a Franco-Italian composer of large scaled polychoral sacred choral works (e.g., one work featured forty-eight vocal and instrumental lines). He composed Masses, motets, Magnificats, and other sacred vocal works. Much of Benevolo's fame as a composer has rested largely on his supposed composition of the fifty-three part Missa Salisburgensis, which musicologists believed was first performed by Benevolo in Salzburg Cathedral in 1628. Nevertheless, external and internal evidence have demonstrated that the Mass is in fact the work of composer Heinrich Ignaz Biber.
