On Ash Wednesday, cathedrals and chapels will resonate to a mystical piece of music created for the Vatican’s papal choir in the Sistine Chapel. Ysenda Maxtone Graham discovers the legend of the Allegri Miserere.
IT’S the time of year for being reminded that we are but dust and unto dust shall we return. Far from shunning this information, we seem to crave it. Thousands of us will throng into cathedrals and college chapels for Ash Wednesday services on March 6 next week. As we shuffle towards the altar to have our foreheads marked with a cross of ash, the top Cs of the Allegri Miserere from the choir will remind us that, although we are but dust, we can still invoke the celestial.
It’s a spine-tingling piece: the 20 verses of Psalm 51, ‘Have mercy upon me, O God’, set in turn to five-part choir, men’s voices in steady plainsong and a solo quartet singing from a distant gallery or transept. I first heard it in the sixth form, on the King’s Cambridge LP Evensong for Ash Wednesday, and was addicted for life.
Roy Goodman was the superb 12-year-old treble soloist for that world-famous recording. ‘Our rugby match finished late that day,’ Mr Goodman (now 68) recalls. ‘We didn’t have time to shower and Matron, Mrs Aikin, told us to put on our normal long-trousered Eton suits and hurry to chapel for the recording.’
With muddy knees and hardly time to get his breath back, Roy sang the solos ‘beautifully’, as Sir David Willcocks said on Desert Island Discs when he chose the piece as one of his eight recordings to take to the island.
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