Pergolesi: Stabat Mater

Onorati, Chiarastella, Orchestra da Camera Benedetto Marcello, Rubortone, Bettina, Scogna, Flavio Emilio

TC 711603

“Skillfully expressing a sense of mockery and derision.”

With these words, Padre Martini, in his work Esemplare ossia saggio fondamentale pratico di contrappunto sul canto fermo (1774–75), delivered his verdict on Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater.

This condemnation marked a new level of vehemence in the tirade against the “chiesa style,” which preoccupied generations of composers, theorists, and educators throughout the 18th century, as it attacked a work already celebrated as a masterpiece across Europe—a masterpiece that embodied a way of expressing the sacred in music considered unique in modern spirituality at the time.

This very awareness accounted for the enormous success that Pergolesi’s sequence would enjoy for the remainder of the 18th century and beyond. His legendary status was undoubtedly fueled by the aura of pathos that pervades the composer's last work, as well as by his early death—elements that strongly influenced minds already inclined toward "Rousseauian" sentiments.

Such a myth also corresponded to the inescapable aesthetic qualities that, despite their abundant presence in opera and instrumental music, struggled to gain a foothold in the secular bastions of sacred music.

These defensive measures against what is commonly understood as a modern awareness of musical autonomy and freedom of expression (for that was what the stylistic debate was really about) had, for some time, reached a compromise typical of a Catholic culture that tended to distinguish between matters of principle (which had to be defended to the bitter end) and practical matters (which had to be tolerated and tacitly accepted).

We can categorize all Catholic church music of the 18th century into such a compromise: The demands for expressiveness unleashed by the prevailing critical subjectivism moved within a framework of polyphonic etiquette, which in the hands of the great composers (including Pergolesi) functioned wonderfully as a kind of stylistic isolation, insofar as it was not accepted as a lifeless duty to the school and tradition of church music, but as a critically acquired vocabulary.

CD x 1

Tactus

1.07.2013

8007194103526