When the 14 year-old Mozart perpetrated a daring theft from the most powerful institution in the world, there was no need to circumvent a laser grid by descending on cables from on high.
Mozart and his father attended a Holy Week service at the Vatican in 1770. There, they encountered for the first time Gregorio Allegri’s haunting “Miserere.”
Allegri composed his setting of Psalm 51 (50) in the 1630s. The piece was intended for exclusive performance in the Sistine Chapel, as part of the Tenebrae service of Holy Wednesday and Good Friday.
Its conception is a striking one, with two choirs: one intoning a simple chant, and the other, spatially separated, providing ornamentation. The effect of a stratospheric top C makes the “Miserere” one of the most enthralling works in the choral literature of the late Renaissance.
The Vatican, realizing it had a good thing, forbade performance of the piece or copies of the score to be circulated outside its walls, under pain of excommunication.
It was Mozart who blithely liberated the piece, copying it down from memory and handing it off to author and music historian Charles Burney, who published it without delay.
Mozart was summoned before the Pope, and rather than being excommunicated, he was showered with praise for his feat of musical genius. The ban on the “Miserere” was lifted.
Mission accomplished!
These portraits, of Allegri (left) and the teenage Mozart, will self-destruct in five seconds
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