Miserere (Allegri)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Gregorio Allegri's Miserere has a reputation built on secrecy, genius, and a choir that guarded its secrets like sacred relics. At its heart is a setting of Psalm 51, composed for a single, specific purpose: the Tenebrae services of Holy Week inside the Sistine Chapel. For a long time, the world outside the Vatican walls was not meant to hear it the way the chapel's own choir sang it. Or so the story went. How did a piece written for private liturgy become one of the most beloved choral works in history? And how much of its mystique was real, and how much was legend?

• 2. Chapel Secrets and Open Copies

  ›

  Allegri composed the work around 1638, during the reign of Pope Urban VIII, setting it among the falsobordone pieces the Sistine Chapel choir used for Holy Week. The practice of using such settings reached back to at least 1514. What made this piece seem forbidden was the oral tradition surrounding it. The Renaissance ornamentation that gave the Miserere its distinctive character was passed down through the choir's own practice, not through any written score. That tradition was virtually unknown outside the Vatican by the time the work became famous, and the gap between what people heard about the piece and what they could actually access fed a powerful myth. The myth crystallised into a specific claim: that only three authorised copies existed outside the Vatican, held by Emperor Leopold I, the King of Portugal, and Padre Martini. This claim, oft-repeated over generations, turned out to be misleading. Copies were freely available in Rome. Performances were documented in London as far back as around 1735, and by the 1760s the Miserere was considered one of the works most usually performed by the Academy of Ancient Music.

• 3. Mozart's Memory

  ›

  On the 14th of April 1770, Leopold Mozart wrote a letter to his wife describing something extraordinary: his fourteen-year-old son Wolfgang had heard the Miserere during the Wednesday service in Rome and, later that same day, written the entire piece down from memory. The letter became the sole surviving source of this story, and it caught the imagination of everyone who heard it. Doubt has since settled over several of its details. Mozart had visited London in 1764-65, where the Miserere was already in regular performance. He had also met Padre Martini on the journey to Rome, making a prior encounter with the piece quite plausible. Leopold's letter itself contains statements that are confusing and seemingly contradictory. Yet the tale of the fourteen-year-old transcribing the piece from a single hearing proved irresistible. Less than three months after that visit, Mozart was summoned back to Rome by Pope Clement XIV, who praised him for his feats of musical genius. On the 4th of July 1770, the Pope awarded Mozart the Chivalric Order of the Golden Spur.

• 4. The Ornament Problem

  ›

  Pietro Alfieri, a Roman priest, published an edition of the Miserere in 1840 that included ornamentation, with the explicit aim of preserving the performance practice of the Sistine choir. His edition covered both Allegri's setting and that of Tommaso Bai, whose version dates to 1714. Alfieri's work pointed at the real heart of the piece's mystique: the ornamentations that made it famous were Renaissance techniques that predated the composition itself. These were the techniques the Vatican closely guarded, not the bare notes on the page. Even Charles Burney's transcription, widely circulated and influential, did not capture the ornamentation. Felix Mendelssohn transcribed the work in 1831, and Franz Liszt produced his own version too. Various other sources from the 18th and 19th centuries survive, with and without ornamentation, each representing a different layer of understanding of what the piece actually sounded like. The version most performed today carries a famous high note, a "top C" in the second half of the four-voice falsobordone. That detail traces to William Smyth Rockstro's edition, published in the first edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1880.

• 5. The Version the World Knows

  ›

  Robert Haas combined Rockstro's 1880 version with the first verse of Burney's 1771 edition in 1932, producing what became the basis of the standard text. That composite version gained wide reach after 1951, when Ivor Atkins published an English edition that replaced the original Latin text with Miles Coverdale's translation from the Book of Common Prayer. A subsequent recording by the Choir of King's College, Cambridge built on Atkins' text and helped fix this version in the public ear. In March 1963, the Choir of King's College recorded the work again, this time conducted by David Willcocks, with the then-treble Roy Goodman among the singers. That recording appeared originally on a gramophone LP called Evensong for Ash Wednesday. In 2015, the Sistine Chapel Choir released their own recording, the first CD the choir had ever made, featuring the 1661 Sistine codex version recorded in the chapel itself. A full performance of the Miserere runs between twelve and fourteen minutes.

• 6. Structure of the Voices

  ›

  Allegri wrote the Miserere for three choirs. The first two choirs, one of five voices and one of four, alternate through the verses. A third choir sings plainsong responses. The specific verses follow a careful pattern: verses 1, 5, 9, 13, and 17 go to the five-part first choir; verses 3, 7, 11, 15, and 19 go to the four-part second choir; the remaining verses carry the plainchant. All three choirs join together for verse 20, delivering a nine-voice finale. The original vocal forces were arranged as SATTB and SATB. At some point during the 18th century, one of the two tenor parts was transposed up an octave, producing the SSATB arrangement that most ensembles perform today. The piece is grounded in the falsobordone technique, a method used at the time for setting psalm tones in a polyphonic way, and Allegri anchored his setting to the tonus peregrinus. In December 2008, BBC Four broadcast a documentary titled Sacred Music: The Story of Allegri's Miserere, presented by Simon Russell Beale, featuring a performance by The Sixteen conducted by Harry Christophers.