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The finest recorded versions of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater
The work
‘My poor, favourite Pergolesi has just died of a chest infection… but his Stabat Mater is considered to be the masterwork of Latin music.’
When the French writer Charles de Brosses visited Naples in 1739, he lamented the passing of one of its finest composers: Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. By the end of the 18th century, Pergolesi had been declared ‘the Raphael and Virgil of music’, and his two most famous works, the intermezzo La serva padrona of 1733 and the Stabat Mater, said to have been written on his death-bed, were pronounced ‘as indestructible as nature’.
Pergolesi’s Naples was a city of powerful extremes: blighted by poverty, disease, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, yet splendid with its lavish Baroque palazzi, opera houses and hundreds of churches adorned with art and resonant with music. The city whose first name was Parthenope – the ‘maiden-voiced’ siren – lured with her vocal music. The soundscape of Naples’s Golden Age ranged from the brouhaha of street cries and popular songs to tragic operas and comic works in Neapolitan dialect, melodious cantatas and breezy intermezzi. Above all, sacred music flooded the city, pouring through its streets in religious processions and sacred dramas, seeping through the walls of churches, chapels and oratories.
The Latin poem Stabat mater dolorosa (long attributed, albeit questionably, to the 13th-century Umbrian Jacopone da Todi) is an emotive account of the Virgin’s sufferings at the foot of the Cross. It belongs to the tradition of Latin ‘sequences’ – compressed, metrical, rhyming verses on religious subjects. Despite its formal rigour, the poem explodes with torment and lacerating grief, and its rhyme scheme (aab ccb) poignantly exploits the effects of anticipation and memory. The maternal
By the end of the 18th century, Pergolesi had been declared ‘the Raphael and Virgil of music’
sentiment that impregnates the work resonated particularly in Naples, where the sorrows of motherhood were heightened by the fearful infant mortality rate, and where some 200 churches were dedicated to Mary.
Traditionally, lay brotherhoods sang the sequence in solemn religious processions, but later it was incorporated into the liturgy for the Feast of the
Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The origins of Pergolesi’s setting are shrouded in mystery. Tradition has it that he wrote the work shortly before he died for a noble Neapolitan confraternity: the Knights of the Virgin of the Seven Sorrows. It was probably intended for their eponymous feast day in the church of San Luigi di Palazzo, where Pergolesi’s patron – the Duke of Carafa di Maddaloni – had a private
chapel. Perhaps it was meant to replace Alessandro Scarlatti’s earlier setting for the same confraternity, as both works are for similarly spare resources: two solo voices, strings and basso continuo.
Stylistically, Pergolesi echoed the lyrical melodies and transparent textures of his comic intermezzo La serva padrona. Particularly controversial to 18th-century listeners were the dancing rhythms, syncopations, gambolling motifs and decorative trills which seemed to trivialise the grief-laden text. The composer Charles Avison claimed the young composer had not understood the difference between ‘the tenderness or passion of a theatrical scene and the solemnity of devotion.’
Yet, within the lyrical idiom, Pergolesi exploits the effects associated with Empfindsamkeit – the ‘heightened expressive style’ that steeped the contemporary European aesthetic. In the opening duet, for instance, weeping suspensions and the key of F minor set the haunting tone; Christian Schubart later associated that key with ‘groans of misery and longing for the grave’, while Haydn, Beethoven and Liszt allied it with passio (suffering). In the second movement, Cuius animam gementem, off-beat rhythms deliberately distort the natural accents of the text to evoke the stabbing sword that pierces the Virgin’s soul, while acidulous trills convey her anguish. Similarly, against the dancing rhythms of Quae moerebat, syncopations and trills suggest emotional turbulence. Chromatic colours and oscillating dynamics paint the Eja mater, in which the supplicant pleads to grieve together with Mary. Then, in Fac ut portem, listeners share the tortures of Christ’s passion as the music sears with dissonances, gashing leaps, unnerving silences and jabbing dotted rhythms. Finally, ceaseless falling motifs bathe the closing movement – Quando corpus morietur – in an eternal flow of tears. This is a heart-rending meditation on death and suffering by the 26-year-old composer, all too aware of life’s fragility.
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