British institution

Now that the Allegri Miserere season is fully launched — the text is suitable for Lent — it seems fitting to ask why every choir in the land thinks it incumbent on them to sing this piece of music, for 150 years only ever sung within the walls of the Sistine Chapel.

Now that the Allegri Miserere season is fully launched — the text is suitable for Lent — it seems fitting to ask why every choir in the land thinks it incumbent on them to sing this piece of music, for 150 years only ever sung within the walls of the Sistine Chapel. It never used to be so. The local cathedral choir might periodically have had a go at it — and St John’s Cambridge always broadcast it on Ash Wednesday — but nowadays performances by secular and liturgical choirs alike have reached epidemic proportions, a kind of top C fever. This is all the stranger when one reflects that most of these choirs will sing much worse than usual in attempting it. Why bother?

Because it has acquired the status of a must-have accessory. This is partly to do with its colourful history (Mozart’s memory, castrati, excommunication, the morphing of the original composition into what we have today) and partly because performing it has become a challenge everyone wants to talk about, to join the ranks of those who have sung the Allegri in public. It is almost as if those who belong to a choir which has not attempted it have fallen behind in one of the big experiences of life.

The trouble is that five solo top Cs in 12 minutes is a test of nerves which very few people, especially children, are equal to.