This early thirteenth-century poem in Latin, in ten rhyming six-line stanzas, each subdividing into two three-line versicles, is of disputed authorship and has not always been a sanctioned part of the liturgy. It was excluded from the Tridentine rite by the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century but nonetheless remained popular: numerous well-known musical settings—by Lassus, Palestrina, Charpentier, Alessandro Scarlatti, Domenico Scarlatti, etc.—date from before Pope Benedict XIII in 1727 formally readopted the Stabat Mater as a part of the Roman liturgy.

Antonio Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater, marvellously sung in this performance from 2017, is a brilliant example of how music enhances this deeply moving portrait of the grieving mother of Christ. It’s a short version, setting only the first half of the poem (the first five stanzas, or versicles 1-10 as numbered here, plus ‘Amen’), which marks it as the type to be used as a hymn in the Office, not as a sequence during Mass. It’s best to listen to all nine short sections at one sitting: they are not designed to be heard as distinct movements (sections iv-vi repeat the music of sections i-iii) and belong together in an unchanging soundscape in the rare key of F minor, which in opera and The Four Seasons Vivaldi reserved for scenes of pain and other extreme discomfort. This persistent bleakness is scarcely relieved at all by C minor for the two recitatives and section vii, ‘Eja Mater’. Yet the music wears its heart on its sleeve with a great deal of lyricism, through which we may feel the sadness and empathize with Mary’s personal sorrows. The concluding ‘Amen’ is one of the best settings of that single word, and probably the most animated, to be found in all musical literature.

The work almost certainly dates from early 1712 and is perhaps Vivaldi’s very first sacred vocal composition: before this he was known as a violin virtuoso and teacher and a composer only of sonatas and concertos. A record of payment to him shows that a Stabat Mater was commissioned by the Chiesa della Pace in Brescia, where it was probably performed, with one of that church’s professional male altos as soloist, on the ‘Friday of Sorrows’, which in 1712 fell on 18 March.

* *  This post is in a series for Lent and Holy Week, 2021 * *

Vivaldi, Stabat Mater, RV 621, sung by Tim Mead with Les Accents, directed by Thibault Noally, at Sainte-Chapelle, Paris, in June 2017.