L'Italo-Americano

L'Italo-Americano THURSDAY, MARCH 22, 2018 www.italoamericano.org 8 FRANCESCA BEZZONE S ince I came back to Italy, about 4 years ago, I rekindled my love for music and joined a polyphonic choir: we mostly sing in church, do the occasional concert and, of course, this time of the year we work overtime, as Holy Week celebrations are quite intense and we sing almost every day. This year, our parish priest asked if we could learn il Miserere del- l'Allegri: "it's really hard to learn, but beautiful." Beautiful is not sufficient a term to describe this piece of baroque music which, strangely enough, remains largely unknown to mainstream music listeners. Apparently, Allegri's Miserere had been explicitly composed to be performed in the Sistine Chapel, only during Holy Week and that no one could even think to sing it outside of those walls and those days, or they w ould have been dead. Quite literally, because whoever did it could apparently be sen- tenced. More on it in a minute. Indeed, the history of the composition is extremely inter- es ting and a bit of res earch unearthed quite a bit of curious trivia about it and its author, shedding some light on the mys- tery around both. Allegri composed his Mis- erere around 1630, specifically for the Officium Tenebrarum of the Sistine Chapel. It wasn't the first, nor the last to be created, but its beauty, his tory and, indeed, the secrecy surrounding it made it quite unique. Some curious facts could be already said about Allegri himself who was, for some time, wrongly believed to be related to Correg- gio the painter, born Antonio Allegri. Legends wanted him also to be a castrato, singing as an alto, although his portraits, which show him always with a beard, seem to make it unlikely. As fascinating as Allegri's own life and person can be, his Miserere does much better. Pope Urban VIII gave the composer the duty to create a work to be performed during the H oly Week and he came out with the Miserere: it was so beautiful, so intimate and touching that the Pope - and this is history - for- bade its execution outside of the Vatican. The ban was officially extended also to its score, which could not be copied or sold. Now, the whole sentence-to- death affair, it seems, was more of a urban legend, so flamboyant and popular how ever that it reached our times, still happily making the rounds among musi- cians and can tors . A llegri's work became so famous that people would visit the Vatican in occasion of Holy Week cele- brations only to be able to listen to it. Now, the Sistine Chapel was well known for the talent of its choir and cantors, who were considered true vocal virtuosi particularly appreciated for their abbellimenti, that is, variations on a piece's original composition for simple aesthetic reasons. All choirs made abbellimenti on most musical pieces, and Alle- gri's Miserere wasn't an excep- tion: and here starts the juicier part of the mystery, that of the top C. A top C is a note rarely seen in choral music: you find it, of cours e, in operatic arias for sopranos, but they are barely pre- sent in sacred compositions. However, it tended to appear on the many flourishes typical of the baroque era, those very virtu- osismi the Sistine Chapel's choir built its reputation on. And one sneaked its way into Allegri's Miserere, too. The top C wasn't in the original score, but the ver- sion containing it was the one people were accustomed to and ended up becoming more origi- nal than the original. Because, as we said, tran- scribing the score was illegal, many musicians never quite real- ized the top C didn't come from Allegri's pen, but was a later addition. Indeed, notes that high were even less common in those years than they are in Romantic or contemporary operatic music and, when performed, they were usually done to show off the tal- ents of a child cantor or, even more often, of a castrato. So, the version of the Miserere we know today is not quite the same as the one Allegri created, but rather a variation, result of centuries of virtuosi's performances and of the inability to access the actual manuscript of the piece. Yes, an inaccessible manu- script, but that's not to say some- one didn't manage to get those notes out on a piece of paper. All of them, by heart, after having listened to them only once: it was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who, at the tender age of 14, while travelling around Europe with his father Leopold, stopped in the Vatican and decided to participate to Holy Week litur- gies. Legend says he listened to the Miserere on Holy Thursday morning, transcribed it when he got home and returned once more to the Sistine Chapel on Good Friday with the transcrip- tion hidden in his hat, to fix the few little mistakes he had made. When the Pope got to know of young Wolfgang's intrepid initiative, he was so amused and, I dare say, astonished by his tal- ent, he not only did not punish him, but awarded him the Speron d'Oro, or Golden Spur, a Papal Order of Knighthood. Mozart hasn't been the only one to play a trick on the Sistine Chapel's S chola Cantorum "stealing" a transcription of the compos ition. In 1831 F elix Mendelsshon Bartholdy wrote it dow n by heart, bringing it a fourth higher than the original, so Allegri's G turned into a top C. After a century of scores elab- orated on unknown transcrip- tions and leaked versions of the original, it was Austria born Robert Haas, in 1931, to finally standardize the composition, making the top C part of it offi- cially. Today's version of Allegri's Miserere may not be exactly the one he had created, but it certain- ly didn't loose any of its beauty and pathos. A piece of music to absolutely listen to. Forbidden music: Allegri's Miserere LA VITA ITALIANA TRADITIONS HISTORY CULTURE Gregorio Allegri, composer of the Miserere: for some, he was a castrato, but where did that beard come from, then? The Sistine Chapel: for centuries this was the only place where Allegri's Miserere could be performed

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