Allegri's Miserere Mei

This music prompts tears on account of its unblemished purity, so beautiful indeed that the Vatican once banned it. An unaccompanied choral setting of the Miserere ("Have Mercy on Me, O God") from Psalms 51, it was composed for the Sistine Chapel in the 1630s for the Tenebrae Holy Week service, as candles were extinguished one by one, leaving the faithful in darkness. More than a century later, Mozart marveled at it. The sound of a boy treble, soaring to a top C, is near miraculous. A later work with that same limpidness is the "Pie Jesu" from Fauré's Requiem.



REFERENCE

• Gregorio Allegri (1582-1652) was an Italian composer and priest of the Roman School of composers. He lived mainly in Rome, where he would later die.