Mozart Requiem and Allegri Miserere

Join us to hear the St Margaret's Choristers sing Mozart's Requiem in the magnificent setting of Westminster Abbey with a programme of music telling the remarkable story of Mozart's prodigious talent.

Allegri’s Miserere mei (1638) was jealously reserved by the Vatican's Sistine Chapel for performance within its own walls during Holy Week. This was until the 14-year-old Mozart, in 1770, struck by the work’s beauty after hearing it on a visit to Rome, went back and wrote it out from memory – and the following year the work was published in London from his copy. At the other end of his short life, Mozart composed two masterpieces of sacred music – the miniature gem Ave verum corpus, a short but perfectly formed communion motet, and the monumental and dramatic Requiem, famously left unfinished at his untimely death but completed by his pupil Franz Süssmayr. Drawing together these strands, is the sublime music of Mozart's teacher Franz Joseph Haydn.