Vatican Secrets
In 1640, the Italian composer Gregoria Allegri wrote a piece for a nine-part choir called Miserere Mei, Deus. It was a setting of the Ash Wednesday Psalm ('Have mercy upon me, O God...') and was written while Allegri was an employee at the papal chapel in Rome under Pope Urban VIII, in the time of the counter-Reformation.
The choir is divided into a main group and, unusually, a mini-choir, usually placed at some distance from the main choir. Notably the mini-choir has two solo treble parts, one of which rises up to a high C, an extremely high note for any soprano.
However unusual the setting, the real notoriety of the work comes from its history. When the Pope first heard it, he deemed it so spiritually powerful, so etherally divine, that only his own personal choir at the Sistine Chapel should be allowed to perform it, and even they only once a year during Holy Week. This invariably lent the performances an atmosphere of ritual and mysticism; the copies of the music were locked in the Vatican's vaults for the whole of the rest of the year, kept jealously away from the prying eyes of the musical directors of Europe.
However unlikely this sounds nowadays, we must remember that in the 17th Century sacred music was considered to be just that, and a work so clearly spiritual would indeed be considered dangerous to mortal ears.
Composers and musicians traveled to Rome every year specially to hear this legendary work, and few were disappointed. All were impressed by the theatrical touches leading up to its opening bars, where candles in the Chapel were one-by-one extinguished with the clergy kneeling in the dark, and equally so by the virtuosic embellishments of the castrati who often sung the upper treble line. Mendelssohn described it two hundred years later:
The Sistine Chapel, showing the choir gallery on the right
The Pope allowed two personal copies to be made as special gifts; one to the Emperor Leopold I, and the other to the King of Portugal in the eighteenth century. Other than this, the prohibition on the distribution of the piece was thorough and meticulous. At least, until 1770 where a fourteen-year-old boy shocked the entire musical and ecclesiastical world by memorising the entire work (approximately 13 minutes) on hearing it only once, and by then copying it down to paper. That boy was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Mozart's father Leopold wrote to his wife about the affair:
Notice in the Publick Advertiser, London, June 1765 showing Mozart aged 7
It was the mystery and the atmosphere that raised Allegri's Miserere to the height of musical and spiritual reverence. To trigger a response in us, music must be three-dimensional, it has to be happening to us and we have to react to it. People who have had such experiences know that music can potentially change a person's life, that it is much more powerful than we sometimes care to admit. That is why the Pope locked Allegri's Miserere away in the vaults of the Vatican: he witnessed the power music can have and wanted to control it. Undoubtedly he would have done the same with the fourteen-year-old Mozart had he known the unbelievable forces that child was to unleash.
The Chapel choir at my university recently put on an abridged performance of Allegri's Miserere, which I recorded and have made available with permission to download here [7.89MB]. Imagine as you listen sitting in total darkness in the Sistine Chapel hundreds of years ago, having just endured several hours of unison singing and Latin readings, and you might begin to realise the tremendous power the music exhorted over audiences far and wide.
Glossary
Castrati - A castrated adult male singer, usually with an exceptionally high range
Fortissimo - Italian musical term meaning 'very loud' or 'very strong'
Pianissimo - Italian musical term meaning 'very soft' or 'very weak'
Treble - Boy Soprano, the highest voice range
Unison singing - Singing with only a single line rather than several notes at once
Virtuosic - Virtuoso-like, of exceptional technical skill
I wrote this myself, pretty much off the top of my head, taking the two pictures as digital photographs from my university library, hence the slightly poor quality. This is the first in a series of several short articles on the history of music I am intending to write for the forums.
arty
In 1640, the Italian composer Gregoria Allegri wrote a piece for a nine-part choir called Miserere Mei, Deus. It was a setting of the Ash Wednesday Psalm ('Have mercy upon me, O God...') and was written while Allegri was an employee at the papal chapel in Rome under Pope Urban VIII, in the time of the counter-Reformation.
The choir is divided into a main group and, unusually, a mini-choir, usually placed at some distance from the main choir. Notably the mini-choir has two solo treble parts, one of which rises up to a high C, an extremely high note for any soprano.
However unusual the setting, the real notoriety of the work comes from its history. When the Pope first heard it, he deemed it so spiritually powerful, so etherally divine, that only his own personal choir at the Sistine Chapel should be allowed to perform it, and even they only once a year during Holy Week. This invariably lent the performances an atmosphere of ritual and mysticism; the copies of the music were locked in the Vatican's vaults for the whole of the rest of the year, kept jealously away from the prying eyes of the musical directors of Europe.
However unlikely this sounds nowadays, we must remember that in the 17th Century sacred music was considered to be just that, and a work so clearly spiritual would indeed be considered dangerous to mortal ears.
Composers and musicians traveled to Rome every year specially to hear this legendary work, and few were disappointed. All were impressed by the theatrical touches leading up to its opening bars, where candles in the Chapel were one-by-one extinguished with the clergy kneeling in the dark, and equally so by the virtuosic embellishments of the castrati who often sung the upper treble line. Mendelssohn described it two hundred years later:
The Sistine Chapel, showing the choir gallery on the right
The Pope allowed two personal copies to be made as special gifts; one to the Emperor Leopold I, and the other to the King of Portugal in the eighteenth century. Other than this, the prohibition on the distribution of the piece was thorough and meticulous. At least, until 1770 where a fourteen-year-old boy shocked the entire musical and ecclesiastical world by memorising the entire work (approximately 13 minutes) on hearing it only once, and by then copying it down to paper. That boy was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Mozart's father Leopold wrote to his wife about the affair:
Notice in the Publick Advertiser, London, June 1765 showing Mozart aged 7
It was the mystery and the atmosphere that raised Allegri's Miserere to the height of musical and spiritual reverence. To trigger a response in us, music must be three-dimensional, it has to be happening to us and we have to react to it. People who have had such experiences know that music can potentially change a person's life, that it is much more powerful than we sometimes care to admit. That is why the Pope locked Allegri's Miserere away in the vaults of the Vatican: he witnessed the power music can have and wanted to control it. Undoubtedly he would have done the same with the fourteen-year-old Mozart had he known the unbelievable forces that child was to unleash.
The Chapel choir at my university recently put on an abridged performance of Allegri's Miserere, which I recorded and have made available with permission to download here [7.89MB]. Imagine as you listen sitting in total darkness in the Sistine Chapel hundreds of years ago, having just endured several hours of unison singing and Latin readings, and you might begin to realise the tremendous power the music exhorted over audiences far and wide.
Glossary
Castrati - A castrated adult male singer, usually with an exceptionally high range
Fortissimo - Italian musical term meaning 'very loud' or 'very strong'
Pianissimo - Italian musical term meaning 'very soft' or 'very weak'
Treble - Boy Soprano, the highest voice range
Unison singing - Singing with only a single line rather than several notes at once
Virtuosic - Virtuoso-like, of exceptional technical skill
I wrote this myself, pretty much off the top of my head, taking the two pictures as digital photographs from my university library, hence the slightly poor quality. This is the first in a series of several short articles on the history of music I am intending to write for the forums.
arty
