A bittersweet swansong for a master of opera

Three hundred years after his birth, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's greatest work remains a haunting masterpiece, writes EILEEN BATTERSBY

IT IS an image as old as the Christian story, a mother kneels at the foot of a cross lamenting her dead son. Many composers have honoured the crucifixion scene by commemorating it with beautiful music. But it was a young 18th century Italian who dramatically removed it from the medieval and gave it immediacy; he also, by dispensing with a large choir and instead writing for two solo voices, made a public episode intimate.

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi was born 300 years ago this year; his artistic immortality has long been secure on the strength of his masterpiece, his hauntingly elegiac Stabat Mater, upon which he had been working for a long period but at last completed in the final days of his life.

Just as the dying Mozart had battled with a Requiem that had been a commission yet would also, in ways, become his own, Pergolesi, then terminally ill with tuberculosis and being tended by monks in the Franciscan monastery at Pozzuoli, outside Naples, worked on the mother of God’s requiem for her son, acutely aware that he would never recover. Yet unlike Mozart, Pergolesi completed his commission, a new setting of the 13th century text, the Stabat Mater, a couple of days before his death, aged 26, on March 16th 1736.

The piece was enthusiastically accepted, not only on its elegantly operatic merits and emotional power, but also, because it quickly became widely available in printed form and possibly, the very real human tragedy surrounding its composer added to its appeal which may also explain why suddenly there was such a demand for Pergolesi that many works which have since become disputed were attributed to him.

But there are no doubts about his Stabat Materor his other death bed composition, the lovely Salve Regina in C minor. Ironically, although he is revered for these religious pieces, his first composition was a serious opera, Salustia, which he quickly followed with some comic turns, such as La frata 'nnamorato (1732) Il prigioniero superbo(1733), the rather bawdy intermezzo of which, La Serva Padrona(the maid as mistress), went on to amuse and create a debate about the contrasting merits of Italian and French comic opera.

Pergolesi had been born in 1710, the only surviving child of four. His father held an administrative position in Jesi, a small town near the central Italian port of Ancona, once a Roman colony and naval base used by Caesar. The family was comfortable, more influential than wealthy. At 13 the young Pergolesi went to study in Naples and soon excelled as a chorister and he also mastered the violin and later, the organ. His operas made him sufficiently famous to move on from being a court composer in Naples to becoming deputy maestro di cappella – and all by the age of 23. When his large scale Mass in F was performed in Rome in 1734, part of the stage collapsed under the weight of so many musicians. He continued to write operas such as Flaminio.

But then, chance intervened. A group of Neapolitan nobleman had established an annual ritual of gathering each Palm Sunday to hear the Stabat Materthey had commissioned some 20 years earlier from Alessandro Scarlatti. That piece, they agreed, had become stylistically outdated. Pergolesi was asked to write a new one, although conforming to the old formula of two voices and strings. The established structure suited him perfectly, he was well used to writing for solo voices, while the violin was his chosen instrument and he had been a court organist.

His Stabat Materis reflective yet not without joy. It triumphs through its melody. The work is graceful, serene and above all, bittersweet. The operatic quality is obvious but Pergolesi succeeds in making his grieving mother an individual though not a character, an element of distance is achieved, she is a universal mother. Organ and strings combine to offer a background to a subtle sequence of five solo arias and seven duets for soprano and alto – or counter tenor as in the sublime 1988 Academy of Ancient Music recording with Emma Kirkby and James Bowman, conducted by Christopher Hogwood, which also includes Kirkby's interpretation of the Salve Regina.

So impressed was Bach with Pergolesi's Stabat Materthat he simplified the vocal lines for an adaptation of Psalm 51, the motet, Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden. Haydn and Boccherini each composed a Stabat Mater. Late in his career, Rossini was commissioned to write one. In his hands it became a lyric opera and was triumphantly received. It took him a decade and it was his final work. The Czech composer Anton Dvorak composed his immense choral setting of the Stabat Mater in honour of his infant daughter whose sudden death in 1875 was then relentlessly followed, as he worked on the piece, by the loss within months of his second daughter and then, a few weeks later of his only surviving child, his son.

Dvorak’s is the longest version and is majestically fitting for what was for him an epic personal tragedy.

Rossini and Dvorak created wonderful settings, yet the Stabat Materwhich remains definitive in its beauty, muted grace and soaring melodies is the one written by a young Italian enigma who had devoted most of his brief life to writing, in the main, rather lively operas.