Soloists

The tradition in the Papal Choir was that the polyphonic verses were sung by soloists, and it is clear from the gracing found in all the verses that this is not ‘choral’ music. Apart from this evidence, the genesis outlined in Chapter 8 of Baini’s Miserere – written in response to the perception that the five-part verses had become ‘almost monotonous, because … there are no variations’ – is very telling. Baini’s solution, to make sure that ‘every verse is treated with faithfulness to the meaning that the specific words of this psalm deserve’, created a work which can fairly be described as ‘choral’ in spirit. The simple performance of the notes on the page would suffice, with no embellishing skills required. And yet it too was performed by soloists, as Mendelssohn’s testimony of 1831 makes clear.

The problem of monotony in 1820 was clearly due to a lack of soloists capable of embellishing in an interesting way, and Kantner and Pachovsky are surely mistaken when they attempt to argue that this monotony was due to choral performance of those verses. It is therefore all the more surprising that Alfieri, alone of all witnesses, marked the five-part verses tutti. Either there really was at least one year around 1840 when the Miserere was performed thus, or else he was misinformed.

In the Sistine Chapel the Miserere was always sung entirely from the Cantoria, the modern English practice of placing the concertino choir at a distance being impossible, especially during the overcrowded offices of Holy Week. All the singers were thus crowded together in a relatively small space, and one might imagine that there would hardly be room in the Cantoria for all of them. Burney clearly struggled with this, making a point of visiting it to see for himself when he returned to Rome from Naples in November 1770.