92: The Miserere

You would be hard-pressed to find a musical selection more associated with one day of the Church year than today’s selection is, with Good Friday. I am, of course, talking about Gregorio Allegri’s setting of Psalm 51. 

A bit of background: I’ve made it my custom the last few years, on Holy Thursday until the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, to listen to works as normal; but then to only listen to the Miserere until about 1:40 PM on Good Friday, switching then to the St. John Passion, so that the point at which my recording of choice will reach the point in the Passion Narrative of the death of Christ is precisely at 3:00 on Friday. After the Passion ends, at about 3:30, except for whatever is played at the Celebration of the Passion that night (which very often includes the Miserere, the subject of this article), I do not listen to anything else until the morning of Holy Saturday. 

As I mentioned in this post (https://qwertysthoughts.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-story-behind-piece-mozart-suposedly.html) on another of my blogs, there is quite a lot of popular intrigue and urban-legend-making around this piece, especially its relationship to Mozart. It is true that it was written for the exclusive performance of the Sistine Chapel Choir, and it is true that for a time no one else could ever copy it, and it is true that Mozart had a phenomenal ability to transcribe things from memory after listening only once, but the idea that he did this—and then was reprimanded by the Pope—as a child while visiting Italy seems more and more like a tale meant to prop up Mozart’s (absolutely incredible) genius and sell his brand, and less like actual historical fact, as time passes. 

Even if today holds no religious significance to you, listen to the Miserere, and marvel in it for a bit. This work is all about contrast: light and dark, major and minor, solo and choir. Sometimes it helps to listen to recordings with the score, and other times, depending on the physical setup and the quality of the videography, it is more beneficial to see the performers. 

Where they are matters in a way that makes it quite unique. The Miserere is written for 2 choirs having nine voices (SSATB in Choir I, SATB in Choir II), plus a tenth tenor voice. This separation is why it is sometimes good to see the choirs—because most of the time, Choir I is off on the left, and Choir II is off on the right, but, even more importantly, the tenor soloist is usually either in a pulplit, choir loft, or somewhere else “offstage,” invisible to both both choirs and the public for whom the Miserere is being performed; in any case, far, far away from everyone else.

The psalm begins with choir I, who immediately establish G minor in bar 1, but then walk away just as quickly, since bars 2-5 (the rest of the phrase; quite strange to have a 5-bar phrase sound so natural, isn’t it?)  are just as clearly grounded in the relative B-flat major as bar 1 had been in G minor. From then until bar 13 (the end of the first section), we pass around B-flat, E-flat, C minor, D major, and G major, ending this section on the V chord (as a triad, i.e., not the dominant seventh) of where we started. 

The next few bars are, essentially, unmetered and put naturally-cadenced human speech to music in the form of the solo tenor part. This reveals something quite important about the work: its antiphonal form. That is, that from now until the end, we’ll be passing ideas back and forth, not just choir I to choir II, but choirs to soloist and back. A choir will sing, and the soloist will answer; the soloist will sing, and the choir will answer. 

The first entrance of Choir II is marked much more by the presence of pedal point, either through notes in rhythm with everyone else, or through long, sustained notes in the basses which I’m certain Allegri wrote to mimic the pedals of an organ, since, on Good Friday, the organ cannot sound. Choir II’s second phrase is, no doubt, what nowadays gives the Miserere its greatest notoriety, and what I can assure you I playfully reminded every soprano I know about—the mistake an English music teacher from 300 years post-Allegri made when writing a section in a textbook about this kind of antiphonal writing. For reasons that to this day remain a mystery, from bar 25 onward, the rest of choir II’s part was transcribed into the textbook (and now everyone sings it like this) a fourth higher than supposedly was “correct” according to what Allegri actually wrote. 

This “mistake”, which has now given us the highlight of the whole work—and the reason sopranos need that reassurance—is a high C that emerges out of 2 consecutive leaps of a perfect fourth: the D about an octave above middle C, up to G, up to the C two octaves above middle C. First of all, two consecutive, large leaps like this are hard for anyone, and generally speaking, writing something like that breaks all the rules of voicing I’ve been laying down since the beginning of the year. Second, Good Friday liturgies don’t start with the Miserere, so you’ve already been singing on and off for an hour or two (or longer!) when you get to this point; and you still have to think about keeping your voice fit for Holy Saturday (another 3-4 hours of on-and-off singing) and Easter morning. Third, almost no hymns you sing in church on a regular basis actually ask you to go that far, so depending on the singer, range could be a serious issue. Finally, everyone knows this high C is coming, and schola choirs who sing the Miserere are usually quite small, so the few sopranos (if not a single soloist) who sing it are incredibly exposed by the small ensemble and enormous expectation.  

After that phrase finishes (and resolves to the major I, not the minor i), we again hear from the off-stage antiphonal tenor, a very-quick-to-go-to-major Choir I, and the tenor again. After this, Choir II returns, again with the same “mistake” with the high C. By now, the antiphonal nature of the psalm should be clear; after the second high C, the tenor returns, then choir I, then the tenor, then choir II (and a third high C), and the cycle continues:

• Choir I

• Tenor

• Choir II (always featuring the high C)

• Tenor

We hear the cycle five times total—and after the fifth high C, something changes as the psalm concludes. Choir II would normally be followed by the tenor, but instead, the last time, they are followed directly by Choir I. Likewise, after Choir I, who themselves would be followed by the tenor under normal circumstances, the Miserere concludes with the only time all nine voices of Choirs I and II sing together, and the Miserere comes to a close having come to rest on the major I.