Miserere mei, Deus

composer

SSAB SSATB

author of text

Psalm 50 (51)

Recordings

Hear my prayer
Jeremy Budd (treble), St Paul's Cathedral Choir, John Scott (conductor)

Play all extracts from this album CDH55445 Helios (Hyperion's budget label) July 2013 Release

Allegri: Miserere & the music of Rome
The Cardinall's Musick, Andrew Carwood (conductor)

Play all extracts from this album Buy by post £13.99
CDA67860 Studio Master FLAC & ALAC downloads available

Exultate Deo
Westminster Cathedral Choir, James O'Donnell (conductor)

Play all extracts from this album Buy by post £13.99
CDA66850

The Music of St Paul's Cathedral
St Paul's Cathedral Choir, John Scott (conductor)

Play all extracts from this album Buy by post £4.99
SPCC2000 Super-budget price sampler

Details

Jeremy Budd (treble), Nicholas Thompson (treble), Wilfrid Swansborough (countertenor), Timothy Jones (bass), St Paul's Cathedral Choir, John Scott (conductor)

Track 4 on CDH55445 [13'35] Helios (Hyperion's budget label) July 2013 Release Copyright holder as reported by MCPS: Chester Music Ltd
LatinEnglish

Westminster Cathedral Choir, James O'Donnell (conductor)

Track 8 on CDA66850 [11'21] Copyright holder as reported by MCPS: Public Domain
LatinEnglish

The Cardinall's Musick, Andrew Carwood (conductor)

Track 15 on CDA67860 [12'35] Copyright holder as reported by MCPS: Public Domain
LatinEnglish

Jeremy Budd (treble), Nicholas Thompson (treble), Wilfrid Swansborough (countertenor), Timothy Jones (bass), St Paul's Cathedral Choir, John Scott (conductor)

Track 13 on SPCC2000 [13'35] Super-budget price sampler Copyright holder as reported by MCPS: Chester Music Ltd
LatinEnglish

Miserere mei, Deus

EnglishFrançaisDeutsch

The piece known as ‘Allegri’s Miserere’, a setting for nine voices of Psalm 51, has a bizarre history. It is highly unlikely that the widely accepted twenty-first-century version was ever written down by the composer and it has come into being as a result of a number of factors. Allegri wrote a relatively restrained setting of the words of Psalm 51 and his singers would have been expected to adorn his original with ornaments and embellishments, probably getting more florid as the piece went along. The setting was traditionally sung during the Holy Week services in the Sistine Chapel until the 1870s, and the ornaments used by the singers to decorate Allegri’s original were famously not written down but passed from generation to generation. Various attempts were made by prelates, noblemen and musicians (including Leopold I, Padre Martini, Mozart, Burney and Mendelssohn) to procure a ‘correct’ version of the piece. The versions which these people heard or saw or published served only to confuse the issue. There was no reliable ‘urtext’ edition on which to draw and it was only with the gradual rediscovery of various sources and manuscripts that a version in Latin with Allegri’s original and a single set of ornaments for the soloists together with interpolated plainsong verses was produced by the late Dr George Guest at St John’s College, Cambridge in the late 1970s. Since then, regular performances of the Miserere in English cathedrals and chapels have firmly cemented the piece as an essential part of our musical heritage.

Regardless of its authenticity (if such a thing can be said to exist) the magic of the piece relies on the juxtaposition of the original falsobordone written by Allegri with the ornaments or abbellimenti added in the solo writing and the plangent tones of the plainsong verses (sung to the chant ‘Tonus Peregrinus’ which is quoted in the topmost voice of Allegri’s original). The biggest debate rages about the famous high ‘C’. It can be said with some certainty that a composer of Allegri’s generation and education would be highly unlikely to write the ungainly interval of an augmented fourth in the bass part in the solo section. Yet only with this interval does the top ‘C’ become possible and the top ‘C’ is now the sine qua non for the listener! Contemporary taste and bravura must have played a part in the ornaments that singers chose to use when improvising in the Papal Chapel and the ornaments heard by the young Mozart could have been a world away from the version sung by Allegri’s own choir in the early seventeenth century. Perhaps they found a way of embellishing up to top ‘C’ without the unacceptable harmonic shift, a shift which although ‘breaking the rules’ sounds to our modern ears unremarkable.

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Hyperion Records