Of all the stories that are told about Wolfgang Mozart’s visits to Italy, one exceeds all others in fame. It concerns the day in Rome in April 1770 when the 14-year-old Mozart first heard Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere, an unaccompanied nine-part polyphonic setting of a psalm that normally lasts about 13 minutes. The Miserere rises repeatedly to an ethereal top C, a haunting moment that had already given the work Europe-wide mystique in Mozart’s time and ensures that it is still widely performed and recorded today.
The Miserere had been written in the 1630s for the exclusive use of the Sistine Chapel choir and for performance only during Holy Week. The score was a ferociously guarded Vatican secret. No written versions were supposed to exist. Yet, in the chapel that day, young Mozart listened to the Miserere once, then went home to his lodgings and wrote the entire thing down from memory.
