Tongues set free

Eleanor Lancelot

Not all composers have set the Miserere, based on Psalm 51, in its entirety. Many will be familiar with the setting by Allegri, but James MacMillan’s Miserere also encompasses the complete text. The work opens with the lower voices in E minor, capturing the heavy-to-bear weight of the sin that ‘is ever before me’. Throughout the second part of the work MacMillan’s pared-back texture, with plainsong over sustained notes, speaks to the simple but exposing requirement for ‘truth in the inward parts’. 

A shift comes at ‘Sacrificium Deo spiritus contribulatus’ (‘The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit’) and soon we hear again the opening theme (now transformed, shimmering in E major), the listener’s focus moved from penitence to hope. The piece is technically demanding – a feature which perhaps evokes the excruciating hardship of the journey of the cross (and indeed of journeying through a world marred by sin) – but the final jubilant, liberated phrases are redolent of tongues set free to ‘sing of thy righteousness’.