Il martirio di Santa Cecilia

The Messa di Santa Cecilia (mass of Saint Cecilia) is a religious work by Alessandro Scarlatti, written in 1720 for five soloists (SSATB), choir and orchestra, commissioned by and dedicated to cardinal Francesco Acquaviva of Aragona. Scarlatti was sixty years old at the time and composed at the beginning of the 18th century, in a modern style of the period, characterised by brio and seduction, which culminated in the great masses of Bach and Beethoven and "seems to foretell Haydn's last masses".