There’s something about Mary

Music likes 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, Schütz, Haydn, Gounod and César Franck.

The liturgy of Tenebrae has given rise to settings of the Lamentations by Tallis, Charpentier and Stravinsky (Threni) as well as the Tenebrae Responsaries by Victoria and Gesualdo. Allegri’s famous Miserere (Psalm 50) is also associated with Good Friday and then there are all those incredibly powerful settings of the Stabat Mater.

This text 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 …’) — these are the first words of a long poem, some 20 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.

The authorship of the hymn has been variously ascribed to St Gregory the Great, St Bernard of Clairvaux, Innocent III, St Bonaventure, Pope John XXII and Gregory XI, but was most probably the work of Jacopone da Todi, a Franciscan monk.