Glorious choruses of lamentation

The magnificent music of Passion Week is among the most haunting ever composed. Its creators were paying tribute to each other, as well as to God, writes Eileen Battersby.

A MOTHER WEEPS. She kneels in the dirt as, some feet above her head, silhouetted against the darkening sky, her son is dying, nailed to a wooden cross. Christ's stark, brutal death is the most dramatic image in the Christian tradition. One man's agony is the defining act of atonement for the sins of the world. Good Friday dawns this morning and, with it, a vigil of faith begins. There is the cyclical wonder as well as the eerie injustice of it. Throughout the world today, if only for today, Christians are united in a collective mourning for a deliberately choreographed sacrifice made more than 2,000 years ago.

For centuries, artists have been inspired by the horror, the symbolism, the ambivalence, the emotion and mankind's enduring debt. A son obeys his father and fulfils his destiny; he dies and is entombed; he is then reborn. There is grief, but also, ultimately, defiance, a resurrection. Above all, the rituals of Passion Week gather strength from the power of music, and the magnificent music of Passiontide is amongst the most subtle and most haunting ever composed.

In 1736, an Italian, Giovanni Pergolesi, then 26 and close to death, was drawn to the suffering of the mother of Christ, a woman lamenting her son. Pergolesi's response, Stabat Mater, arranged in 12 sections, has remained the definitive evocation of the suffering of the mother of God, so pure a musical articulation of grief that another Italian, Gioacchino Rossini, famously, albeit only initially, declined a commission in 1831 because he felt Pergolesi's masterly setting could not be surpassed.

Some 50 years earlier, yet another Italian composer, Luigi Boccherini, also composed a Stabat Mater and openly deferred to Pergolesi's elegant masterwork. As if inhibited by it, he used only a single soloist supported by a lone cello, and although he would revise it in 1800, he achieved a subdued, austere work, more cerebral than emotional.

Pergolesi, who is believed to have died of tuberculosis on either March 16th or 17th, 1736, inspired many composers, but he in turn had also been responding to an earlier version, that of Alessandro Scarlatti, the prolific composer of operas and secular cantatas as well as sacred oratorios, motets and Masses. So quickly had musical taste changed that Pergolesi's commission was intended to replace Scarlatti's Stabat Mater, itself an affecting, if tentative, work. JS Bach, an admirer of Italian music, paid homage to Pergolesi's Stabat Mater in his motet, Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden. Although often overlooked - no doubt because of the daunting number of concertos he is believed to have written, an estimated 500 - the extraordinary Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) left an enthralling Stabat Mater, RV621, among his 50 or so sacred works.

Despite his reluctance, Rossini did go on to write his Stabat Mater. His first version, completed in 1832, was a slightly furtive affair occasioned by a bout of lumbago which caused him to engage a co-author. All of this was kept uneasily quiet, but Rossini was to scrap that version and compose a further four sections to add to his initial six movements. His final version, completed in 1842, is closer to lyric opera than a formal devotional piece, but it offers drama and emotion.

Drawing on the agony of intense personal loss, the death of his three children, Antonín Dvorák composed the longest Stabat Mater by any major composer. It premiered in Prague on December 23rd 1880, a bizarrely unseasonal time for a Passiontide work - but there were reasons. The result is an epic tragedy which at times is almost baroque in tone and echoes Bach; at others, it draws more closely on Dvorák's 18th-century Czech predecessors.

Lamentation possesses a singular gravitas and eloquence. Sacred music, dominated as it is by Bach, who was a church organist, can more than hold its own with the romantic. It is also interesting to see how important a part the sacred plays in the repertoire of major composers from Monteverdi and Scarlatti to Beethoven or Stravinsky. Bruckner, it will be seen, was essentially a church music-trained composer and spent 13 years as the organist at Linz Cathedral. Most of the great music written for church and/or religious purposes, from the baroque period onwards, has made its way to the concert hall, which says far more about the towering quality of the music than it does about levels of religious observance.

IF ONE CONSIDERS, in the broadest sense, the three main purposes of music - to entertain ourselves, to praise God as well as honour temporal rulers, and, particularly in this week of weeks, to mourn - much of the earliest music which has survived was originally composed for devotional purposes. The central source and structure of much of this music, dating from the 15th century, has been the Mass of the Roman Catholic Church. It is this which provides the basic five-movement form, consisting of Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus (also using Benedictus) and Agnus Dei. Central to the Mass settings of this period was a fixed melody. This cantus firmus is present throughout the works of all the great composers of the polyphonic era such as Palestrina, Lassus and Byrd.

Although the tradition of the polyphonic Mass setting ended about 1600, composers remained drawn to settings, but now with the introduction of instruments and solo voices. The Mass soon revived as a musical genre in Italy and was particularly strong during the 18th century in southern Germany and Austria. Haydn's magnificent Stabat Mater (1767) was completed early in his career and quickly established him as a major composer throughout Europe. He and Mozart composed settings for soloists, chorus and orchestra, while Beethoven's Missa solemnis, although too vast for liturgical use, proves an intensely religious experience in a concert hall.

The requiem, a Mass for the dead, is more deliberate in tone and intent. Mozart appears to have established the genre single-handedly, such was the impact of his unfinished requiem. Berlioz and Verdi both produced massive, highly dramatic requiems.

Dvorák's, as already mentioned, is also on a mammoth scale, though not as stridently operatic in tone. Brahms's German Requiem is a setting of German biblical texts on the theme of death and consolation, while Gabriel Fauré offered a gentle, subtle, non-theatrical variation on the form.

in 1605, almost three centuries before Fauré completed the requiem that would be played at his own funeral, the Spanish composer, Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611), completed his second requiem Mass for six-part choir. It is known simply as Victoria's Requiem and contains some of his finest music. It is also one of the last works in what is known as the Renaissance polyphonic style. The music of Victoria is both austere and passionate. He was born in Avila, also the birthplace of St Teresa, and began his musical career as a chorister at the cathedral there. Such were his gifts that he was sent, at 17, to Rome to study, under the patronage of Philip II as well as the Church.

In Rome, he met Palestrina and other singers, organists and composers from all over Europe who found themselves in the churches of what was a capital of music just as Catholicism was re-asserting itself. Victoria, by then a priest, was composing, and his works were being published. Although he was successful in Rome, he always dreamt of returning to a quieter life in Spain and did so, leaving briefly in 1594 to attend Palestrina's funeral.

Victoria's Officium Hebdomadae Sanctae, his music for Holy Week, was published in Rome in 1585, exactly a century before the birth of Bach. The music has a Renaissance sound and is one of the most self-contained Holy Week cycles by any composer.

It is also, arguably, the most cohesive work of Renaissance polyphony. Melancholic in tone, Victoria's velvet music is liquid and subtle, its opulence controlled. His Responsories for Tenebrae consist of 18 responses intended to be sung in groups of six, at matins over three days: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday. The texts of these Responsories trace the events of Christ's passion and death as taken from the Gospels in versions dating from the fourth century. Sung in Latin in a darkened church setting, lit only by candles, the effect is quietly dramatic.

Two of Victoria's contemporaries stand shoulder to shoulder with him: Palestrina and Lassus. Palestrina (1525-1594), born Giovanni Pierluigi, who took the name Palestrina from his likely place of birth, a small town near Rome, devoted his life and his music to Rome's great churches: Santa Maria Maggiore, St John Lateran and St Peter's. As a young man he enjoyed the favour of the Bishop of Palestrina, Cardinal Giovanni Maria del Monte, who, when elected Pope Julius III in 1550, asked the composer, then aged 25, to accompany him to Rome.

Subsequent popes did not treat him quite as well, yet Palestrina was always comfortably placed within the papal chapel. He wrote more than 100 Masses and 375 motets and many other sacred works, although he did compose secular pieces, mainly madrigals, as well. Essentially conservative in his musical outlook, he lived and worked near the centre of the Counter-Reformation and was thus far less free to experiment. Still, if never an innovator, he refined existing styles and mastered the "imitative style" which is the heart of 16th polyphony and is the defining feature of Renaissance music. This perfect technique, restraint and balance explain the seamless, if expressive, ease of his music. His Stabat Mater has a sound best described as simply gorgeous.

Orlande de Lassus (Orlando di Lasso in Italian) was born in 1532 in Mons, a Franco-Flemish town in an area rich in gifted musicians. As a boy, he was blessed with a voice of such beauty that legend rather than fact maintains it caused him to be kidnapped three times. This northern European who spent most of his adult life in southern Europe was a man of the Renaissance, whose various court appointments and extensive travels make him the most cosmopolitan and versatile of late Renaissance composers.

It was Lassus who mastered the expressive beauty of Italian melody as well as the solid richness of Flemish and German polyphony. Composing more than 500 motets, some 70 Masses, more than 100 Magnificat settings and four Passions, as well as more than 400 secular pieces, Lassus brought imagination and energy to his graceful sound and stately harmonic movement.

Just as Palestrina and Lassus are considered the equals of Victoria, so too is William Byrd (1543-1623), considered not only the finest 16th-century English composer but also the last great English composer of Catholic church music, as well as the first of the Elizabethan age of secular and instrumental music.

Having spent a decade as the organist of Lincoln Cathedral, Byrd joined the Chapel Royal as a singer before becoming organist there, a post he initially shared with his predecessor, none other than Thomas Tallis (1505-1585). Just under a century later, Henry Purcell would be appointed to the job.

Although a Catholic, Byrd survived, possibly by spending some five years out of London. Composing for both Catholic and Anglican churches, his genius undercuts his motet collection, Gradualia, published in 1605, the same year as Victoria's Requiem. Byrd's finest legacy may well be his three Latin Masses.

BY 1600, A revolutionary artist, Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) had heralded the emergence of the baroque period, which would end with Bach and Handel. Opera established Monteverdi as a major musical force, and it was the emotional truth which he brought to his operatic work and madrigals that shone through his major sacred vocal music, Vespers (1610). Dedicated to the then pope, Vespers also consolidated Monteverdi's right to an important post, at St Mark's in Venice.

He only composed for the human voice, and in this he had a fascinating northern European counterpart, Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672). The pair met in Venice.

Born exactly a century before Bach, Schütz, in a world dominated by the Thirty Years' War, endured a difficult life spent working for the impoverished Dresden court from which he could never escape. His St Matthew, St Luke and St John Passions were all completed in 1666. Working within the older polyphonic tradition, he was familiar with the emerging innovations, yet his stylistic simplicity may have been due to having few performers to hand.

Schütz influenced Bach, as did master organist and composer Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707), who inspired Bach's 200-mile trek to Lübeck to visit him. Most of Buxtehude's cantatas, arias and oratorios have been lost, but his organ music (half of which consists of chorale preludes based on Lutheran hymns) remains. His famous cycle of seven cantatas, Membra Jesu nostri patientis sanctissima (Most Holy Members of the Body of our Suffering Jesus), is daring for its long instrumental passages and pre-dates Haydn's Die Sieben Letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze.

Alongside the 150 songs, two symphonies, chamber works and piano music written by Franz Schubert (1787-1828), it is interesting to study his seven Masses, the most outstanding of which, the Mass in E Flat Major, demonstrates his mastery of the form. Schubert composed sacred music throughout his career and although he was fervently anti-clerical he was highly spiritual, a religious man. His Stabat Mater (1816) was composed to a German text and offers a fascinating contrast to the Latinate elegance of Haydn's setting, which reveals such a close awareness of Pergolesi's version.

Schubert's fellow Austrian, the shy, insecure, countryman, Anton Bruckner, as mentioned before, came from as robust a church music background as Bach, composing his Masses, Te Deum, motets and cantatas while also working on his symphonies. The music of the church would shape his work throughout his career and his sacred music, with its echoes of Schubert, Beethoven and Palestrina, and at times, 16th-century counterpoint.

Recently, in St Peter's Church of Ireland, Drogheda, at the world premiere of Estonian Arvo Pärt's The Deer's Cry, the influence of the great European church choral tradition acted as a tap on the shoulder. But then this tradition has never gone away. Francis Poulenc's Gloria (1959), written for soprano solo, mixed chorus and orchestra, suggests that even at its most apparently secular, the spiritual is never far from the minds of most of Europe's great composers. As Beckett noted, Good Friday is a fine day on which to be born, even symbolically.

Tonight, in keeping with a tradition inherited by Bach when he arrived in the city, Leipzig's St Thomas's Church (where he was kantor) will resound to a performance of his St Matthew Passion. It is, as expected, booked out. Also, at 5pm this evening in the Collegiate Church of St Nicholas in Galway, Resurgam, under Mark Duley, will perform Bach's St John Passion (see page 2 for Dublin review).

Western music can claim a glorious tradition, and at the heart of it is the work of Johann Sebastian Bach, God's own composer. His splendid Passions - the intimate, more immediate St John (1724) and the majestic St Matthew (1727), with its soaring arias and scored for double orchestra - prevail over all else. Bach loved his God, his music, and also his fellow man. If there is one word defining all of the work by all of the composers mentioned, it is humanity.