Did a 14-year-old Mozart really steal the Vatican's secret music by ear?
The story goes that Allegri's Miserere was guarded by the Pope, and that the teenage Mozart heard it once in the Sistine Chapel and wrote it all down from memory. The piece was real and so was the visit. The secrecy, and parts of the legend, are shakier.
Gregorio Allegri set Psalm 51, 'Have mercy on me, O God', around 1638 for the Sistine Chapel choir to sing during the Tenebrae services of Holy Week. The music alternates between a five-voice choir, a four-voice choir and plainchant, and the two choirs finally join in a nine-part ending. What made it famous was less the written notes than the ornaments the papal singers added, an unwritten Renaissance tradition that was scarcely known outside the Vatican.
That gave rise to a myth of secrecy, including a claim that only three authorised copies existed outside Rome. In fact copies circulated in Rome, and the piece was sung elsewhere: performances in London are documented from about 1735, and by the 1760s it was a regular item for the Academy of Ancient Music.
The Mozart story rests on a single source, a letter Leopold Mozart wrote to his wife on 14 April 1770. It says that Wolfgang, aged fourteen, heard the Miserere at the Wednesday service and wrote it out from memory the same day. Historians have doubts: the music was already known in London, which the Mozarts had visited in 1764 and 1765; the boy had met the scholar Padre Martini on the way to Rome; and Leopold's letter contains confusing, apparently contradictory statements. Mozart was, even so, made a knight of the Order of the Golden Spur by Pope Clement XIV that July.
One more twist: the soaring top C that listeners now treasure is not quite Allegri's. The version most sung today descends from an edition printed in the first Grove Dictionary of Music in 1880, later merged with an 18th-century edition by Charles Burney. A 1963 recording by the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, sung in English, helped make it one of the best-loved unaccompanied choral works in the world.
Source: Wikipedia — Miserere (Allegri) · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
