Stabat Mater is a work by Gioachino Rossini based on the traditional structure of the Stabat Mater sequence for chorus and soloists. It was composed late in his career after retiring from the composition of opera. He began the work in 1831 but did not complete it until 1841.
In 1831 Rossini was traveling in Spain in the company of his friend the Spanish banker Alexandre Aguado, owner of Château Margaux. In the course of the trip, Fernández Varela, a state councillor, commissioned a setting of the traditional liturgical text, the Stabat Mater. Rossini managed to complete part of the setting of the sequence in 1832, but ill health made it impossible for him to complete the commission. Having written only half the score (nos. 1 and 5–9), he asked his friend Giovanni Tadolini to compose six additional movements. Rossini presented the completed work to Varela as his own. It was premiered on Holy Saturday of 1833 in the Chapel of San Felipe el Real in Madrid, but this version was never again performed. [1] [2]
When Varela died, his heirs sold the work for 2,000 francs to a Parisian music publisher, Antoine Aulagnier, who printed it. Rossini protested, claiming that he had reserved publication rights for himself, and disowned Aulagnier's version, since it included the music by Tadolini. Although surprised by this, Aulangier went ahead and arranged for a public performance at the Salle Herz on 31 October 1841, at which only the six pieces by Rossini were performed. In fact, Rossini had already sold the publication rights for 6,000 francs to another Paris publisher, Eugène Troupenas. Lawsuits ensued, and Troupenas emerged the victor. Rossini finished the work, replacing the music by Tadolini, before the end of 1841. The brothers Léon and Marie Escudier, who had purchased the performing rights of Rossini's final version of the score from Troupenas for 8,000 francs, sold them to the director of the Théâtre-Italien for 20,000 francs, who began making preparations for its first performance. [2] [3] [4]
Rossini's extensive operatic career had divided the public into admirers and critics. The announcement of the premiere of Rossini's Stabat Mater provided an occasion for a wide-ranging attack by Richard Wagner, who was in Paris at the time, not only on Rossini but more generally on the current European fashion for religious music and the money to be made from it. A week before the scheduled concert Robert Schumann's Neue Zeitschrift für Musik carried the pseudonymous essay, penned by Wagner under the name of "H. Valentino", in which he claimed to find Rossini's popularity incomprehensible: "It is extraordinary! So long as this man lives, he'll always be the mode." Wagner concluded his polemic with the following observation: "That dreadful word: Copyright—growls through the scarce laid breezes. Action! Action! Once more, Action! And money is fetched out, to pay the best of lawyers, to get documents produced, to enter caveats.—O ye foolish people, have ye lost your hiking for your gold? I know somebody who for five francs will make you five waltzes, each of them better than that misery of the wealthy master's!" [5] At the time when Wagner wrote this, he was still in his late twenties and he had not yet had much success with the acceptance of his own music in the French capital. [6]
The Stabat Mater was performed complete for the first time in Paris at the Théâtre-Italien's Salle Ventadour on 7 January 1842, with Giulia Grisi (soprano), Emma Albertazzi (mezzo-soprano), Mario (tenor), and Antonio Tamburini (baritone) as the soloists. [3] [4] The Escudiers reported that:
Rossini's name was shouted out amid the applause. The entire work transported the audience; the triumph was complete. Three numbers had to be repeated...and the audience left the theater moved and seized by an admiration that quickly won all Paris. [2]
In March Gaetano Donizetti led the Italian premiere in Bologna with great success. The soloists included Clara Novello (soprano) and Nicola Ivanoff (tenor). Donizetti reported the public's reaction:
The enthusiasm is impossible to describe. Even at the final rehearsal, which Rossini attended, in the middle of the day, he was accompanied to his home to the shouting of more than 500 persons. The same thing the first night, under his window, since he did not appear in the hall. [3]
Despite the fact that the work is markedly different from his secular compositions, Northern German critics, as reported by Heinrich Heine in an essay on Rossini, criticised the work as "too worldly, sensuous, too playful for the religious subject." [2] In response the French music historian Gustave Chouquet has remarked that "it must not be forgotten that religion in the South is a very different thing from what it is in the North." [4]
The Stabat Mater is scored for four vocal soloists (soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, and bass), mixed chorus, and an orchestra of 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings.
Rossini divided the poem's twenty 3-line verses into ten movements and used various combinations of forces for each movement:
Written in 1841 for tenor solo, the andantino maestoso section "Cuius animam", with its rollicking and memorable tune, is often performed apart from the work's other movements as a demonstration of the singer's bravura technique.[ citation needed ] The first theme in "Cujus animam" was also quoted note-for-note in the 1941 Woody Herman jazz number, "Blues on Parade". [7]
The Messa da Requiem is a musical setting of the Catholic funeral mass (Requiem) for four soloists, double choir and orchestra by Giuseppe Verdi. It was composed in memory of Alessandro Manzoni, whom Verdi admired. The first performance, at the San Marco church in Milan on 22 May 1874, marked the first anniversary of Manzoni's death.
Carlo Maria Giulini was an Italian conductor. From the age of five, when he began to play the violin, Giulini's musical education was expanded when he began to study at Italy's foremost conservatory, the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome at the age of 16. Initially, he studied the viola and conducting; then, following an audition, he won a place in the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia.
István Kertész was a Hungarian orchestral and operatic conductor who throughout his brief career led many of the world's great orchestras, including the Cleveland, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Detroit, San Francisco and Minnesota Orchestras in the United States, as well as the London Symphony, Vienna Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, and L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. His orchestral repertoire numbered over 450 works from all periods, and was matched by a repertoire of some sixty operas ranging from Mozart, Verdi, Puccini and Wagner to the more contemporary Prokofiev, Bartók, Britten, Kodály, Poulenc and Janáček. Kertész was part of a musical tradition that produced fellow Hungarian conductors Fritz Reiner, Antal Doráti, János Ferencsik, Eugene Ormandy, George Szell, János Fürst, Peter Erős, Ferenc Fricsay, and Georg Solti.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was a German lyric baritone and conductor of classical music. One of the most famous Lieder performers of the post-war period, he is best known as a singer of Franz Schubert's Lieder, particularly "Winterreise" of which his recordings with accompanists Gerald Moore and Jörg Demus are still critically acclaimed half a century after their release.
Cecilia BartoliOMRI is an Italian coloratura mezzo-soprano opera singer and recitalist. She is best known for her interpretations of the music of Bellini, Handel, Mozart, Rossini and Vivaldi, as well as for her performances of lesser-known music from the Baroque and Classical period. She is known for singing both soprano and mezzo roles.
Elisabeth Grümmer was a German soprano. She has been described as "a singer blessed with elegant musicality, warm-hearted sincerity, and a voice of exceptional beauty".
Inese Galante is a Latvian soprano opera singer. Galante is known for a great beauty of tone, nuanced pianissimos and sensitive command of dynamics and colour. Her performance of Vladimir Vavilov's Ave Maria, from her "Debut" album (1995) attracted worldwide interest in the piece.
José Francisco Araiza Andrade, is a Mexican operatic tenor and lied singer who has sung as soloist in leading concert halls and in leading tenor operatic roles in the major opera houses of Europe and North America during the course of a lengthy career. Born in Mexico City, he studied singing at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música de México and later in Germany, with Mozartian tenor Richard Holm, and lieder interpretation with Erik Werba. He made his operatic debut in 1970 in Mexico City as First Prisoner in Beethoven's Fidelio. Araiza initially came to international prominence singing in Mozart and Rossini operas, but in the 1980s broadened his repertoire to include Italian and French lyric tenor roles and Wagnerian roles such as Lohengrin and Walther von Stolzing. He was made a Kammersänger of the Vienna State Opera in 1988. Now retired from the opera stage, he teaches singing and serves on the juries of several international singing competitions.
Stabat Mater, FP 148, is a musical setting of the Stabat Mater sequence composed by Francis Poulenc in 1950.
Antonín Dvořák's Requiem in B♭ minor, Op. 89, B. 165, is a funeral Mass scored for soloists, choir and orchestra. It was composed in 1890 and performed for the first time on 9 October 1891, in Birmingham, England, with the composer conducting.
Stabat Mater is a 2008 composition for choir and orchestra by Karl Jenkins, based on the 13th-century prayer Stabat Mater. Like much of Jenkins' earlier work, the work incorporates both traditional Western music with ethnic instruments and vocals, this time focusing on the Middle East. The first recording features the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, along with two soloists, Lithuanian mezzo-soprano Jurgita Adamonyte, and English musician Belinda Sykes, who both sings and performs on the duduk, an Armenian reed instrument.
Milagro Vargas is an American mezzo-soprano known for her distinctive voice and stage presence. She has appeared as an international soloist in operatic, orchestral, chamber music and recital settings.
Antonín Dvořák's Stabat Mater, Op. 58 (B. 71), is an extended setting for vocal soloists, choir and orchestra of the 20 stanzas of the Stabat Mater sequence. Dvořák sketched the composition in 1876 and completed it in 1877. It has been characterized as a sacred cantata and as an oratorio, and consists of ten movements of which only the first and the last are thematically connected. Its total performance time is around 85 minutes.
The Diapason d'Or is a recommendation of outstanding (mostly) classical music recordings given by reviewers of Diapason magazine in France, broadly equivalent to "Editor's Choice", "Disc of the Month" in the British Gramophone magazine.
Giovanni Tadolini was an Italian composer, conductor and singing instructor, who enjoyed a career that alternated between Bologna and Paris. Tadolini is probably best known for completing six sections of Rossini's 1833 version of the Stabat mater after the latter fell sick. However, he also composed eight operas as well as sinfonias, sonatas, chamber music, and numerous pieces of religious music and art songs.
Ann Hallenberg is a Swedish mezzo-soprano. She has an operatic career on the stage and concert platform around Europe. She regularly appears in major opera houses and festivals: embracing roles by Rossini, Mozart, Gluck, Handel, Vivaldi, Monteverdi, and Purcell.
Christoph Spering is a German conductor of classical music, especially church music. He founded in 1985 the choir Chorus Musicus Köln and in 1988 the orchestra Das Neue Orchester.
Riccardo Frizza is an Italian conductor, particularly known for his work in the Italian operatic repertoire. After making his professional conducting debut in 2001 with Rossini's Stabat Mater at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, he went on to conduct in the leading opera houses of Europe and the United States, including La Scala, La Fenice. the Paris Opera, and New York's Metropolitan Opera.
Otello is a 153-minute studio album of Gioachino Rossini's opera Otello, performed by José Carreras, Nucci Condò, Salvatore Fisichella, Alfonso Leoz, Keith Lewis, Gianfranco Pastine, Samuel Ramey and Frederica von Stade with the Ambrosian Chorus and the Philharmonia Orchestra under the direction of Jesús López Cobos. It was released in 1979.
The Rossini Bicentennial Birthday Gala is a live album of operatic and sacred music by Gioachino Rossini, performed by Rockwell Blake, Craig Estep, Maria Fortuna, Thomas Hampson, George Hogan, Marilyn Horne, Kathleen Kuhlmann, Mimi Lerner, Chris Merritt, Jan Opalach, Samuel Ramey, Henry Runey, Frederica von Stade, Deborah Voigt, the Concert Chorale of New York and the Orchestra of St. Luke's under the direction of Sir Roger Norrington. It was released in 1993 as a 119-minute video album and in 1994 as a 78-minute CD.
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