Art of myth-making

The story of Allegri’s Miserere has probably become the most engrossing myth that great art of any kind has to offer. From the mists of time when it was first heard, through the threat of terrible punishment — excommunication — to those who might betray it, to the touch of divine intervention that Mozart brought it, it has everything to stimulate the pens both of those who want to rationalise it and those who are more inclined to fabulate on an inspiring theme. It helps that the music itself is so powerful, to which many figures, past and present, have paid tribute: Mary Shelley, for example, described how ‘the soul is carried away into another state of being’. Evidence of its modern status is given by the ArkivMusic online list of recordings, which identifies that there are exactly a hundred of them, surely putting it in a category by itself.

The problem is that every time someone writes anything about it we seem to get just that little bit further from what actually happened in the first place, and that bit further down the path of turning it into what we want it to be. This is the natural process of myth-making. In the case of the Allegri, it has gone on for nearly 400 years, and is set very fair to continue indefinitely. I wonder where we will have got to by the turn of the next century; but although I hate to spoil a good story by the tactless recitation of the facts, there are elements in this one that are promoted by wilful thoughtlessness.

The most persistent piece of nonsense has to do with Mozart’s contribution. There is no doubt that on 13 April 1770 (a Friday, presumably Good Friday) he went to the Sistine Chapel with his father Leopold and memorised what he had heard.