Stabat mater in F Minor

Delicious dissonances, infectious rhythms and a sense that the angels must have dictated its intensely expressive melodic lines are among the boldly etched hallmarks of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. The work, written around 1736 for two castrati singers and strings, appears to have been its young composer’s response to a setting of the same text (and for the same forces) made in Naples in 1724 by Alessandro Scarlatti, and may have been commissioned to replace it in the repertory of a noble Neapolitan confraternity’s annual Good Friday meditation on the Virgin Mary. Pergolesi’s composition presents a profoundly moving vision of Christ’s mother at the foot of the Cross, her suffering and compassion crystal clear in such affecting arias as “Vidit suum dulcem natum” and “Eia mater fons amoris”, and the heart-melting duet “Quis est homo”. Romantic myth, concocted from hearsay in the early 1830s by the Marquis of Villarosa, helped sustain the fame of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. The composer’s first biographer embroidered his scholarly research with a yarn about how the terminally ill Pergolesi, not long past his 26th birthday, felt utterly compelled to finish his sacred work and died clutching its recently completed manuscript. Despite evidence that the piece was written months earlier for the Naples church of Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori, the death-bed story suited a composition that achieved cult status in the mid-1700s. The Stabat Mater, first published in London in 1749, spread like wildfire thanks to countless handwritten copies, one of which was adapted to a German text by J.S. Bach, and annual performances in Paris that drew vast crowds and brought the city to a standstill.