Stabat Mater.
I have been listening in the car, over the last couple of days, to Pergolesi's Stabat Mater. And I think it is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written. (And the best version I have found is by New Trinity Baroque, downloadable here (MP3, 5MB). Not th eonly one, by any shot, but high up there in an exalted list.
It is Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's (1710-1736) setting of a Latin poem, but uses only three lines:
This doesn't tell a story: it shows an image, a lightning flash illuminating one moment. It's like a haiku: a flash around which the rest of the story must be inferred, and is felt more strongly therefore.
And all the more poignantly, while the image is about Christ, it isn't about Christ: it is about Jesus' mother, and describing her feelings, watching he son dying slowly and horribly, and unable to do anything about it. Unable to comfort him, or make it better. Unable to leave. This isn't about the Passion, this is about a mother's love and grief.
And it is superlatively powerful for it, not needing any hint of Christian piety for it to touch you. It comes close to being universal.
And the music plays all this off perfectly. Two voices play around each other (canonically soprano and alto, but it seems to be common to use sop. and countertenor, as in the NTB version I've linked to), closely and loosely, trading off the first two lines back and forth in various permutations, but always coming together for ‘filius’. I don't have the technical knowledge of what Pergolesi was doing, but I do know that it works perfectly. Only having one voice would not give the opportunity for interplay, more voices would be too much. (I wonder what it would sound like with a baritone or bass voice... although I can see why Pergolesi didn't: it simply doesn't need one.) It is a small, intimate piece, perfectly suiting the depiction of one intensely private moment.
But I'm just going on and on, as I tend to do with any subject which interests me.
I just needed to say something about this, and share it with others, in the hope that you would get as much from it as I have.
It is Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's (1710-1736) setting of a Latin poem, but uses only three lines:
Stabat mater, dolorosawhich translates as
iuxta crucem, lacrimosa
dum pendebat filius
The mother stood, in grief,
Beside a cross, weeping,
where hung her son.
This doesn't tell a story: it shows an image, a lightning flash illuminating one moment. It's like a haiku: a flash around which the rest of the story must be inferred, and is felt more strongly therefore.
And all the more poignantly, while the image is about Christ, it isn't about Christ: it is about Jesus' mother, and describing her feelings, watching he son dying slowly and horribly, and unable to do anything about it. Unable to comfort him, or make it better. Unable to leave. This isn't about the Passion, this is about a mother's love and grief.
And it is superlatively powerful for it, not needing any hint of Christian piety for it to touch you. It comes close to being universal.
And the music plays all this off perfectly. Two voices play around each other (canonically soprano and alto, but it seems to be common to use sop. and countertenor, as in the NTB version I've linked to), closely and loosely, trading off the first two lines back and forth in various permutations, but always coming together for ‘filius’. I don't have the technical knowledge of what Pergolesi was doing, but I do know that it works perfectly. Only having one voice would not give the opportunity for interplay, more voices would be too much. (I wonder what it would sound like with a baritone or bass voice... although I can see why Pergolesi didn't: it simply doesn't need one.) It is a small, intimate piece, perfectly suiting the depiction of one intensely private moment.
But I'm just going on and on, as I tend to do with any subject which interests me.
I just needed to say something about this, and share it with others, in the hope that you would get as much from it as I have.