Miserere (Allegri)

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Engraving by Gregorio Allegri, he is holding a sheet of music marked Miserere in his hand
The first bars of Allegri's Miserere

The Miserere of Gregorio Allegri is a famous A-Cappella -Vertonung of Ps 51 ( Ps 50  Vul in the count of the Vulgate ). It is named after the incipit of this psalm in the Latin Vulgate, Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam , "God, have mercy on me for your goodness."

Allegri probably wrote it in the 1630s while he was papal chaplain in Rome under the pontificate of Urban VIII . It was sung in the Sistine Chapel in the Karmetten as the first psalm of lauds during Holy Week until 1870 . Copying the score and performing it on other days was eventually banned under the penalty of excommunication , so that Allegris Miserere was soon surrounded by a myth.

The fourteen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is said to have heard the piece during a Wednesday service in Rome in 1770 and later wrote it down correctly from memory. Two days later he went to the Good Friday service to make minor corrections. Later, on his travels, he met the English historian Charles Burney , who took over the play and brought it to London, where it was published in 1771. After the publication, the ban was lifted. However, the published version did not include the rich ornamentation for which the work is known today. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the work was rewritten and supplemented several times, including by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy in 1831 and Pietro Alfieri in 1840.

The Miserere is a comparatively simple Fauxbourdon movement for nine voices , which are divided into two alternating choir groups . A five-part choir sings a simple version of the Miserere, the second, four-part choir, an ornamented variant at another point in the performance room. Due to a transcription error in a version compiled by Sir Ivor Atkins in 1951, a section of the work was notated a fourth too high, so that the highest soprano voice reached the three-stroke c (c 3 ) - this high note is not found in the original Vatican manuscripts and also in no sheet music edition before 1951. The version of the piece usually sung today therefore differs from the original; its widespread use made it a work of art in its own right. The composer Franz Wittenbrink once said about this piece: "If there is a heaven, it must be in these sounds."

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hanna Klimpe: Franz Wittenbrink on revolutionaryism: "My master plan was the revolution". In: taz.de . December 20, 2013, accessed December 12, 2019 .