Contextul politico-religios favorabil dezvoltării corale în Ţările Române în a doua jumătate a sec. al XIX-lea. Arhiva Arhiepiscopiei Bucureştilor/ 18
Religious political context favorable to moral development in the Romanian in the second half of the nineteenth century. Archive of Archdiocese of Buc

Summary/Abstract: The present study intends to analyze only the correspondence found in the Bucharest Diocese Archive on year 1876, on the subject of church choirs, as even from a 100 page correspondence within a single year there are several conclusions to be drawn: - the goal of the collaboration between secular authorities and the Church was to officialise and even generalise choral singing in churches. The fact that the singers were from then on paid by the state, that they were trained at the Conservatoire and that the choirs were periodically under inspection from the Ministry makes it clear that the aforementioned objectives were both precise and constant; - the letters exchanged between the Metropolitan Bishop and the Ministry of Culture and Cults looked for solutions to personnel shift within the choirs, to the singers' service and Conservatoire classes attendance, to various petitions, complaints, examinations; the salary records offer a valuable information: from the (male) „duos, trios and quartets” of 1865 - 1866, in fact simply groups of the habitual singers who answer the priest's words, by 1876 the choir had moved to a kind of mixed status, as it included tenors, basses, and children as mezzo-sopranos and sopranos. This type of choir, using children's voices for the mezzo-soprano and soprano parts, lasted until 1895, when Gavriil Musicescu broke with the tradition of the Church Synod and introduced women in the choir.

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