Stabat mater (Pergolesi)

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Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, autograph page of the Stabat mater (from movement 3 O quam tristis )

The Stabat mater by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi is a setting of the medieval poem of the same name for alto , soprano , strings and basso continuo . This is the best known sacred work of the Italian composer and was written in 1736, a few weeks before his death.

construction

The work consists of twelve movements:

  1. Stabat mater dolorosa , duet for alto and soprano
  2. Cujus animam gementem , soprano aria
  3. O quam tristis et afflicta , duet for alto and soprano
  4. Quae moerebat et dolebat , Altarie
  5. Quis est homo , duet for alto and soprano
  6. Vidit suum dulcem natum , soprano aria
  7. Eja mater fons amoris , altarie
  8. Fac ut ardeat cor meum , duet for alto and soprano
  9. Sancta mater, istud agas , duet for alto and soprano
  10. Fac ut portem Christi mortem , altarie
  11. Inflammatus et accensus , duet for alto and soprano
  12. Quando corpus morietur and Amen , duet for alto and soprano

Origin of the work

Pergolesi composed his Stabat mater on behalf of a Neapolitan aristocratic lay brotherhood, the Cavalieri della Vergine dei Dolori di San Luigi al Palazzo , for use in the liturgy of Holy Week . Twenty years earlier the same brotherhood had also ordered a stabat mater from Alessandro Scarlatti . Pergolesi wrote his version, together with a Salve Regina , in a Franciscan monastery in Pozzuoli a few weeks before his death; he was sick with tuberculosis .

Impact history

The early death of Pergolesi, who died at the age of 26, led to increased demand for his works in the second half of the 18th century. In the next 50 years, the Stabat mater became one of the most reprinted works of the century, and numerous forgeries were issued under Pergolesi's name. Of the 148 compositions in the first complete edition of his works, only 30 are considered authentic today. In contrast, the authenticity of the Stabat mater is beyond doubt, as a manuscript in Pergolesi's handwriting has been preserved.

A novelty of the work is that it takes up the then newly emerging gallant style with which the composer celebrated great successes on the European stages in his opera intermezzo La serva padrona (1733). However, the use of this style was unusual in church music . In his composition theory of 1774, Padre Martini criticized this closeness to La serva padrona and found the setting of the text to be too lightweight.

The immediately moving mood of the work, however, soon met with overwhelming approval. The renunciation of large-scale choirs and orchestras was partially reversed in arrangements made in the 19th century. Jean Jacques Rousseau praised the opening movement as “the most perfect and touching duet from the pen of any composer.” The annual performances of the work in the royal chapel of Versailles were by Louis XVI. visited. In England around 1760 the music was adapted to the text of an ode by the English poet Alexander Pope .

In Germany, around 1745 , Johann Sebastian Bach reworked Pergolesi's Stabat mater for the cantata Tilge, Höchster, Meine Sünden ( BWV 1083); the text is a metrically adapted adaptation of Psalm 51 . Giovanni Paisiello , Johann Adam Hiller , Georg Joseph Vogler , Joseph Eybler , Antonio Salieri , Franz Xaver Süßmayr , Otto Nicolai and Alexei Lwow are among the other editors of the work . In 1840 Richard Wagner dedicated a longer chapter to Pergolesi's Stabat mater in his memoir, A German Musician in Paris . He particularly goes into Lwow's arrangement and compares it with Mozart's arrangement of Handel's Messiah . The enthusiasm for the work continues to this day, also in the context of historical performance practice .

literature

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