Sacred Music - From The Middle Ages To The 20th Century [CD 20-21]

CD 20

GIOVANNI BATTISTA PERGOLESI (1710-1736)
Stabat Mater pour soprano, alto, cordes et orgue
01. Duo 'Dolorosa' [03:32]
02. Aria (Soprano) 'Cuius Animam Gemenentem' [02:18]
03. Duo 'O Quam Tristis Et Afflicta' [02:07]
04. Aria (Alto) 'Quae Moerebat Et Dolelebat' [02:20]
05. Duo 'Quis Est Homo, Qui Non Fleretet' [02:52]
06. Aria (Soprano) 'Vidit Suum Dulcem m Natum' [03:25]
07. Aria (Alto) 'Eja, Mater, Fons Amororis' [02:33]
08. Duo 'Fac, Ut Ardeat Cor Meum' [02:23]
09. Duo 'Sancta Mater, Istud Agas' [05:39]
10. Aria (Alto) 'Fac, Ut Portem Christi Mortem' [03:42]
11. Duo 'Inflammatus Et Accensus' [02:22]
12. Duo 'Quando Corpus Morietur' - Duo 'Amen' [03:58]
Sebastian Hennig, soprano (garçon)
René Jacobs, contre-ténor
Concerto Vocale
Dir. René Jacobs
LUIGI BOCCHERINI (1743-1805)
S tabat Mater G. 532, première version 1781
13. 'Dolorosa'. Grave Assai [05:04]
14. 'Cujus Animam Gementem'. Allegro [02:16]
15. 'Quae Moerebat Et Dolebat'. Allegretto Con Moto [03:14]
16. 'Recitativo' [01:26]
17. 'Pro Peccatis Suae Gentis'. Allegretto [03:53]
18. 'Eja Mater, Fons Amoris'. Larghetto Non Tanto [07:11]
19. 'Tui Nati Vulnerati'. Allegro Vivo [04:26]
20. 'Virgo Virginum Praeclara'. Andantino [05:18]
21. 'Fac Ut Portem Christi Mortem'. Larghetto [02:37]
22. 'Fac Me Plagis Vulnerari'. Allegro Commodo [02:38]
23. 'Quando Corpus Morietur'. Andante Lento [04:17]
Agnès Mellon, soprano
Ensemble 415, dir. Chiara Banchini

CD 21

ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678-1741)
Stabat Mater RV 621
01 - 'Stabat Mater Dolorosa'. Largo [02:54]
02 - 'Cujus Animam Gementem'. Adagio [01:47]
03 - 'O Quam Tristis'. Andante [01:53]
04 - 'Quis Est Homo'. Largo [02:50]
05 - 'Quis Non Posset'. Adagio [02:04]
06 - 'Pro Peccatis Suae Gentis'. Andante [01:49]
07 - 'Eja Mater, Fons Amoris'. Largo [02:43]
08 - 'Fac Ut Ardeat'. Lento [01:38]
09 - 'Amen'. Allegro [01:07]
Andreas Scholl, contre-ténor
Ensemble 415, dir. Chiara Banchini
GIOACCHINO ROSSINI (1792-1868)
Stabat Mater
I. Introduzione. Andante Moderato. 'Stabat Mater Dolorosa' [08:39]
II. Aria. Allegretto Maestoso. 'Cujus Animam Gementem' [05:48]
III. Duetto. Largo. 'Quis Est Homo, Qui Non Fleret' [06:19]
IV. Aria. Allegretto Maestoso. 'Pro Peccatis Suae Gentis' [04:18]
V. Coro E Recitativo. Andante Mosso. 'Eja Mater, Fons Amoris' [04:47]
VI. Quartetto. Allegretto Moderato. 'Sancta Mater, Istud Agas' [06:49]
VII. Cavatina. Andante Grazioso. 'Fac, Ut Portem Christi Mortem' [04:30]
VIII. Aria E Coro. Andante Maestoso. 'Inflammatus Et Accensus' [04:27]
IX. Quartetto. Andante. 'Quando Corpus Morietur' [05:47]
X. Finale. Allegro. 'In Sempiterna Saecula. Amen' [05:39]
RIAS Kammerchor
Dir. Marcus Creed

STABAT MATER


or two voices with basso continuo on a non-liturgical text. However, most of the sacred repertory intended for liturgical use
continued to be called ‘motet’, ‘concerto’, or quite simply psalm, canticle, hymn, etc., accompanied by the incipit of the text,
such as Stabat Mater, Regina Coeli, Laudate Dominum, Magnificat and so forth. In these works, especially those composed
for solo voices, instruments and continuo, the stylistic influence of the secular cantata and the opera was enormous. The
entire rhetorico-musical language of the secular repertory – that is to say the way a musical text, like a literary one, was
regarded as a recited discourse, using the same techniques of presentation, development, and persuasion, but translated into
musical conventions or figures of style – was applied to the musical setting of a sacred text.

The Stabat Mater dolorosa, that wonderful hymn or sequence (the lament of the Virgin Mary) attributed to the thirteenth-
century writer Jacopone da Todi, is an excellent example of this. The frequently set text was treated as a choral work by the
Roman composers (D. Scarlatti, Bononcini, Caldara), whereas elsewhere in Italy the preference was for one or two solo
voices (A. Scarlatti and Pergolesi in Naples, Vivaldi in Venice). The solo voice lent itself better than the chorus to the sorrowful
expression characteristic of the words, poignantly captured by Vivaldi and Pergolesi. The latter’s version, completed shortly
before his death in 1736, used as its initial thematic material a Pange lingua for two voices by the Neapolitan composer
Francesco Provenzale (if this attribution is correct). It was rapidly disseminated throughout Europe. Even Bach produced a
‘parody’ of this gem of Neapolitan sacred music in his Psalm 51 Tilge, Hochster, meine Sunden (1744-48).

‘The chief merit of [Pergolesi’s] Stabat Mater is the sentimental charm of its melodies. Sentimental charm is indeed the chief
merit of all Pergolesi’s works, sacred or secular, [and he] could only be considered a great composer in any department by
critics who were entirely ignorant of the works of his predecessors and contemporaries.’ With those provocative words, the
English scholar Edward J. Dent dispatched poor Pergolesi in his article for an early edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and
Musicians. Behind his remarks – and they are certainly too malicious – lay a desire to demolish an early and drastic essay in a
new genre, of eighteenth-century invention, no less sentimental than Pergolesi’s music itself: the romantic biography.

In the documented outlines of his life we can read the main elements out of which the new genre was constructed: ‘uncertain’
identity; removal from an insufficient family environment; and above all early demise (he died on 16 March 1736, probably
of tuberculosis, at the age of twenty-six).

The candle was too snuffed out to soon to allow the construction of two other inevitable components of romantic biography,
misunderstanding and triumph over the odds (or: ‘genius will out’). They were therefore supplied by posterity. Was Pergolesi
misunderstood (other than by Dent)? Certainly none of his efforts at composing opera seria – Zeno’s Salustia and
Metastasio’s Adriano in Siria and L’Olimpiade – was outstandingly successful. Slow progress in accomplishing the main
task of an eighteenth-century Italian composer was normal for someone of his tender age, and in any case his qualities were
readily enough recognised to assure him not only a rapid series of commissions, but also acceptance as maestro di cappella
in more than one aristocratic household, a road which led (briefly) to Rome.

Pergolesi’s fame, which broadly speaking began with his death, can best be understood as a dialectic between the intrinsic
qualities of his music and its usefulness in the service of ideology. Even the small quantity of his output helped to avoid
inconvenient complexities and contradictions (it had other amusing consequences as well: Pergolesi is perhaps the only
composer the modern ‘complete’ edition of whose works contains more spurious than authentic compositions!). For the
eighteenth century, but even much later, the name ‘Pergolesi’ brought to mind two pieces. The first of these was the pair of
intermezzi La serva padrona (1733), whose performance at Paris in 1752 gave rise to the famous Querelle des Bouffons,


The other was his setting of the sequence for the Feast of the Seven Dolours of the BVM, Stabat Mater, for soprano, contralto,
and string accompaniment. Pergolesi may have written the work during his final illness in the Franciscan monastery at
Pozzuoli. Tradition has it that it was composed for the aristocratic fraternity in the church of S. Maria dei Sette Dolori as a
replacement for the setting by Alessandro Scarlatti. In any case its status as last (and possibly incomplete) work concords well
with its pathetic sentiment in the creation of an aura of personal tragedy, and in this respect it belongs to the same canon
as Mozart’s Requiem.

The pro-Italian French intellectuals played no small part in the elevation of the Stabat Mater to levels of myth. Charles De
Brosses called it ‘the masterwork of Latin music. There is hardly any work more highly praised than this one for its profoundly
learned harmony.’ And Rousseau, in his discussion of ‘duo’ in the Dictionnaire de musique, claimed that ‘the first stanza of
the Stabat Mater [was] the most perfect and most touching to have come from the pen of any musician’. For later eighteenth-
century writers it served as a point of reference, as in Saverio Mattei’s comparison (1784) with Jommelli’s Miserere: the
former excelled in tender and soft pathos, the latter in the high and tragic sort.

Not only was the Stabat Mater repeatedly printed in the early years of its existence (in London from 1749, also in France, but
never in Italy), it was also used, as a receptacle for afterthoughts. There is an early German adaptation, Tilge, Hochster, meine
Sunden, in the hand of J .S. Bach; J. A. Hiller set it to a text of Klopstock in 1773; the flamboyant Abbe Vogler ‘improved’ its
harmonies in the late 1770s; Paisiello ‘enriched’ it in 1810; it served as vehicle for an ode of Alexander Pope; and in 1831
Alexey L’vov transformed it into a work for chorus and grand orchestra, including trumpets, trombones and timpani! And the
list is not thereby exhausted.

The canonical status of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater doubtless owes much to the search for new solutions to the expression of
tender pathos. Another factor may, however, also have contributed to its elevation to the rank of ‘classic’. Although the Stabat
Mater is anything but Corellian, it contains two moments of ‘instrumental’ inspiration which might have evoked the spirit
(and the collocation) of the composer from Fusignano, despite their derivation from the sacred world of solemn counterpoint.
The first is the orchestral introduction to the opening strophe, which recalls a topic repeatedly treated by Corelli in the trio
sonatas (op.1 nos.2, 5; op.2, no.2, and so on); the second is the ‘Fac ut ardeat’ which might conceivably have worked as an
allusion to the strict style within a concerto grosso.

Two external elements condition Pergolesi’s musical treatment. One is the unrelieved ‘dolorous’ mood of the text, which led
to a predominant use of the minor mode (only three sections are in the major); the other is the metrical construction of the
text, entirely in eight-syllable lines, which posed a problem – only partly solved – of variety in diction. If the Stabat Mater is an
admirable exercise in the creation of thirteen roads to sweet sadness, it must also be said that its pathos is more generic than
specific: only rarely are its gestures unambiguously responsive to particular images of the poem.

Padre Martini, in his Esemplare o sia saggi fondamentale pratico di contrappunto, criticised Pergolesi for using the same
gestures in his sacred music as in La serva padrona. The accusation is weak, and in any case ideologically inspired. Affinities
with the rhetoric of opera seria, however, can be found, if one knows where to look for them. The few sections in major
mode, such as Quae moerebat, are unmistakably operatic in inspiration. For the rest, the key lies in the middle sections of
Pergolesi’s da capo arias for L’Olimpiade, nearly all of which are in minor mode, and replete with the same tenderly pathetic
gestures. – T. W.

The fact that Boccherini was one of the most brilliant composers of instrumental music of his generation is all the more


of his patron the Infante Don Luis to Las Arenas, a small town near Avila, extremely far away from the intense musical activity
of the Court, did not prevent him from remaining in touch with European musical circles. For their part, they were very
attentive to the production of a composer who had ‘strayed’ to the extreme west of the continent. It should be pointed out that
Boccherini maintained a regular and rewarding correspondence with friends and publishers abroad (mainly French) to whom
he sent his latest compositions, which thus had the benefit of a very wide distribution throughout practically all of Europe.
This applied, however, only to his instrumental music the production of which was, after all, considerable: about fifty string
trios, almost a hundred quartets, a hundred and twenty-five quintets, over two hundred miscellaneous works of chamber
music, in addition to symphonies and concertos. The religious and secular vocal works, distinctly inferior in quantity (but only
in quantity), went virtually unnoticed during the composer’s lifetime, as they do today.

During his Milan period (marked by the influence of Giovanni Battista Sammartini) he was a member of one of the first string
quartets in history, together with three other great musicians, Manfredi, Nardini, and the violist Cambini, and became an
exceptionally skilful cellist and a visionary composer of chamber music. But at the same time he did not neglect vocal music;
when he began work on the Stabat Mater he had already composed between 1764 and 1766 a mass (which has survived
only in fragments), two motets, two oratorios (Gioas, Re di Giudea and Il Giuseppe Riconosciuto), the secular cantata, La
confederazione dei Sabini con Roma (1765), and a number of individual arias. He was married to the soprano Clementina
Pelicho, the sister of one of the most illustrious divas of the time, Maria Teresa Pellicia. In 1786 he was commissioned by the
Countess Benavente to compose a zarzuela for the palace of La Puerta de la Vaga in Madrid and he wrote La Clementina, a
superb Spanish opera to a libretto by the great Ramon de la Cruz, the Spanish Metastasio.

As we see, Boccherini was by no means indifferent to vocal music. It was probably towards the end of 1781 that Don Luis
asked him to write a Stabat Mater for the sacred Office at Las Arenas. After a first version for soprano accompanied by two
violins, a viola and two cellos, he wrote a second version in 1801, to which he added an overture (the first movement of his
Symphony op.35/4 in F major of 1782) and two more singers, a contralto and a tenor ‘per evitare la monotonia di una sola
voce . . . e la troppa fatica a quest’unica parte cantante . . . senza cambiar l’opera in niente’ (to avoid the monotony of a single
voice . . . and the excessive fatigue to this, the only singing part . . . without changing the work in any way) – this explanation
was written in his own hand in the manuscript of the second version. It was given the opus number 61 (‘opera grande’) in
his autograph catalogue.

Boccherini naturally made several slight, particularly carefully considered modifications in the instrumentation to adapt it to
the new vocal specification. The articulation and the designation of some of the movements were also changed. The essential
difference between the two versions is that of chamber music and orchestral music; in the first version the voice is really
treated as another instrument that is skilfully combined with the string quintet.

The Stabat Mater of ‘Don Luis Boquerini’ is a reflection of its author, an exceptionally devout man who could not complete
a manuscript without writing ‘laus Deo’ at the end. However, this sincere spirituality has a sprightly quality that is unusual
in the often austere religious expression of the period. In his hands the sometimes lugubrious lines of Jacopone da Todi (a
Franciscan monk who died in 1306) acquire a particular luminosity without sinking into the levity or the idle frivolity of a
good number of the composers of central and northern Europe. Even if Boccherini’s music might be impregnated with a
certain operatic tone (like that of his magisterial forerunners, Alessandro Scarlatti and Pergolesi), this dramatic quality is
no less elegant. The first and last stanzas, ‘Stabat Mater’ and ‘Quando corpus’, are set in F minor; between them the work
fluctuates between various keys: ‘Quae moerebat’ and ‘Fac me plagis’ in C minor, ‘Pro peccatis’ in A flat major, ‘Eia mater’


and pathos-laden, but Boccherini never gives way to immoderate emotionalism. The melodic theme of the first stanza is of
a noble melancholy, the distress of ‘Quae moerebat’ is always reserved, and what is one to say of the marvellous cantilena of
‘Virgo virginum’ borne by the first violin and the viola accompanied by a subtle pizzicato in the bass?

Although it incontestably belongs to its period, this music remains highly personal; very few passages are evocative of the old
practices of religious music, like the fugue ‘Fac me plagis’, which is partly a reference to official Spanish church music, or the
highly orthodox final stanza in which the powerful concluding tierce de Picardie chords permeate the last bars of the work
with a thoroughly solemn character. But as a general rule, Boccherini tries not to forsake the profoundly sacred nature of the
subject; if he uses the most varied instrumental techniques it is only to emphasize the expressiveness of the musical text.
These qualities are very characteristic of his writing: frequent pedal points, sordini, sforzandi, vibrato effects, and, of course,
the omnipresence of the cello as a soaring instrumental soloist – the kind of writing he reserved for his chamber music when
he played with the Font family for the pleasure of the Infante. – E. M.

The image we have of Vivaldi is primarily of a secular composer. A few church works are popular, especially the Gloria; but
when we see his name we think chiefly of concertos, The Four Seasons in particular. Yet much of Vivaldi’s output was intended
for performance in church. For long periods of his life he taught and composed for the Pieta. One of four such institutions in
Venice, this was established in the fourteenth century as an orphanage for illegitimate girls. By Vivaldi’s time the management
had long realised the power of music to attract munificence from citizens and tourists alike. Elaborate musical performances
were given by the musicians of the Pieta. These were all female, though not necessarily impoverished orphans or young.
Although some accounts read as if these performances were concerts, they were nominally services, and concertos were
included at appropriate points. Normally there was nothing to distinguish these from concertos played in palaces or theatres.
But sometimes a work survives with a distinctive title, such as the three concertos for San Lorenzo.

Most settings (e.g. those of Domenico Scarlatti and Pergolesi) were of the complete sequence. But Vivaldi provides a concise
and moving setting of the hymn text, using a strange pattern of movements and repeats that does not fully correspond with
the verse structure. – C. B.

Rossini seems to have been following in the footsteps of Pergolesi when, in 1831, two years after he had bidden his premature
farewell to the opera with Guillaume Tell, he accepted a commission from the Spanish State Councillor and Archdeacon Don
Manuel Fernandez Varela whom he had met on the occasion of a production of his Barber of Seville in Madrid. This was
the beginning of the protracted and complicated history of the genesis of the composition. The first performance on Good
Friday of 1833 in the Spanish capital was based on a partially authentic score into which Rossini, who had been prevented
by a long illness from completing it in time, had interpolated settings by his pupil Giovanni Tadolini of the sections he had
not finished. Rossini adamantly refused to allow this composite version to be published, threatening to prosecute publishers
who disregarded his wishes ‘to the death’. This is understandable since he had only postponed completing the Stabat Mater
himself, but not abandoned it.

Finally, after his return to Bologna in 1838, he started the slow, step-by-step process of finishing the work. The original twelve-
movement scheme was now reduced to ten numbers which, far more than the older version, represent a kind of cross-section
of the full range of his palette of musical expression. Reminiscences of the church music of long-past periods stand side by
side with bel canto arias of generous, at times voluptuous brilliance, dramatic orchestral colours next to frugal, contemplative
a cappella


of stylistic unity, Rossini resorts to a ramified system of cyclic associations which is particularly prominent just before the final
apotheosis, when he introduces a quotation from the opening bars of the work.

The first performance of this new version of the Stabat Mater took place in the Theatre Italien in Paris on 7 January 1842,
and in the spring of the same year -Gaetano Donizetti conducted it with overwhelming success in Bologna. ‘It is impossible to
describe the enthusiasm’, he wrote. ‘After the final rehearsal, which Rossini attended in broad daylight, he was accompanied
home to the loud acclamations of over five hundred people. The same thing happened beneath his window after the premiere,
although he was not even in his room.’ In Italy Rossini was regarded as the leading national hero and his music – whether
religious or secular – as a patriotic beacon. And yet from the very beginning reactions to the Stabat Mater were divided. While
the public and the press everywhere reacted with frenetic enthusiasm, the attitude of the representatives of the church ranged
from reserve to concern over the profane and sensuous impetus of the music which seemed to bear the expression of sorrow
and grief without any trace of heartfelt meditative humility. It aroused violent controversy in Germany. While Heinrich Heine
made a sincere attempt to assess the work against the background of the tradition of Italian church music, and made an
enthusiastic plea for the ‘immediate passion and inner exuberance’ of the work – not, however, without caustically playing
Rossini against the ‘hypocritical, would-be-pious’ Mendelssohn – Richard Wagner, on the other hand, gibed with undisguised
disapproval in a commentary written for the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik: ‘Rossini is devout – everybody is devout, and the
Parisian salons have become oratories.’ Rossini’s own mischievously ironic self-derision to the critic Eduard Hanslick still
makes an assessment of his Stabat Mater impossible without a fundamental debate on discrimination and taste. ‘This is no
religious music for you Germans’, he observed; ‘my holiest music, after all, is always only half serious.’ – R. H.