Stabat Mater (Scarlatti)


's Stabat Mater is a religious musical work composed for two voices, two violins and basso continuo, in 1724, on a commission from the Order of Friars Minor, the "Knights of the Virgin of Sorrows" of the Church of San Luigi in Naples for Lent
The text, the Stabat Mater sequence, is a 13th-century liturgical text meditating on the suffering of Mary, mother of Christ.
Considered outdated by those who had ordered it, Scarlatti's work was replaced in 1736 by the famous Stabat Mater by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi.
Scarlatti's set the Stabat Mater three times. There is another manuscript of a three-part Stabat Mater, dated 1715 and kept in Naples and a third work, composed for four voices, dated 1723, but now lost.

Description

The Stabat Mater consists of eighteen pieces that can be grouped into four parts, starting and ending with a duet.
Scarlatti inverts verses 10 and 11 and groups verse 13 with verse 14, and verse 15 also plays verses 16 and 17 in a recitative. That is eighteen numbers for twenty verses.
Scarlatti's late composition impresses by its extraordinary musical richness, variety of forms, chromatic freedom and flexibility of expression. Thus the work is one of his most popular religious works today.
A performance takes about forty minutes.