Stabat Mater



The Stabat Mater is a 13th-century Christian hymn to the Virgin Mary that portrays her suffering as mother during the crucifixion of her son Jesus Christ. Its author may be either the Franciscan friar Jacopone da Todi or Pope Innocent III. The title comes from its first line, "Stabat Mater dolorosa", which means "the sorrowful mother was standing".

The hymn is sung at the liturgy on the memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows. The Stabat Mater has been set to music by many Western composers.

Date
The Stabat Mater has often been ascribed to Jacopone da Todi (ca. 1230–1306), but this has been strongly challenged by the discovery of the earliest notated copy of the Stabat Mater in a 13th-century gradual belonging to the Dominican nuns in Bologna (Museo Civico Medievale MS 518, fo. 200v-04r).

The Stabat Mater was well known by the end of the 14th century and Georgius Stella wrote of its use in 1388, while other historians note its use later in the same century. In Provence, about 1399, it was used during the nine days' processions.

As a liturgical sequence, the Stabat Mater was suppressed, along with hundreds of other sequences, by the Council of Trent, but restored to the missal by Pope Benedict XIII in 1727 for the Feast of the Seven Dolours of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Text and translation
The Latin text below is from an 1853 Roman Breviary and is one of multiple extant versions of the poem. The first English translation by Edward Caswall is not literal but preserves the trochaic tetrameter rhyme scheme and sense of the original text. The second English version is a more formal equivalence translation.

Indulgence
To the Stabat mater was attributed the indulgence of 100 days each time it was recited.

Musical settings
Composers who have written settings of the Stabat Mater include:
 * Josquin des Prez
 * Orlande de Lassus (1585)
 * Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina: Stabat Mater (c.1590)
 * Giovanni Felice Sances (1643)
 * Marc-Antoine Charpentier H.15 & H.387 (1685–90)
 * Louis-Nicolas Clérambault C. 70 (17..)
 * Sébastien de Brossard SdB.8 (1702)
 * Emanuele d'Astorga (1707)
 * Antonio Vivaldi: Stabat Mater (1712)
 * Domenico Scarlatti (1715)
 * Nicola Fago (1719)
 * Alessandro Scarlatti: Stabat Mater (1723)
 * Antonio Caldara (~1725)
 * Agostino Steffani (1727)
 * Giovanni Battista Pergolesi: Stabat Mater (1736)
 * Nicola Logroscino (1760)
 * Florian Leopold Gassmann (~1765)
 * Joseph Haydn: Stabat Mater (1767)
 * Giuseppe Tartini (1769)
 * Tommaso Traetta (1770)
 * Antonio Soler (1775)
 * Luigi Boccherini: Stabat Mater (1781, 1801)
 * Franz Ignaz Beck (1782)
 * Pasquale Cafaro (1784)
 * Franz Schubert: Stabat Mater in G minor (1815) and Stabat Mater in F minor (1816)
 * Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga (1821?)
 * Gioacchino Rossini: Stabat Mater (1831–1841)
 * Peter Cornelius (1849)
 * Franz Liszt: part of the oratorio Christus (1862–1866)
 * Antonin Dvořák: Stabat Mater (1876–1877)
 * Laura Netzel (1890)
 * Josef Bohuslav Foerster: Op. 56 (1891–1892)
 * František Musil (composer): Op. 50 (1893)
 * Giuseppe Verdi (1897)
 * Charles Villiers Stanford (1906)
 * Toivo Kuula (1919)
 * George Oldroyd (1922)
 * Karol Szymanowski: Stabat Mater (1925–1926)
 * Johann Nepomuk David (1927)
 * Lennox Berkeley (1947)
 * Julia Perry (1947)
 * Francis Poulenc: Stabat Mater (1950)
 * Krzysztof Penderecki: in St Luke Passion (1963–1966)
 * Arvo Pärt: Stabat Mater (1985)
 * Knut Nystedt (1986)
 * Amaral Vieira (1988)
 * Trond Kverno (1991)
 * Pawel Lukaszewski (1994)
 * Vladimir Martynov (1994)
 * Salvador Brotons (1997)
 * Frank Ferko (1999)
 * Vladimír Godár (2001)
 * Bruno Coulais (2005)
 * Karl Jenkins: Stabat Mater (2008)
 * Paul Mealor (2009, revised 2010)
 * Metropolitan Hilarion (2011)
 * Franco Simone (2014)
 * James MacMillan (2015)
 * Vache Sharafyan

Most settings are in Latin. Karol Szymanowski's setting is in Polish, although it may also be sung in Latin. George Oldroyd's setting is in Latin with an English translation for Anglican and Episcopalian use.