In the eighteenth century Maltese culture was in the hands of various culturally distinct groupings that were dominated by the powerful elite – social groups founded on kinship, religion and class affiliations. The nobility, who resided mainly at Mdina and Valletta, stood at the top of the social hierarchy: these were persons who mixed only with the ruling elites. Their lifestyle distinguished them from the lower classes in countless ways. Elite culture, to which Zerafa belonged, was academic and professional, recondite and expressive. In this sector of the population lived the artists who provided the superior kind of painting, sculpture, music, theatre and literature. All of these required an educational preparation in order to be fully appreciated. At the bottom was a ‘popular’ culture. In his Descritione di Malta Gian Frangisk Abela (1588–1655), Vice-Chancellor of the Order of St John, equated the ‘Maltese’ with the elite and the educated. He ‘envisaged the role of the Maltese elite within the ideological context of Malta' attachment to Christianity’, further adding that they were ‘the noble and precious marrow of the city.’

The Maltese elite managed to dominate the historical events that shaped the cultural history of the country. Above all, it was the Church that manipulated historical events for its own purposes, the main ones being political. Zerafa took a primary role in the shaping of Maltese contemporary artistic history – a legacy that survives physically in his collection of manuscripts. His music earned him a place in the annals of Maltese eighteenth-century higher society – a ‘one-class society’ arising from a system of social privilege, ‘which consisted in how much respect people could earn from their fellowmen’; the title Signor marked out the privileged person from the commoner – it distinguished a person of quality from the general populace. Documentation in the form of autograph scores, separate parts, payment receipts and correspondence commonly refers to Benigno Zerafa as ‘il Signor Rev. Don Benigno Zerafa, maestro di cappella’. The evidence is all there:

Zerafa jwith the intrinsic merit of his contributions, remains, so far, unchallenged.