"Weeping, the mother stood at the foot of the cross on which her son hung to die." So reads the opening line of the poem written in the 13th century by a Franciscan in honor of Mary mourning the fate of her son Jesus on the cross. It has been set to music by many composers, and Pergolesi's version is one of the best known. It is also very light - the galant style reminded me (and many critics) of Pergolesi's opera buffa La Serva Padrona. Well, there are worse pieces to resemble to!
Pergolesi was commissioned by a brotherhood of devout noble laymen to create a new Stabat Mater for the San Luigi Church in Naples. It was to replace the Stabat Mater from 1724 by Alessandro Scarlatti, which had been performed as part of the liturgy every Good Friday for the previous decade and was considered "old-fashioned."
Throughout Europe, Pergolesi's Stabat Mater attracted great interest. It became the most widely printed musical work in the 18th century, but because not all music publishers were equally careful with Pergolesi's autograph, many inaccurate editions came out. Editions also appeared in which the orchestra was expanded to include winds, or a choir was added. In the 20th and 21st centuries, according to the insights of historically informed performance practice, performances and recordings again went back to Pergolesi's original score. Following the example of Alessandro Scarlatti, he had chosen the intimate scoring of two solo voices (soprano and alto), accompanied by strings (two violins and viola) and basso continuo (cello and organ).
The famous philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who also composed himself, called the opening movement "the most perfect and moving duet that ever flowed from the pen of a composer." The admiration for this work is also evident from the fact that other composers, including Giovanni Paisiello, Joseph Eybler, Abbé Vogler, Antonio Salieri and Franz Xaver Süßmayr made adaptations of it. Johann Sebastian Bach used Pergolesi's Stabat Mater as the basis for the motet "Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden" (BWV 1083), on a German-language, Lutheran paraphrase of the miserere text (Psalm 51).
Against all the admiration for Pergolesi's masterpiece stood the opinion of the eminent musicologist Padre Martini, who in 1774 found the work's gallant style inappropriate for serious religious music. But he remained a voice crying in the wilderness, as it is indeed such beautiful music!
Listen to: Gli Angeli Genève at the Utrecht Early Music Festival.
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