Holy Week Part 3

Continuing a survey which might be titled "Stabat Mater through the ages...."

The first setting of this beautiful mediaeval poem which I ever encountered was Dvořák's beautiful romantic cantata.  I'm listening to it as I write.  It was on Good Friday in the late 1960s, at St. Paul's Church on Bloor St. East in Toronto, and the director was the great Canadian conductor Sir Ernest Macmillan, then nearing the end of his long life.  Sir Ernest had to conduct sitting down, but there was no mistaking the depth of feeling in his interpretation.

Dvořák's setting is one of the most "personal", inspired as it was by the deaths of three of his children.  At the same time it is one of the most "public", a very large-scale work for concert performance.  It calls for four soloists, chorus, full orchestra, and lasts for about 80 minutes.

There's no mistaking the grief-laden air of the first movement, symphonic in structure, style and conception -- it can easily be analyzed as an example of sonata form, on a very large scale (nearly 20 minutes long).  Later movements alternate soloists and chorus in varying combinations, always with that gift of memorable melody which was so characteristic of Dvořák.  In spite of the grief of the text, the composer's own irrepressibly cheerful temperament keeps sneaking in anyway -- most notably in the jovial "Amen" fugue which seems to be bringing the whole work to a rousing conclusion.  But that is not Dvořák's way, and the meditative coda which gradually winds things down is an early example of a tendency that developed throughout his career. 

To really hear this work as it deserves to be performed, look for Rafael Kubelik's Bavarian version for DGG.  Kubelik had a remarkable feeling for the depths of this score, and the music glows in his hands like no other recording I have ever heard.

Polar opposite to Dvořák's setting is the version composed not many years later by Giuseppe Verdi.  Where Dvořák is expansive, rich, and glowing, Verdi is austere, simple, and straighhtforward.  He sets the entire text as a sequence of lines with virtually no repetition.  The work is for chorus and orchestra with no soloists, and is as compact as could well be.  Yet it is a sensitive setting, paying due heed to the meaning of all the poetic images.  Contained in a set of late works known as the Quattro Pezzi Sacri, this Stabat Mater is usually performed and recorded as part of the complete group.  I love Giulini's early London recording for EMI, a perfect pendant to his studio version of the Verdi Requiem from the same time period.

In the 1920s, Karol Szymanowski composed a striking cantata setting, not as long as Dvořák's but every bit as big, and very much a concert work.  If you aren't familiar with his music, the Stabat Mater is an excellent place to begin.  It's approachable, very listenable, and at the same time piques the ear with unexpected harmonic twists and turns and unusual orchestral colourings.  I have a fine Telarc disc where it's directed by Robert Shaw with his Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus.  It comes harnessed to Francis Poulenc's equally fascinating but very different approach to the same text.  I'll be heading on to that one next.

And finally, the English composer Herbert Howells composed another large-scale Stabat Mater as a concert work in the 1960s -- the last major work he completed.  Like many of Howells' major works, it takes as its point of departure the death of his son Michael at the age of 9 in 1935. The music is very typical of him -- that is to say, quite unlike anything else you've ever heard.  Howells really deserves to have a post to himself, so here I will just say that his approach to harmony is distinctly his alone, and his handling of the orchestra and singers is also unique.  It's pleasing to the ear, not aggressive modernism, and yet could have been written in no earlier time.  The world premiere recording on Chandos was conducted, unexpectedly, by a Russian conductor (Gennadi Rozhdestvensky) but that fact serves to highlight that Howells is not a composer only for English listeners -- his music transcends merely national lines, as all the best music does.