A Medieval Poem That Became One of Music's Favourite Texts

The thirteenth century Latin poem Stabat Mater, closely associated with this feast, has been set to music by an unusually large number of major composers across radically different musical periods, including Renaissance settings by Palestrina, Baroque settings by Vivaldi and the famous, much-recorded setting by the young Pergolesi completed shortly before his early death in 1736, through to nineteenth century settings by Rossini and Dvorak and twentieth century settings by Poulenc and other modern composers, giving the text an independent musical afterlife in the concert hall that runs well beyond its liturgical use within the specific Marian devotion the feast commemorates.

This continuous, centuries-spanning tradition of setting the same text anew means that Stabat Mater functions today as much as a recognised item of the Western classical choral repertoire, regularly performed and recorded by secular concert choirs and orchestras with no specifically devotional purpose, as it does as a devotional text tied to Our Lady of Sorrows itself, a case of a religious poem's artistic reputation becoming, for many listeners, effectively separate from the specific feast and Marian sorrow tradition that originally produced it.