martyrdom · 230 · Rome
The early evidence for Cecilia is a building. The titulus Caeciliae in Trastevere is one of the oldest title churches of Rome, its priests signing at the synod of 499, and it stands where a house belonging to a Caecilia stood — the Caecilii were a great Roman family and the church keeps the name. That she was a martyr is old and firm; when she died is not, and the dates offered run from the reign of Marcus Aurelius to that of Alexander Severus. The passion that supplies everything else — the husband Valerian converted on their wedding night, the brother Tiburtius, the angel, the three sword strokes that failed to kill her outright — is late fifth century. The music comes from a sentence in it. At her wedding, it says, while the instruments played, Cecilia sang in her heart to the Lord alone. Read as an antiphon out of context it became Cecilia singing to instruments, and by the fifteenth century she had an organ. This dataset grades her traditional. Her seed row asked for that and did not get it: the note said the word without the prefix build-silver reads, so she rendered as historical until this pass.
Where does the patron saint of music come from?
A mistranslated line in her own passion, about a thousand years later.