Regarding my Saint Cecilia post, it’s interesting about Gounod: He found no pleasure in any music Rome had to offer him except for the singing of Palestrina by the Sistine Chapel Choir. He composed no less than sixteen masses. For a while he considered entering the priesthood, but in the end he contended himself with the desire to compose sacred music. Of his Saint Cecilia Mass he was “above all concerned to render its spirit in a manner that did honor to the patron saint of music: ‘There is only one difficulty,’ he wrote. ‘It is to match in music the demands of this incomparable and inexhaustible subject: the Mass!… In music!… by a paltry man!… My God, take pity on me!…’”