“To achieve artistic and economic independence, Palestrina works with great diplomacy in the shadow of the powerful Roman Catholic Church.

Despite strict ecclesiastical rules, he succeeds in modernizing music.” [1] The film starts with the death of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina in 1594.

Afterwards his son, Iginio, some of his students and colleagues, members of the Cappella Giulia (Julian Chapel) at St. Peter's Basilica, and also members of the Roman clergy give their personal statements or testimony on Palestrina’s life and career: from his childhood, when he is trained as a choir-boy in the circle of the "Roman School" of polyphony founded by Costanzo Festa, to the peak of his career, when the plague and an influenza epidemic take away his two oldest sons and his wife.

He developed a new style in polyphonic art, the genus novus with a balance between word and sound, in which all voices are separate and independent from each other.

After having lost his two sons and his wife, the testimonies reveal with the wink of an eye, that Palestrina, instead of taking holy orders, decided to marry a very rich widow, enabling him to afford the publication of all his scores.