Music at St Mark’s Basilica

A chapel for a magnificent church

The Basilica dates its musical chapel to the beginning of the fourteenth century. The first record is a receipt of 8 June 1316: ten ducats to Maestro Zucchetto for repairing “the great organs of San Marco, which were broken”. From the start, the Basilica writes, the chapel became the centre of Venetian musical life, developing styles suited to the splendour of the building.

On 18 June 1403 the Senate made it a school as well: eight Venetian boys, paid a ducat a month, to learn “to sing well”. In 1489 a new organ by Fra Urbano was set in the left-hand gallery above the high altar, inaugurated in 1490, and in 1491 the chapel had its first maestro di cappella, the Fleming Pietro de Fossis.

Willaert and the Venetian school

In 1527 another Fleming, Adrian Willaert, took over and led the chapel until his death in 1562. The Basilica calls him the founder of the Venetian school. His best-known pupils were not Venetian: Cipriano de Rore, Gioseffo Zarlino, Costanzo Porta, Claudio Merulo.

The next generation was. Baldassare Donato and Andrea Gabrieli, both born in Venice, pushed the music in a new direction, and their rivalry with Zarlino, then the maestro, once broke out in public, with the singers rebelling on the feast of Saint Mark. Their line passed to three musicians who, by coincidence, were all called Giovanni: Giovanni Gabrieli, Andrea’s nephew, Giovanni Bassano and Giovanni Croce.

Split choirs and the sound of St Mark’s

What made St Mark’s famous across Europe was what this school did with the building. From the second half of the sixteenth century instruments, wind instruments above all, took a permanent place in the liturgy beside the organ. Groups of singers and players were set apart and made to answer, merge and clash — the cori spezzati, or split choirs, and the echo sonatas. Voices and instruments were mixed within the same choir, and in Giovanni Gabrieli’s Sacrae Symphoniae (1615) the instruments no longer simply doubled the voices but took parts of their own. After him, the Basilica notes, instrumental music was published on its own, and by the end of the seventeenth century purely instrumental forms were common in the Basilica.

From the second half of the 1500s to much of the 1700s, it concludes, Venice was a capital of music, if not the capital.

Monteverdi

The chapel’s high point came with Claudio Monteverdi, who left the court of Mantua in 1613 to succeed Giulio Cesare Martinengo as maestro. He reorganised the chapel and wrote much for it, and with his pupils Giovanni Rovetta and Francesco Cavalli and his colleagues Alessandro Grandi and Francesco Usper, his name carried far beyond the Republic. The rest of the seventeenth century took him as its reference.

After Monteverdi

The eighteenth century brought a strong orchestra into the Basilica under Antonio Lotti and Antonio Biffi, with Benedetto Marcello and Antonio Vivaldi close by, and ended under Baldassare Galuppi, “il Buranello”.

The fall of the Republic in 1797 cut the chapel down. It became the Patriarch’s chapel; through the nineteenth century its orchestra shrank until it disappeared and it lost its high voices. From Antonio Buzzolla (1850–1870) it turned back to unaccompanied music with organ, added boys’ voices in 1890 to sing the sixteenth-century repertoire again, and rediscovered Gregorian chant; the young Lorenzo Perosi was at St Mark’s from 1894 to 1898. In 1974, the Basilica records, the chapel nearly came to a standstill, and survived thanks to its singers and its maestri.

New organs

On 10 February 2026 the Procuratoria signed the contract for new pipe organs with two builders, Johannes Klais Orgelbau of Bonn and Francesco Zanin Organi of Codroipo. The plan places four sections around the church — the main organ in the gallery on the Gospel side, a solo section in the gallery opposite, and one in each arm of the transept — and restores, as a separate instrument, one of the two historic organs by Gaetano Callido, silent for more than a century, so that the Basilica can again play “with two organs”, as it did for centuries. The Procuratoria ties the project to 2028, 1,200 years since the relics of Saint Mark arrived; it gives no completion date.

Hearing it today

The Cappella Marciana, the Basilica says, is one of the few chapels in Italy that still sings fine polyphony regularly in the liturgy, with music from eight centuries ago to a few weeks old. It sings the solemn Mass at 10:00 on Sundays and holy days — Sundays and holy days of obligation, in the nave: 8:00; 10:00, the solemn Mass sung by the Cappella Marciana; 12:00, the organ Mass; 18:45. Entry for Mass is always free through the Porta dei Fiori, on the north façade (Piazzetta dei Leoncini); it is a service, not a concert, and the times are on the opening hours page. The galleries the choirs sang from are the singers’ galleries whose bronze reliefs Sansovino made — see the sculpture.