"Stabat Mater" for Soloists, Choir and Orchestra

GIOACHINO ROSSINI composed STABAT MATER for four soloists, mixed choir and orchestra when he was already settled in Paris.  The Stabat Mater prayer is a heartfelt devotional work on the text of the famous 13th  century Roman Catholic hymn attributed to the Franciscan friar Jacopone da Todi, which became established as one of the most important canonical sequences and in the mid-16th  century became an official part of the Catholic Mass.

The stirring story of Our Lady’s passion before the crucifixion of the Son of God and the prayer to the Virgin have inspired artists from different times, such as Boccherini, Palestrina, Pergolesi, Haydn, Rossini, Schubert, Dvorak, Verdi, Poulenc, Arvo Pärt and many others. In his work, Rossini combines his unsurpassed sense of melody with deep spirituality and dramatic power

The history of the creation of the work is interesting. During a trip to Spain in 1831 with his friend, the Spanish banker Alexander Aguado, Rossini was commissioned to write Stabat Mater by the Councillor of State Fernandez Varela. Due to his health problems, the composer was only able to produce half of the score (Nos. 1, 5 – 9) and asked his friend Giovanni Tadolini to write the remaining numbers. It was premiered on Holy Saturday in 1833 in the chapel of San Felipe el Real in Madrid, but this version was never performed again. When Varela died, his heirs sold the work to the Parisian music publisher Antoine Ollanier, who printed it. Rossini protested and abandoned this version, as it included Tadolini’s music. Nevertheless, Ollanier organised a public performance at the Salle Herz on 31 October 1841, at which only the six Rossini movements were performed. Ten years after the first version, at the end of 1841, at the insistence of his publisher Eugène Truppena, Rossini completely recomposed the work, forming its second definitive version of 10 movements, replacing the numbers written by Tadolini and adding a dramatic finale with an extended double fugue on the verse In sempiterna saecula (In perpetuity. Amen!), which is not part of the standard text of the sequence.

The announcement of the premiere divided the audience into fans and critics. The then young Richard Wagner, who was in the French capital at the time, sharply criticised the European fashion for composers to write religious music and for financing it lavishly, and Robert Schumann published his opinion in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik as an essay signed with the pseudonym “H. Valentino”. Conversely, Heinrich Heine wrote of Rossini that despite the fact that the work was markedly different from his secular compositions and some North German critics criticized the work as too secular, too sensual, too cheerful for its religious subject matter, it was received enthusiastically, so magnificent were the sounds heard from the “Théâtre Italien”, it seemed like an anteroom of heaven. Two months later, Rossini attended the Italian premiere of the Stabat Mater in Bologna, conducted by Gaetano Donizetti himself, who remarked on the occasion, The enthusiasm is impossible to describe. Even at the last rehearsal Rossini attended that day, he came home to the thunderous applause of over 500 people. It was the same on the first night, under his window, as he had not been to the hall…

Following the success of its Paris premiere the following year, Stabat Mater was presented throughout Europe on numerous occasions.

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