Allegri's birthplace is uncertain but we know that from 1591 to 1596 he was a boy chorister and, thereafter, sang as a tenor in various church choirs. Having studied composition, he became a composer and singer at the cathedrals of Fermo and Tivoli. Then, from 1628 to 1630, he was maestro di cappella of the church of Santo Spirito, Rome.
Shortly afterwards, during the reign of the highly-cultured Pope Urban VIII, he became a singer in the papal choir of the Sistine Chapel. Many of his works, including his famous Miserere were composed for this choir. A setting of the fifty-first psalm, it has traditionally been sung by the papal choir in Holy Week ever since.
The highly ornamented passages which form the heart of the Miserere were kept a closely-guarded secret for centuries. Only three copies appear to have been made in Allegri's own time, one of which was rediscovered in 1770. It delighted and influenced later composers and writers, among them Mozart and Goethe.
Allegri's other works include six and eight-part settings of the mass, mostly in the a cappella style which church composers had been using for several generations. They remained in the repertoire of the papal choir for at least a century after their composer's death, unlike his published instrumental works, which were written in a more modern, but less durable, idiom, considered fashionable in his lifetime.
