Stabat Mater

Although the medieval Stabat Mater hymn was removed from the Roman Catholic liturgy by the Council of Trent (1545-63), Palestrina’s famous setting of the text for eight voices was almost certainly written for the choir of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome in the late 1580s. The elderly composer exercises great restraint in his treatment of the words of the Latin poem, an evocation of the Virgin Mary’s suffering as a witness to the crucifixion and death of her son Jesus. Palestrina begins by allocating alternate lines of text to one of two choirs before uniting both in a heartrending statement of “O quam tristis et afflicta” (“O how sad and stricken”). The simple economy of Palestrina’s mainly syllabic setting belies the work’s many subtle changes of choral texture, meter, and rhythmic accents. It also prepares the way for the overwhelming impact of “Quando corpus morietur” (“When my body dies”), desperate in its sadness, and of the final plea for the soul to be granted the glory of paradise, a prayer of hope sustained by the promise of eternal salvation.