Miserere mei, Deus (‘Have mercy upon me, O God) Disaster! With one fell swoop, the second king of Israel broke three of the commandments God had given to help His people live in the light of His holiness. The enormity of what David had done in his sudden relationship with Bathsheba did not seem to strike his heart immediately, however. He had coveted another man’s wife, committed adultery, planned and plotted the death of one of his most loyal and upright followers – and then carried on as if everything was normal. But God knew, and in his love and holiness He sent the prophet Nathan to confront David. Gulp! It was a task that required courage, given the king’s sometimes domineering and even tyrannical tendency to exert his power in unkind and capricious ways. Nathan, who seems to have served as something akin to a court chaplain, knew that he was risking his life, and wisely approached the matter by telling David a riddle within a parable about a rich man stealing a poor man’s pet lamb, before pointing the finger squarely at him. Nathan’s words pierced the hardness in David’s heart, reminding him of the shepherd he had been, and the unfairness of the tale that he had just heard. The penny dropped. David heard and took the matter to heart – and his repentance was as profound and far-reaching as his faithfulness had been so outstanding on so many other occasions. Deeper far than mere remorse, the Holy Spirit has used David’s record of his repentance in what we know as Psalm 51 to touch and convict countless hearts ever since. As we reflect and pray, may the Lord help us to enter more deeply into a 360 degree awareness of own faults and failings, and to pray blessing upon blessing on those who we have hurt or maligned. Few pieces of music can help us to enter more deeply into this ‘mea culpa’ recognition of our own sins and shortcomings than Gregorio Allegri’s stunningly beautiful setting of this psalm. You will probably be familiar with the story of how this sublime music was discovered. Jealously guarded by the Vatican, and forbidden to be sung anywhere outside the pope’s own Sistine Chapel, (and even there only during Holy Week), the story goes that Mozart, the teenage musical prodigy, heard the Miserere being sung during a service, and promptly rushed home and wrote the whole complex piece out from memory. Whether or not the story depicts exactly what happened, the fact is that, thanks to Mozart, the music entered the public domain – for which we can never be too grateful. A devout believer, Allegri himself had trained as a priest, and worked with the Vatican’s Papal Choir. He has been described as a man ‘whose music was imbued with his religious faith and personal sense of justice, and who was ‘a model of priestly peace and humility, a father to the poor, the consoler of captives and the forsaken, a self-sacrificing help and rescuer of suffering humanity.’ This combination of David’s words and Allegri’s heavenly music represent a wonderful opportunity for heart spring-cleaning. The music was recorded for us in Berlin in April 2025, and played by Susanne Herzog, Shirley Richards, Anne Seidler, Gabriele Kröhnert and Alexander Koderisch, with Julia and Thomas Herzog and Peter Richards making solo contributions on recorder, cor anglais and French horn.