Stabat Mater
by Giovanni Baptista Pergolesi (1735)
Good Friday
Friday, 18 April, 2025
7:00 p.m.
Margaret Cormier, soprano
Rebecca Claborn, mezzo-soprano
David Smith, piano
The medieval Latin hymn Stabat Mater Dolorosa, long attributed to Franciscan friar Jacopone da Todi (c.1300), appears first in a thirteenth century Graduale from the Dominican Convent of S. Maria Maddalena di Val di Pietra in Bologna, Italy. In the manifold versions of the poem recorded over subsequent centuries, each three-line stanza follows an AAB rhyme-scheme, with regular numbers of syllables in each line (8.8.7). These features, along with the raw emotion and stark imagery of the poem have inspired many composers, from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries, to set the text to music. Even without a musical setting, the simple act of reading or reciting the poem casts its own melodious and contemplative spell.
One of the most famous and beloved musical settings of the Stabat Mater is of course the one we are privileged to hear this evening, by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736). Likely completed in the last year or two of his all-too-short life (Pergolesi died at age 26 of tuberculosis), the feeling, invention and freshness of the music all reflect the best of the high-Baroque style of composition, in which the emotion or action of the text can be ‘painted’ by harmonies, rhythms and melodic gestures. As was true of many composers of his time, Pergolesi wrote music for both the church and the opera stage. Thus we can hear in his work, clearly intended for virtuosic singers, a dramatic range of emotion, balanced at some moments to lift us out of the tragedy of the text with lush, even cheerful extravagance, only to cast us down in the next moment to feel the full force of the human anguish, plaintive sobbing and deep grief of the Mother of our Lord at the foot of the cross.
Featured artwork: “The Death Shroud,” Viktor Vasnetsov, 1848-1926