Miserere mei, Deus.
“Have mercy on me, O God.”
These are the opening words of Psalm 51 in the Latin Bible, and from the first word, Miserere—“have mercy”—the psalm came to be known simply as the Miserere.
According to the biblical story, the words belong to King David after his adultery with Bathsheba and his arranging for her husband, Uriah, to be killed in battle. Confronted with what he has done, David does not defend himself. He asks God for mercy:
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your great mercy. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
For centuries, Psalm 51 has been one of Christianity’s great prayers of repentance.
Sometime in the 1630s, the Italian composer Gregorio Allegri wrote a setting of the psalm for the Sistine Chapel in Rome. It was intended for the solemn services of Holy Week, when the chapel was gradually darkened as candles were extinguished one by one.
The music is remarkably simple in its basic design. Verses of the psalm are sung in plainchant, alternating with passages sung by two groups of singers: a larger choir of five voices and a smaller group of four. Again and again the music moves between the austerity of the chant and the richer sound of the choirs.
There were no women in the papal choir. Women were not permitted to sing in the Sistine Chapel, so the highest parts were sung by male voices. In the long European church tradition, boys with unchanged voices supplied the treble sound that today we often hear sung by women sopranos.
And it is the treble voice that gives Allegri’s Miserere the moment for which it is now famous.
The music has been restrained. The voices seem almost to be praying rather than performing. Then, from the smaller choir, a single treble line begins to climb.
Higher.
And higher.
Until suddenly it reaches a high C.
For an instant the voice seems to have escaped the other voices altogether. It hangs above them, extraordinarily clear and exposed, before descending again into the choir.
The effect is so beautiful that for many listeners today, that one soaring note is Allegri’s Miserere.
There is, however, a small historical complication. The famous high C does not appear straightforwardly in Allegri’s surviving original music. The Miserere belonged to a living performance tradition in the Sistine Chapel, in which singers ornamented the written notes. Over generations the music was copied, embellished, altered, and sometimes misunderstood. The version that eventually became famous throughout the modern world is therefore not simply Allegri’s manuscript reproduced note for note. It is Allegri’s music as it came down to us through centuries of singing.
Perhaps that makes the high C more interesting rather than less.
No single moment need have created it. A piece of music written nearly four hundred years ago passed from singer to singer, choir to choir, manuscript to manuscript, generation to generation, until somewhere along that journey a treble voice climbed higher than Allegri had written it.
It climbed, finally, to that high C.
And there, for one brief moment, above the other voices in the Sistine Chapel, it seemed to have nowhere higher to go.
Yego’s Chronicles 