did not suit the solemnity of the occasion. Rather, their many-voiced singing exuded a joyful mood.... Accordingly, the
pope himself, having beckoned to his singers, directed them to sing with proper restraint, and in such a way that everything
was audible and intelligible, as it should be.^5Palestrina was one of the singers who heard this fatherly lecture from the pontiff. His second book of
Masses, published in 1567, is prefaced by a letter of dedication to King Philip II of Spain (best
remembered in English-speaking countries as Queen Elizabeth’s rejected suitor and later her military
adversary), in which Palestrina testified to his resolve, “in accordance with the views of most serious and
most religious-minded men, to bend all my knowledge, effort, and industry toward that which is the
holiest and most divine of all things in the Christian religion—that is, to adorn the holy sacrifice of the
Mass in a new manner.”^6 The seventh and last item—the valedictory, as it were—in the book that had
opened thus, with the composer’s statement of pious or chastened resolve, was a Mass entitled Missa
Papae Marcelli, “The Mass of Pope Marcellus,” or even “Pope Marcellus’s Mass.” And indeed, it was a
Mass that conformed very closely to what Bishop Cirillo Franco had been seeking, for it set the sacred
words “in such a way that everything was audible and intelligible, as it should be.”
Was this the Mass that Bishop Cirillo Franco received from Pope Marcellus, as promised? To believe
that one would have to imagine Palestrina writing the Mass, and Pope Marcellus dispatching it, within
seventeen days, which was all the earthly time the pope had left. That is certainly not impossible. But by
1567 the “intelligibility movement” had gathered a powerful impetus, and the dedication to Pope
Marcellus may have been commemorational, honoring the unlucky and lamented pontiff whose reign had