I prayed to God not like a miserable sinner in despair, but calmly, slowly. In this I felt that an infinite God would surely have mercy on his finite creature, pardoning dust for being dust. These thoughts cheered me up. I experienced a sure joy so confident that as I wished to express the words of the prayer, I could not suppress my joy, but gave vent to my happy spirits and wrote, above the Miserere, Allegro.”
So Joseph Haydn, the 200th anniversary of whose death we celebrate this year, explained how he could set even a prayer for mercy in an upbeat tempo. In one of his late Mass settings, at the point where the tempo usually slowed for the words “Thou that takest away the sins of the world”, Haydn kept going in a fast tempo and even quoted from his own Creation a passage referring coyly to the sexual urge that engenders life. The Empress Maria Theresa insisted that he remove this in her own copy of the score.