SPONTINI, GASPARE, LUIGI, PACIFICO. — Musician, born on 14 November 1774 at Majolati (Jesi) and died there on 24 January 1851.
In Rome he made his début as an author of theatrical works; in the
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Besides his career as a composer of theatrical works, his activity on behalf of the reform of sacred music is noteworthy; important evidence of this is the «Report on the reform of Church music», written in January 1839 to the Primicerius of the Congr. of S. Cecilia. In it S. shows himself indignant and scandalized to have found, after a long absence from Italy, theatrical music introduced there into the churches, with all that it contains of lasciviousness and impurity; he proposes first of all that musicians acting in bad faith be corrected by binding them with an oath of fidelity to uprightness and to the holiness of composing music expressly for the church, without copying or plagiarizing scores from melodramas; he then advocates the establishment in Rome of a Library or Institution of ecclesiastical music, capable of providing calcographic copies of the music approved by the appropriate Commission; finally, he declares necessary and urgent the establishment everywhere of singing schools for boys, similar to those conceived by s. Gregorio Magno.
S.’s merit was of exceptional importance, since he, a composer exclusively of theatrical works, was the first to perceive and champion the urgency of reforming sacred music; his concrete proposals, presented to Gregorio XVI, who for them conferred on him the title of count of S. Andrea, would become among the most important historical precedents of the motu proprio of b. Pio X (1903).