The story has all the elements of Da Vinci Code minus the horrible murders: A powerful organization that wants to keep the lid on a sacred work it deems too painful for ordinary mortals to bear. An accomplished music composer and priest who sings in the Papal Chapel in Rome from the age of 9 until his death. A Pontiff who makes smoking tobacco an excommunicable offence, orders the most notorious persecution of a scientist in history and pillages the Partheon. An 18th century child prodigy who creates the first known bootleg copy of a piece of music. A 20th century boy with the voice of an angel who sings it into a global sensation. And the celebrated Old Testament King who starts it all.
Welcome to the enchanting world of Miserere mei, Deus, a late Renaissance work for choirs composed by the Italian priest Gregorio Allegri (1582 - 1652), who was an early candidate for the intriguing phenomenon known as the one hit wonder. Although Allegri composed many other works, he, like Pachelbel of Canon and Gigue in D fame, is today solely remembered for a single work, Miserere me, Deus, which is shrouded in secrecy, legend and mystery thanks in no small part to the Vatican.
Allegri was appointed to the Papal Choir in Rome during the reign of Pope Urban VIII (1568 - 1644), who was a scion of the important Florentine family of the Berberini. A great patron of the arts, the Pope earned future notoriety by coercing Galileo to recant his heliocentric theory of the solar system and looting the metal girders from the Partheon to manufacture canons, an act of unimaginable vandalism that prompted the jibe "What the barbarians did not do, the Berberini did".
In the subsequent years, the only place where Miserere could be heard was in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, where it was played during the Holy Week. Like modern-day pilgrims' visit to Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, it became fashionable for 18th century artists, socialites and aristocrats on European Grand Tour to attend the performance of Miserere in the Papal Chapel and twitter about it in their diaries and letters back home.
Then, suddenly, in 1770, Miserere became public property thanks to a precocious 14-year old boy named Mozart. The visiting child prodigy from the Archbishopric of Salzburg listened to the performance of Miserere once, transcribed everything from memory, went back next day to listen to one more performance in order to make some corrections in his copy, and shared his booty with a visiting English traveler, composer and musicologist, Dr. Charles Burney. Dr. Burney published the score in 1771. The Vatican had no choice but to remove the ban and applaud the genius of history's first and most famous music bootlegger.
Some time in the late 19th century, a copyist's error crept into the score of Miserere, the so-called top C, which became part of the canonized version of the work as performed today. Many connoisseurs believe that this chance error actually served to enhance the beauty of the original score, in itself a contentious notion that has added to the work's enduring mystique.
Before the teenage Mozart blew the Vatican ban on Miserere, only three authorized copies of the score were reported to have been made and distributed outside the Vatican. One of the recipients of this papal favor, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, is reported to have remonstrated with the Pontiff that the copy that he received did not match the score as performed in the Papal Chapel as the score was missing ornamentation. Ever since then, rumors and myths have circulated about secret ornamentation that were passed from performer to performer in the Papal Chapel but missing from many unadorned scores that floated around Europe.
The modern version of Miserere itself is an end product of many revisions and editing as the work crossed both temporal and spatial boundaries after its release from the gilded vaults of the Vatican.
It was another wunderkind, a 12 year old British boy named Roy Goodman who propelled Miserere into popular consciousness with his celebrated performance with the Choir of King's College in the March 1963 recording for Decca label. In a pleasing symmetry spanning a couple of centuries, the Renaissance polyphonic masterpiece set to Psalm 51, which was written by King David in a fit of repentance after his adulterous affair with Bathsheba, was finally introduced into the bazaar of popular culture by another daring youngster.
Roy Goodman, currently one of the world's most successful freelance conductors, was recently interviewed by Margaret Throsby on ABC Classic FM radio. You can listen to the interview here.
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