For our musical offering on this Third Sunday of Lent, here are a few renditions – amongst many – of the perduring Stabat Mater, the 13th century poem on the sorrows of Mary ‘standing by the Cross’, attributed to the Franciscan Jacopone de Todi, or, some say, Saint Bonaventure or Pope Innocent III.
Here is the original Gregorian chant version:
Palestrina set these words to polyphony in honour of Pope Gregory XIV, in 1590-91, towards the end of the composer’s life – a fitting way to enter eternity:
Monsignor Antonio Vivaldi also set the Stabat Mater to polyphony, an elegiac piece composed sometime before 1727, when it premiered.
In comparison, here is Giovanni Battista Piergolesi’s own version, presented just a few years after Vivaldi’s, in 1736, like Palestrina, in the last weeks of the composer’s life.
And, for a bit more basso profundo, here is one I just came across, set to a traditional Polish melody, directed and arranged by Bartosz Izbicki: