This book is the product of twenty years of research into the life and music of Benigno Zerafa (1726–1804), a mid-eighteenth-century Maltese priestcomposer of sacred music. A major part of that research was undertaken during two academic courses in musicology at the University of Liverpool: a Master' degree (1997) with a dissertation comprising a biographical, historical and analytical study, together with a critical edition of Zerafa's 1743 Messa a due cori (Z2); and a doctoral thesis dedicated to his life and music (2011).

The purpose of this book is to provide a preliminary study into Zerafa's life and work, commencing with his early years leading up to his departure for Naples as a student (1738–44), continuing with his forty-year career as maestro di cappella of the Cathedral of Malta (1744–86), and concluding with the final years leading up to his death in 1804. The focus remains on the music that he cultivated throughout his life. His oeuvre numbers 148 sacred vocal works, ranging from large-scale works for two choirs, two orchestras and soloists, to concise works for solo voice and continuo.

The research presented here falls into three categories. The first is made up of biographical, historical and literary studies based mainly on official documents, musical scores, and descriptions of performances at the Cathedral, all principally held by the Archives of the Cathedral of Malta, at Mdina. Documents dealing with the composer's life, the environment in which he was brought up and in which he worked, the liturgy and local religious life, performance practice, the reception of his music and its performance history: all these are discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 3 is about Naples and Neapolitan life during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its material mostly derived from various studies conducted by experts in the Neapolitan domain, as well as from contemporary sources.

The second category comprises source studies mainly based on the assembled musical and textual sources, and refers to such matters as the identification of the composer's musical and textual handwriting, the determination of the authenticity of works attributed to him, the texts he used for his vocal works and the elucidation of annotations on certain musical manuscripts. These elements are discussed in Chapter 4, which also contains English translations of documents written in Latin and Italian.