Gregorio Allegri: Biographie, Werkverzeichnis, Edition und Untersuchungen zu den geringstimmig-konzertierenden Motetten mit Basso (review)

Gregorio Allegri is probably doomed to be forever known for only one work (his double-choir Miserere) and that in a version which he would hardly have recognized. Yet at his death in 1652 he was described in an uncharacteristically fulsome eulogy in the Diario del Puntatore of the papal choir as having been a master 'of the most recondite and arcane artifices of music, of which his works composed with the highest exquisiteness for our chapel will give worthy testimony to posterity'. He was also a popular figure with his fellow singers and with successive popes: two years before his death he had been persuaded to be the choir's maestro for the all-important Jubilee year of 1650, despite his age (68) and at the express wish of Pope Innocent X. Allegri had been the standard-bearer of the stile osservato, the learned, beautifully elaborated style that the chapel had adopted in its heyday after Palestrina's death. The diary's eulogy specifically says that Allegri had learnt it from Giovanni Maria Nanino, seen as the second founder (after Palestrina) of the Roman tradition. When Pope Urban VIII revised the texts of the office hymns in the 1630s, it was to Allegri that he and the papal choir turned in order to adapt Palestrina's cycle of Vespers hymns to the new texts, contemptuously sweeping away the adaptations that had earlier been completed by the outsider Antonio Abbatini. Allegri was excused singing duties while engaged in the task. He had been relatively old—47—when he entered the papal chapel as an alto in 1629. Even then he initially had to share a place with Stefano Landi until a permanent position became vacant in 1635. Andrea Adami, writing in 1711, said that he did not have a good voice and that it was his compositional abilities that had induced Urban VIII to ask for his appointment. Kerstin Helfricht points out in the book under review that he was never in demand for private music-making outside Cappella Pontificia, for example in cardinals' palaces. This would imply that his voice may not have been suitable for quieter chamber music but may have been fine for the louder singing of sacred music in the Cappella Pontificia. He certainly sang solo sections in Holy Week Lamentations, but as he got older his alto or high tenor voice cannot have been easy to maintain.

The sadness felt at Allegri's passing was for more than just the man: it was also a lament for the end of the composing tradition within the papal chapel. The new composers were now working elsewhere—St Peter's, the German College, S. Maria Maggiore, the oratory of SS. Crocefisso—and the papal repertory began to retreat and fossilize, those very 'recondite and arcane' aspects praised in the eulogy of Allegri proving its downfall. Allegri's stile antico masses did continue to be performed in the chapel for a time, but ironically, it was one of his simplest settings that was to survive, and that only because it proved a suitable vehicle for the improvised ornamentation that continued to make performances of his Miserere so famous.

Kerstin Helfricht has attempted a life-and-works study of the composer that goes some way towards illuminating his interesting history but stops well short of the full and rounded study that he deserves. She is reluctant to ask larger questions and contents herself mainly with descriptions and traditional Wort–Ton analyses. Indeed her study seems an odd throwback to the past, given that so much more progressive scholarship has recently been emanating from the Musikabteilung of the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome, where she carried out some of her work. In particular, the study by Bernhard Schrammek of Allegri's contemporary Virgilio Mazzochi—Zwischen Kirche und Karneval: Biographie, soziales Umfeld und Werk des römischen Kapellmeisters Virgilio Mazzocchi (Kassel...