The Martyr Who Became the Patron of Music

Cecilia is venerated as one of the early Roman martyrs, though the historical record beneath the legend is thin, her acts were composed centuries after the events they describe. Her enduring identity is as the patroness of music and musicians, a role that rests on a single line in her legend: that at her wedding, while the instruments played, Cecilia "sang in her heart to the Lord alone."

From that phrase grew an entire iconographic tradition, Cecilia at the organ, Cecilia with instruments, and, from the sixteenth century, the founding of musical academies and festivals under her name; Purcell, Handel, and Britten among others composed odes for her feast on 22 November. In the legend she converts her husband Valerian and his brother before all three are martyred, and her body was later said to be found incorrupt in the catacombs. Whatever the history, her cultural afterlife is vast: a martyr remembered less for how she died than for the music offered in her name.