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\u2018My poor, favourite Pergolesi has just died of a chest infection\u2026 but his Stabat Mater is considered to be the masterwork of Latin music.\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n 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 \u2018the Raphael and Virgil of music\u2019, 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 \u2018as indestructible as nature\u2019.<\/p>\n Pergolesi\u2019s 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 \u2013 the \u2018maiden-voiced\u2019 siren \u2013 lured with her vocal music. The soundscape of Naples\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The Latin poem Stabat mater dolorosa<\/em> (long attributed, albeit questionably, to the 13th-century Umbrian Jacopone da Todi) is an emotive account of the Virgin\u2019s sufferings at the foot of the Cross. It belongs to the tradition of Latin \u2018sequences\u2019 \u2013 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 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 Find \u00a0the Stabat Mater<\/em> <\/a>lyrics here<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s patron \u2013 the Duke of Carafa di Maddaloni \u2013 had a private chapel. Perhaps it was meant to replace Alessandro Scarlatti\u2019s earlier setting for the same confraternity, as both works are for similarly spare resources: two solo voices, strings and basso continuo.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\nWhat is the Stabat Mater?<\/em><\/h2>\n
Who sang the Stabat Mater?<\/em><\/h2>\n
How did Pergolesi set the Stabat Mater <\/em>to music?<\/h2>\n