Psalm 51—A Favorite Text For Composers

For Sunday, September 14, 2025
Miserere mei Deus by Antonio Lotti

By David Jolliffe

Over the centuries, composers of anthems and hymns have taken a great liking to Psalm 51, which begins “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your great mercy.  And according to the multitude of your tender mercies, blot out my iniquity.”  Many of the settings of this psalm are titled simply Miserere mei Deus, a Latin transcription of the first stanza of the psalm.  One of the earliest versions of the Miserere, a polyphonic setting (that is, a setting that combines two or more melodic lines) was created around 1630 by Johannes Martini for the Estes court in Ferrara, Italy, and as late 1997 the renowned American composer David Hurd, whose music the St. Paul’s Choir performs regularly, created a setting for the choir of All Saints Church in New York City.

By far the most frequently sung settings of the Miserere emerged in the late Baroque period, roughly 1600 to 1750, and the most famous version was created by the Italian composer Gregorio Allegri in 1638.  For more than century, this setting was sung only in the Vatican and only during Holy Week, the latter a practice that continues to this day.  In its early years, Allegri’s Miserere was the Vatican’s “property,” and to protect it from thievery the Vatican did not publish the setting, so one would have had to go to Rome and attend a service in the Vatican to hear it.  (It was this setting, by the way, that the 14-year-old Mozart allegedly heard once at the Vatican, when back to his flat and transcribed verbatim from memory, and then returned to the Vatican the next day with the pirated version hidden under his hat so he could check the accuracy of his transcription when the choir performed the piece again. That legend might be apocryphal!)

If the Vatican has its preferred setting of the Miserere, so does St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice.  The Miserere there is sung every year on Maundy Thursday, using the setting composed by Antonio Lotti in 1720.  It is this setting that the St. Paul’s choir will sing at the 11 a.m. service on September 14.

Lotti, born in 1667 and died in 1740, offers a prime example of “hiring from within.”  He began his musical career as a boy alto in the cathedral choir at St. Mark’s—his father was organist and choirmaster there—and rose in the ranks from second organist to first organist and ultimately maestro di cappella, a position he achieved in 1736.  In addition to church and chamber music, Lotti composed 27 operas, and he spent two years mid-career in Dresden, producing a range of works.