A new version

After the dramas of the Napoleonic era came to an end in 1815, a new generation of singers brought new interpretations of ‘the Miserere’. In the mid-1820s a new version started to circulate, now known from twelve closely related manuscript copies (listed in detail in Appendix 8, to which the numbers in bold in the discussion below refer). Two are in the British Library, but most of the others are in German-speaking countries. They have been collated to produce what is called here Source A, transcribed in part in Appendix 9. It is the basis of the performing edition of Allegri’s Miserere included with this book, Edition 2 of Appendix 13.

Complete sources

British Library Add. MS 31525 contains sources 1 and 2 bound together. It belonged formerly to the English organist, collector, musicologist and editor Joseph Warren (1804–81; see Fig. 17), whose name is found on the title page. It was part of a large collection of manuscripts that were acquired from him by Julian Marshall, and sold on to the British Library in 1881.

The first manuscript, Add. 31525(1), is marked Come si eseguisce nella Cappella Pontificia Di Roma [as it is executed in the Papal Chapel in Rome] In Roma presso Bened Morganti Via de Crociferi N°119 and is misattributed to Sigr Mro Baj. The second, Add. 31525(2), in a different hand, shows more signs of haste and is unattributed except in pencil (to Bai) in a later hand (which may be Marshall’s), no doubt misled by the false attribution of the first version. But its title, simply Miserere, is in the same hand as the whole of 1, so we can probably safely assume that Warren acquired them together, probably in Rome in the mid-1820s. Both contain all the verses, and the second has more numerous dynamic markings. Morganti was a seller of books and manuscripts, some of them copied to order, and his name is found in numerous sources dating from around 1800 to the 1830s. Although the British Library catalogue still refers to the manuscript as eighteenth-century, its experts consider that the paper dates almost certainly from the early nineteenth century.