Gregorio Allegri

• 1. Introduction

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  Gregorio Allegri was an Italian Catholic priest and composer who died in Rome on the 17th of February 1652, leaving behind a body of sacred music that most people will never encounter. But one piece carries his name into almost every conversation about Renaissance choral music. The Vatican loved it so much they threatened excommunication to anyone who dared copy it down. That protection held for over a century, until a fourteen-year-old boy walked into the Sistine Chapel and changed everything. Who was the man behind this forbidden score, and how did a single psalm setting outlast every other work he ever wrote?

• 2. A Roman Life in Music

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  Allegri was born in Rome around the 14th of January 1582, and he would die in the same city seven decades later. His training began when he was taken on as a puer, a boy chorister, at San Luigi dei Francesi. His teacher there was Giovanni Bernardino Nanino, who served as the church's maestro di cappella and who was the brother of the also notable Giovanni Maria Nanino. The path mapped out for young Allegri was firmly toward the Church, and he was granted a benefice at the cathedral of Fermo. It was there, away from Rome, that he composed a large number of motets and other sacred works. Those compositions drew the attention of Pope Urban VIII, and that attention brought him a prize appointment: a place in the choir of the Sistine Chapel as a contralto. He joined that choir on the 6th of December 1629 and held the position until his death more than two decades later. Those who knew him described him as virtuous, good-natured, and generous toward the poor and toward prisoners.

• 3. A Composer of Two Worlds

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  Allegri published two volumes of concerti for five voices, one in 1618 and another in 1619. Two volumes of motets for six voices followed in 1621. He also produced an edition of a four-part sinfonia, five masses, and two settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Many more motets were never published during his lifetime at all. His secular and instrumental output placed him among the earliest composers to write for stringed instruments. The scholar Athanasius Kircher preserved one specimen of this kind in his landmark work Musurgia Universalis. Most of that published instrumental music belongs to what was then the progressive early Baroque stile concertato. Yet the music he wrote for the Sistine Chapel points in a different direction entirely, descending from the Palestrina style and in some instances stripping even that refined approach of nearly all localised ornamentation. He is credited with the earliest string quartet. His career sat precisely at the fault line between two eras.

• 4. The Forbidden Miserere

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  Allegri set Vulgate Psalm 50, known also as Psalm 51, and titled it Miserere mei, Deus. It is scored for two choirs, one of five voices and one of four, and it has been sung annually during Holy Week in the Sistine Chapel for many years. One choir sings a simple fauxbourdon based on the original plainsong chant for the tonus peregrinus. The other choir sings a similar fauxbourdon but adds pre-existing elaborations and cadenzas. Critics and musicians have debated which stylistic category the piece belongs to. Many have pointed to it as an example of the stile antico or prima pratica, but its reliance on polychoral techniques puts it outside the true boundaries of that category. A closer comparison, musicologically speaking, is to the works of Giovanni Gabrieli. The Vatican understood that the piece held a power that only grew from being heard live and nowhere else, so they forbade copies under penalty of excommunication. That prohibition held for well over a century before it met its match.

• 5. Mozart and the Unauthorised Copy

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  In 1770, a fourteen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart traveled to Rome with his father and heard the Miserere twice in the Sistine Chapel. He then wrote it out from memory, producing what is now considered the first known unauthorised copy of the work. The Vatican's excommunication threat, so effective for generations, had not anticipated a mind like Mozart's. There is, however, evidence suggesting the story is more layered: copies of the work appear to have circulated in Europe before Mozart's 1770 visit. Mozart may even have heard the piece performed in London as early as 1764 or 1765. The following year, in 1771, the English traveller and music historian Dr Charles Burney obtained Mozart's copy and published it in England. Burney's edition, though historically important, did not capture the ornamentation for which the work was famous. One further wrinkle crept in during the 1880s, when a copyist introduced an error that survives in performances to this day. The shift from G minor to C minor that listeners now hear as a striking harmonic move is not original; it reflects the second half of the verse being transposed up a fourth, and the original version never included a top C.

• 6. Legacy and Lasting Resonance

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  The Miserere stands today as one of the most frequently recorded examples of late Renaissance music, though Allegri actually composed it during the Baroque era. That tension is itself a comment on the Roman School of composers, who were stylistically conservative long after surrounding styles had moved on. The full music performed at Rome during Holy Week, Allegri's Miserere included, was later issued at Leipzig by the publisher Breitkopf and Hartel. Accounts of what that Holy Week performance in Rome sounded like in person survive in two notable places: in the first volume of Felix Mendelssohn's letters, and in a collection titled Letters from Italy by a writer identified as Miss Taylor.