Monteverdi, Scarlatti and Verdi -all three were opera composers. Their letters very clearly show this was how they saw themselves. How fortunate then that they also turned their hand to church music! Whether by choice or for financial reasons hardly matters, since they thereby abolished the artificial separation between the secular and religious spheres. But what about the religious dimension of these works? None of them ever mentioned it. Yet their brilliant inspiration turned these sacred texts into musical masterpieces -music as vividly of it's time and as timeless as their operatic creations.