The ‘Stabat Mater dolorosa’ is a particularly moving section of the liturgy: it focuses on the mourning of the Virgin Mary at the death of her Son, who died for our sins on the cross (verses 1-8). Then the person saying the prayer approaches the Blessed Virgin directly and asks to be allowed to share her grief (verses 9-15). Finally, the supplicant wishes to be united with Christ in compassion, so that the Virgin will come to his defence at the Last Judgment and he will be granted eternal life in Paradise (verses 16-20). The origin of the text remains unclear: it was written in either the 12th or the 13th century, and has been attributed to the Franciscan monks Giovanni Bonaventura (+ 1274) and Jacopone da Todi (+ 1309) as well as to St. Bernard de Clairvaux (+ 1153) and Pope Innocent III (+ 1216). There is written record of the liturgical sequence since the 14th century, when the plague was rife and killed a good fifth of all people in Europe. Since 1727, the Stabat Mater has been sung on the "Feast of the seven sorrows of the Virgin", which is now celebrated on 15th September, but used to fall on the Friday before Palm Sunday. Over the centuries, a number of smaller variations in the text have become established.
The Stabat Mater is one of the prayers most frequently set to music - in the Renaissance by Josquin Desprez (1480), Orlando di Lasso (1585) and Palestrina (1590), while among the Baroque composers who wrote settings of it were Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1680), Domenico Scarlatti (1715) and Antonio Vivaldi (ca. 1727). The best-known and most influential version from the Baroque era is probably that written by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi in the year of his death, 1736. Some fifty years later, in 1787, Cherubini made use of Pergolesi's closing chorus in the ‘Christe eleison' of his G minor Requiem, and four years after that, no lesser composer than Mozart used the same theme in his own Requiem, where it supplied direct inspiration for both the subject of the ‘Introitus’ and in particular for the 'Amen' of the ‘Lacryrnosa', which Mozart left in sketched form, but which Süßmayr ignored when completing the work after the composer's death. Prominent Stabat Mater settings from the Romantic era include those by Schubert (1816), Rossini (1832) and Verdi (1898), while in the 20th century particular mention should be made of the settings by Szymanowski (1926), Poulenc (1951) and Penderecki (1962). However, Dvořák’s large-scale cantata is probably the longest and at the same time the best-loved Stabat Mater in the Late Romantic choral repertoire.
Antonin Dvořák was the son ofa long-established family of innkeepers and butchers from Nelahozeves (known in German as Mühlhausen on the Moldau, some 30 km north of Prague. Historians have alleged that Dvořák’s parents took a sceptical view of their child`s early talent and sent him to Zlonice in 1853 to be a butcher's apprentice. In the meantime, though, the journeyman’s certincate has since proved to be a fake. The 13-year-old Dvořák lived with his uncle, who was indeed a butcher, but first and foremost he attended the local German school, where he was taught German and the organ by one Anton Liehmann, He then moved to Prague to study at that city’s organ school from 1857: the German he had learnt stood him in good stead, as all teaching 'was done in that language. Though bitterly poor, he graduated from what was then Bohemia’s most respected academy for church musicians with fiying colours.
For years Dvořák had to play in dance halls and as a violist in orchestras, also giving piano lessons, in order to keep his head above water. These were years when he also witnessed the first stirrings of Czech nationalism, and indeed the infiuence of the new musical avant-garde, as represented in particular by Wagner and Liszt. He used every free minute to work on his ambitious youthful scores - among them the bold First Symphony in C minor, The Bells of Zlonice, the Cello Concerto in A major (1865), the first string quartets, and the opera Alfred (1871). His adverse personal circumstances notwithstanding, he married his former pupil Anna Čermáková in 1873, and at the same time enjoyed his first successes as a composer: in March ofthat year his hymn based on Hálka’s Die Erben des weißen Berges was given a triumphant first performance by the 300 singers of the newly-founded Hlahol Choir.
Dvořák was a devout Catholic who had grown up with church music, but he didn’t receive his first church position until the spring of 1874, when he became organist at St. Adalbert’s Church in Prague. The choirmaster there, one Josef Bohuslav Foerster, cultivated the bone-dry choral works of the Cecilian tradition, then at its zenith, and the organ music of the Renaissance and the Early Baroque. And even after he had taken up his post, Dvořák still didn’t write any sacred music initially. Thus his biographers were all the more surprised by the drafts for the Stabat Mater, which date back to spring 1876. Some scholars believe that the immediate event that prompted Dvořák to write the work was the sudden death of his daughter Josefa on 19th September 1875, only two days after her birth. No less plausible, however, is a conjecture of the musicologist Kaus Döge: on 22nd November 1875 Dvořák took part in a performance of the arch-consen/ative Stabat Mater by Franz Xaver Witt. He may have found the contrast between the text and Witt’s boring music so drastic that he decided to compose his own Stabat Mater.
However, after he had completed the draft in May 1876, Dvořák put the work to one side. He only returned to it the following year, when two further personal tragedies undoubtedly played a role: August 1877 saw the death of his daughter Růzena, aged 11 months, who had drunk a poisonous solution of phosphor while briefly left untended, then shortly after his first-born, Otakar, died of chickenpox; he was three-and-a-half. On 13th November 1877, the instrumentation of the Stabat Mater was completed. The later successes he enjoyed may have consoled Dvořák for these painful personal losses. He became friends with Johannes Brahms, who had warmly recommended Dvořák to his own publisher, Fritz Simrock. The Slavonic Dances were a huge hit, and that summer his wife Anna gave birth to their daughter Otylka, who was to marry the composer Josef Suk 21 years later. But it wasn't until 23rd December 1880 that the first performance of the Stabat Mater was given in Prague’s Interimstheater conducted by Adolf Čech. Shortly afterwards, the work was published by Simrock, who wrote to Brahms: “I haven’t actually heard it myself but to judge by the score this is a composition of great Catholic piety, combined with such sensual melodic beauty that I would never have thought he had it in him! In my opinion, it is the best composition of his that I've seen to date.” Posterity shared the publisher's opinion, and the Stabat Mater embarked on a triumphal march through the concert halls.
After the first English performance, in London's Royal Albert Hall in March 1883, Dvořák was invited by Henry Littleton, director of the publishing house Novello, to make a concert tour through England, where he enjoyed sensational success with the Stabat Mater in March 1884. He had a huge ensemble at his disposal, and wrote to his friend Karel Bendl: “Just imagine the Neustädter Theater five times as big, and you’ve got an idea of the Albert Hall, where 10,000 people heard the Stabat Mater performed by 1050 musicians and singers, accompanied by this colossal organ!" The piece again met with an enormously positive reception when it was given at the music festival in Worcester Cathedral in September 1884. Only Vienna was behind the times once more: a performance that Hans Richter conducted in the Musikvereinssaal on 19th February 1888 left the critics scandalized. And they were no kinder to Dvořák’s most popular symphony (the New World Symphony) eight years later...
The Stabat Mater consists of ten movements, though these do not correspond to the ten double verses of the text. The layout of the work is more reminiscent of Brahms’s German Requiem, whose pedal-point opening Dvořák conspicuously quotes at the beginning of the sixth movement. However, he uses four instead of two soloists, so that the sequence of solo movements and choruses is correspondingly more varied. The work follows the layout of the prayer described above, with the central section being subdivided once more. This produces a cross-shaped and also symphony-like overall structure in four parts.
The opening movement is set in the Baroque Passion key of B minor (cross symbolism!), and begins with the 'first cross note', F sharp. It then proceeds through different sections of the orchestra before an ascending scale breaks away from this static sound. The main theme has the character of a funeral march, while the second subject is reminiscent of an Italian cantilena. (Dvořák was probably familiar with \/erdi’s Missa da Requiem, first performed in 1874.) These elements then combine to produce a gigantic, 20-minute sonata movement with development, reprise and coda. The grief rises in one new wave after another, leaving little space for more cheering sounds. This movement is then followed by a solo quartet in E minor, which continues the funereal mood, opening with a plaintive solo from the cor anglais. These first two movements belong together, and correspond to the first eight verses ofthe liturgical sequence.
The third movement marks a turning point: the person saying the prayer approaches the Blessed Virgin directly and asks to be allowed to share her grief. Dvořák emphasizes this by switching forcibly from B minor to C minon and also by changing the metre from the solemn triple time reminiscent of Brahms’s "Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras" to calm 4/4 time. However, towards the end, the choir rebels ever more vehemently. In the fourth movement, a bass aria in gloomy B flat minor, Dvořák returns to the cantilena mode reminiscent of Verdi. The next three movements, V through VII, form the necessary contrast to the dark-hued opening movements. They are set in E flat major, B major and A major respectively; two choruses frame a tenor solo with male choir. The score gradually becomes more comforting in tone, but any more reassuring mood such as that created by the undulating pastorale at the beginning of movement V is always nipped in the bud by another passage of grief and pain.
The last three movements of the work are set in the tonic and form the final complex. The duet Fac ut portem (movement VIII) for soprano and tenor really does seem to be preparing us for the last five verses, where the content of the whole is summed up once more in concentrated form, as it were. Movement IX is an alto solo, similar to those found in many earlier compositions dedicated to the Virgin: as in the closing chorus of the Brahms Requiem, the style is unmistakeably Baroque. The tenth and last movement returns to the terrain of Verdiesque funeral marches, and takes up the opening of the first movement as a reprise. At last the grief dissolves in a triumphant D major, and the Amen builds up to a final outburst of jubilation that casts off all mourning, before Dvořák ends his Stabat Mater with a quiet that is made all the more impressive by the mood of rejoicing immediately preceding it.

Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs, Bremen, 2008
Translation: Clive Williams, Hamburg