"Stabat Mater Dolorosa" is a song to our Lady of Sorrows, based on St. John's gespel 19, 26. Told in the first person and originally a "pium dictamen" (a prayer in rhyme) it was meant for private meditation. During the 14th and 15th centuries we find it as hymn or as sequence in breviaries and missals. "Stabat Mater" was inserted as a sequence in the missal for the Feast of the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady (on the Friday before Palm Sunday, or on the 15th September).
The song has been attributed to St. Bonaventura (+ 1274) and to Jacopone da Todi (+ 1306) as the poet is supposed to have been an Italian or a Frenchman and most likely a member of the order of St. Francis. The early versions in music of "Stabat Mater Dolorosa" were usually hymns - early sequence melodies being extremely rare. This record presents for the first time one of the earliest "Stabat Mater" sequence melodies dating back from the 15th century as transmitted in two manuscripts from South Bohemia and one from Salzburg.
Compositions of "Stabat Mater Dolorosa" reach from the 15th century to Penderecki's "St. Luke's Passion". Among the earliest there ranges a simple and straightforward motet for four voices by Innocentius Dammonis who was a member of the Salvatorians' Congregation towards the end of the 15th century. In this composition (published in Venice in 1508) Dammonis quotes the most famous Stabat Mater intonation of those days, i. e. Josquin's tenor motet for five voices. "Stabat Mater Dolorosa". Dammonis only presents the first verse in the imitative polyphone setting for four voices; the subsequent nineteen verses are meant to be sung in the same way.
Agostino Steffani, at the beginning of the 18th century, composed an equal master piece and highlight of his time: his "Stabat Mater" for soli, sixvoiced chorus, six string instruments (violins and viols), and organ. Its masterly combination of perfect counterpoint and elegant belcanto melodies make it the crowning work of Steffani (1654-1728) who was an opera chapelmaster (he prepared the way for Handel), a diplomat, a politician, and a high dignitary of the church. A contemporary enthusiastically called him a "Sant'Agostino in musica".