Music has an infinite ability to tell the same story over and over again. This is part of its tradition but even individual composers can be drawn back to the same models in attempts to reclothe and reinterpret musical forms and structures and settings of classic texts.
This is especially the case with the Crucifixion narrative. Bach is revered for his two Passions – St Matthew and St John, but there have been other ways for composers to relate this story in sound. The Seven Last Words from the Cross is a now defunct liturgical form which attracted the attention of Lassus, Schutz, Haydn, Gounod and Cesar Frank.
The Stabat Mater is a 13th century Marian hymn, meditating on the suffering of Mary, the Mother of God as she stands at the foot of the Cross. Stabat Mater Doloroso (The grieving mother stood … at the foot of the Cross) – these are the first words of a long poem, some twenty stanzas in full, whose subject is the Virgin Mary as she beholds her dying Son.
For devout Catholics, and the many great composers who set these words, this is a kind of ultimate, spiritual ‘Kindertotenlied’. The poem goes beyond mere description and invites the reader and the listener to partake in the Mother’s grief as a path to grace, and as part of a believer’s spiritual journey.
There are many great musical settings from history by Josquin, Palestrina, Pergolesi, the two Scarlattis, Vivaldi, Haydn and Rossini. In the 20th century there are beautiful settings by Szymanowski, Poulenc and Arvo Part. Pergolesi’s setting is one of the longest, but one of the most popular works of sacred music. Liszt created some of his noblest music in his setting, which is part of a larger oratorio, Christus. Szymanowski’s is fragrant and compelling – a work that is simultaneously atmospheric and colourful.
The great 19th century Swiss theologian Philip Schaff wrote about this poem. In ‘Literature and Poetry’ he says “The secret of the power of [the Stabat Mater] lies in the intensity of feeling which the poet identifies himself with his theme, and in the soft, plaintive melody of its Latin rhythm and rhyme, which cannot be transferred to any other language.”
The usual Protestant objections to the poem’s ‘Mariolatry’ have been muted due to the great beauty and pathos that can touch even the hardest heart. Schaff reminds his readers that that Catholics “do not pray to Mary as the giver of the mercies desired, but only as the interceder, thinking that she is more likely to prevail with her Son than any poor unaided sinner on earth.”
I have also repeated myself as a composer. I’ve written two Passion settings (St John and St Luke), a Seven Last Words, some Tenebrae Responsaries, a Miserere and even a response to the Stations of the Cross. Some people say that God intervened in human history. That is, he interfered with our story, to become one of us, to know what it means to be human, and for us to know Him and to discover that He loves us, with all the implications that has.
It feels as I have been circling around these few days in history for some years. It can be done in purely abstract instrumental music too, but a composer enters into a mysterious collaboration with the word (and The Word) whenever a setting of a text like this is involved. And with the Stabat Mater a composer enters into a particularly painful world of loss, violence and spiritual desolation. I seem to have grown up with the Stabat Mater, singing it as a hymn at school and in the local Catholic parish in Scotland as a boy, and having my early perception of the crucifixion (and indeed the world) coloured by its beauty and sadness.
The Sixteen is one of the great choirs of the world and their standards of vocal brilliance and blend are unsurpassed. I remember conducting them in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam a few years ago and encountering astonishment and wonder from the Dutch audience at their unique beauty. I have written a few smaller things for them in the past, but my Stabat Mater, with string orchestra accompaniment (the Britten Sinfonia in the first performances) is a big piece. I feel very close to this choir and orchestra.
On Friday 20 April I headed to Rome to hear a performance of my Stabat Mater in the Vatican on the Sunday evening. The concert was given by the original performers, who had premiered it in the UK a few years ago, a commission from John Studzinski’s Genesis Foundation. This extraordinary man had then convinced everyone, right up to Pope Francis that the work should be performed, (with a live feed on Classic FM) in the Sistine Chapel.
There was an invited audience of about 500, mostly Brits but not all. The Genesis Foundation had flown out the choir, orchestra and composer and had laid on a lunch for special guests, a private tour of St Peter’s Basilica and a private Mass at the very tomb of St Peter underneath. At the rehearsal on Sunday afternoon an English member of the Sistine Chapel Choir showed me the balcony where the Papal choirs have sung for hundreds of years, Palestrina, Allegri and Josquin des Pres among them. The latter had even carved his signature on the wall, perhaps bored during a four-hour Vespers.
I was in composer’s heaven – and pinching myself.
In the audience was Cardinal Vincent Nichols and members of the Curia, as well as members of the Upper House, Lords Heseltine, Alton and Baroness Kennedy, (who said that the event made her proud to be Scottish. Shucks). Janis and Emma from my publishers, Boosey and Hawkes were there, as was an old university pal, Pauline (Emma lost her partner a few months ago).
When the musicians began their rehearsal under their conductor Harry Christophers there was a palpable sense of delight among them at the incredibly intense acoustic in the chapel. Their performance later was powerful and unrelenting. Under the Michelangelo frescos and his gigantic painting of the Last Judgement, my Stabat Mater unfolded as the singularly most significant spiritual moment of my life. The last movement asks Mary to intervene on our behalf before God on the Day of Judgement. As we listened we looked up at Mary beside her Son as the judging unfolds.
After the performance an elderly gent approached me and told me that his wife had died three weeks ago. He had just seen her soul rising into Heaven, and asked me if I had ever experienced the grief he was going through. Yes, I replied (my little granddaughter Sara died in 2016) as I dissolved into inner tears of sadness. And joy.