Our Lady of Sorrows

Our Lady of Sorrows, on 15 September, the day after the Exaltation of the Cross, venerates Mary in her suffering, above all at the foot of the cross. The devotion crystallised the medieval reflection on Mary's grief into a set of seven sorrows, from the prophecy of Simeon that a sword would pierce her own soul, through the flight into Egypt and the loss of the child in the Temple, to the crucifixion, the taking-down of the body, and the burial. The image of the Mater Dolorosa, her heart pierced by swords, is its counterpart in art, as is the Pieta.

The feast owes much to the Servite Order, the Servants of Mary, who made the sorrows central to their spirituality and spread a corresponding rosary. The great sequence Stabat Mater, "the sorrowful mother stood", set by many composers, belongs to this devotion. Placed immediately after the feast of the Cross, the day binds Mary's compassion to Christ's passion, presenting her grief as a participation in the suffering by which, in Catholic belief, the world is redeemed, and it became a focus for those bringing their own griefs to a figure understood to have shared them.

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.