the site of her martyrdom.
Although the cult of Cecilia flourished in the Middle Ages – she is mentioned in Chaucer – it was apparently not until the 15th century that she began to be associated with music.
This seems to have been due to an error. In the fifth-century account of her life it is recorded that at Cecilia’s wedding feast, “as the organs were playing, she sang in her heart to the Lord”. The omission of “in her heart” permitted an over-flattering view of her musicianship. But where Purcell and Handel have profited, it is idle for rationalists to complain.
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