Complete Organ Works – Choral Sacred Music

Giovanni Tebaldini’s relationship with the organ should be investigated in the light of the vicissitudes undergoneboth by the instrument and by composers between the end of the nineteenth century and the twentieth.
In any case,Tebaldini’s position was the outcome of a balance achieved by him between his instrumental mastery (piano, violin andorgan) and his wide-ranging knowledge and experience (theory, singing, composition, vocal polyphony, Gregorian andAmbrosian chant, musical palaeography and the study of musical instruments).
What most involved him, however,was the difficult historical period of the Cecilian reformation, from the first insight of Franz Xaver Haberl, who hadfounded the Kirchenmusikschule in Regensburg in 1874, to the promulgation, on 22 November 1903, of the motu proprioentitled Inter pastoralis officii sollicitudines by Pope Pius X.
Tebaldini was a many-sided personage, characterised byan outstanding talent, a vast culture and a very high moral stature. Thanks to his multifarious but always consistentactivities – aimed particularly at the rediscovery of the glorious Italian musical identity (to which he lent continuity andmomentum, causing it to be appreciated all over Europe) – and thanks to his masterly, passionate theoretic and practicalaction against the decadence of liturgical music, he has been, and still is, one of the most enlightened figures in musicalart and scholarship.