rossini's Stabat Mater - The Grant Park Music Festival

Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus 

Carlos Kalmar, Principal Conductor 

Christopher Bell, Chorus Director 

Rossini’s Stabat Mater 

Friday, July 20, 2012 at 6:30PM 

Saturday, July 21, 2012 at 7:30PM 

Jay Pritzker Pavilion 

Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus 

Christopher Bell, Conductor 

Jonita Lattimore, Soprano 

Jennifer Holloway, Mezzo-Soprano 

René Barbera, Tenor 

Ryan McKinny, Bass 

ROSSINI 

LEIGHTON 

overture to William Tell 

Hymn to Matter 

Ryan McKinny 

INTERMISSION 

ROSSINI 

Stabat Mater 

Jonita Lattimore, Jennifer Holloway, 

René Barbera, Ryan McKinny 

2012 Program Notes, Book 3 A29

Friday, July 20 and Saturday, July 21, 2012 

Soprano Jonita Lattimore, born on Chicago’s South Side, 

performed with the Chicago Children’s Choir before winning a 

scholarship to attend the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, 

New York. She pursued advanced studies at the University of 

Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and with Houston Grand Opera’s 

Opera Studio and the Ryan Opera Center for American Artists 

at Lyric Opera of Chicago. She is currently on the voice faculty 

of Roosevelt University’s College of Performing Arts. Ms. 

Lattimore has earned awards in the Birgit Nilsson Competition, 

Luciano Pavarotti International Voice Competition, George London Foundation 

Competition, and in 2000 was included in the Chicago Sun-Times’ list of “25 Most 

Intriguing Chicagoans.” Her appearances have taken her from the Bastille Opera in 

Paris, Orquestra Metropolitana of Lisbon, Tonkünstler Orchestra of Vienna, Northern 

Israel Symphony, Orchestra della Toscana in Italy and Edinburgh Festival to the 

Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional de Mexico, Weill Recital Hall in Carnegie Hall, Houston 

Symphony, Eugene Symphony, Calgary Philharmonic, Houston Grand Opera and Lyric 

Opera of Chicago. Since making her Grant Park Music Festival debut at the 4th of 

July concert in 1998, Jonita Lattimore has returned regularly to perform, including 

opening nights of both the Jay Pritzker Pavilion and the Harris Theater in 2004 and 

the 2009 premiere of Michael Torke’s Plans, commissioned by the Festival as part of 

the city-wide celebration in honor of the 100th anniversary of Daniel Burnham’s Plan 

for Chicago; her most recent Festival appearance was in Michael Tippett’s A Child of 

Our Time in July 2010. 

Ohio-born mezzo-soprano Jennifer Holloway gained 

international prominence in 2006 when as an apprentice at 

the Santa Fe Opera she took over the leading role of Le Prince 

Charmant in Massenet’s Cendrillon opposite Joyce DiDonato as 

Cinderella. Ms. Holloway’s success led to invitations to appear 

with leading opera companies, including the Opéra National de 

Bordeaux, Teatro Real (Madrid), Maggio Musicale (Florence), 

Glyndebourne (England), Théâtre du Capitole (Toulouse), 

Théâtre du Châtelet (Paris), Teatro Regio (Parma) and New 

National Theatre (Tokyo) overseas, and in the American cities of Dallas, Atlanta, 

Minneapolis, Portland, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Tulsa and Washington; she 

made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Flora in La Traviata during the 2010-2011 

season and returns to the Met stage for Don Carlos in 2012-2013. She has appeared 

in concert with the orchestras of Jerusalem (for the premiere of Frédéric Chaslin’s Love 

and a Question, composed for her), Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chautauqua, Omaha and 

the Bard Music Festival. Ms. Holloway, a graduate of the University of Georgia and 

the Manhattan School of Music, was a 2006 winner in Fort Worth Opera’s McCammon 

Competition and 2005 First Place Winner of the Georgia Region of the Metropolitan 

Opera National Council Auditions. She has also received grants from the Licia 

Albanese Puccini Foundation, Liederkranz Foundation and Hugo Ross Foundation, as 

well as the Anna Case Mackay Award following her participation in Santa Fe Opera’s 

Apprentice Singer Program. These performances mark Jennifer Holloway’s Grant Park 

Music Festival debut. 

A30 2012 Program Notes, Book 3


Tenor René Barbera, born in Laredo, Texas and now a 

third-year member of Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Patrick G. and 

Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center, was awarded First Prize for 

Opera, First Prize for Zarzuela and the Audience Prize at Plácido 

Domingo’s Operalia competition in 2011 in Moscow, the first 

artist to receive all three awards since the competition began 

in 1993. Mr. Barbera’s additional honors include the Sullivan 

Foundation Award (2011), Men’s First Place in the Union League 

Civic & Arts Foundation (2009), Grand Finals Winner in the 

Metropolitan National Council Auditions (2008), Grand Prize in the Charles A. Lynam 

Vocal Competition (2007), First Place in the Charlotte Opera Guild Vocal Competition 

(2006) and First Place in the Heafner/Williams Vocal Competition (2006). During the 

2011-2012 season, he was heard with Lyric Opera of Chicago in Lucia di Lammermoor, 

Ariadne auf Naxos and The Magic Flute; he earlier appeared with Lyric in Carmen, Un 

Ballo in Maschera, La Fanciulla del West, Lohengrin and La Cenerentola. Mr. Barbera’s 

additional opera credits include Vancouver Opera, Canadian Opera Company and 

Opera Theatre of St. Louis. He has appeared in concert with the Apollo Chorus of 

Chicago, Greensboro Symphony and Chicago Philharmonic. Mr. Barbera studied at 

the North Carolina School of the Arts and had additional training at the American 

Institute of Vocal Arts in Graz, Austria, Vocal Arts Symposium in Colorado Springs and 

San Francisco Opera’s Merola Opera Program. René Barbera appeared at the Grant 

Park Music Festival’s Ryan Opera Center programs in 2010 and 2011. 

American bass-baritone Ryan McKinny was the first 

recipient of the Birgit Nilsson Prize for singing Wagner at 

Plácido Domingo’s Operalia Competition, held in 2010 at the 

Teatro alla Scala in Milan. In 2007, Mr. McKinny represented 

the United States in the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World 

Competition, where he was a finalist in the Rosenblatt 

Recital Song Prize. He was also a Grand Finalist in the 2007 

Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and was 

featured in the film The Audition, recently released by Decca 

on DVD. His many opera credits include appearances at New Orleans Opera, 

Oper Leipzig, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Canadian Opera Company, Los Angeles 

Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Utah Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, Theater Basel, 

English National Opera, Spoleto Festival (Italy), Semperoper Dresden, Hamburg 

State Opera, Deutsche Oper am Rhein and Oper Leipzig. Mr. McKinny made his 

Metropolitan Opera debut as Lieutenant Ratcliffe in Britten’s Billy Budd during the 

2011-2012 season. In concert, he has appeared with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, 

Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra and 

Aspen Music Festival, and made his Chicago Symphony Orchestra debut in 

2010 in Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. Mr. McKinny was heard in a special recital of 

Schubert’s Die Winterreise during the Sydney Festival that was broadcast on ABC, 

Australia’s public radio. He took his professional training at Pasadena City College 

in California, the Juilliard School and Houston Grand Opera’s Opera Studio program. 

Ryan McKinny makes his Grant Park Music Festival debut with these concerts. 



Overture to William Tell (1828-1829) 

Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868) 

Rossini’s Overture to William Tell is scored for pairs of woodwinds 

plus piccolo and English horn, four horns, two trumpets, three 

trombones, timpani, percussion and strings. The performance 

time is 12 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed this 

work on August 1, 1936, with Gladys Welge conducting. 

In his later years, Rossini wrote to an aspiring opera composer giving advice about 

composing an overture for a new stage work: “Wait until the evening before the 

opening. Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity, whether it be the presence 

of a copyist waiting for your work or for the prodding of an impresario tearing his hair. 

In my time, all the impresarios in Italy were bald at thirty. I composed the overture 

to Otello in a little room in the Barbaja palace wherein the baldest and fiercest of 

directors had forcibly locked me with a lone plate of spaghetti and the threat that I 

would not be allowed to leave the room alive until I had written the last note. I wrote 

the overture to La Gazza Ladra the day of the opening in the theater itself, where I was 

imprisoned by the director and under the surveillance of four stagehands who were 

instructed to throw my original text through the window, page by page, to the copyists 

waiting below to transcribe it. In default of pages, they were ordered to throw me out 

the window bodily. I composed the overture to Comte Ory while fishing, with my feet 

in the water, and in the company of Signor Agnado, who talked of his Spanish fiancée. 

The overture to William Tell was composed under more or less similar circumstances.” 

Even though this admission seems to confirm both Rossini’s lazy procrastination and 

his awesome ease of composition, the effort he expended on William Tell seems to 

have been rather greater than his words allow. 

If there was ever a composer who made a business of writing music, that composer 

was Rossini. (Richard Strauss was a close runner-up.) Rossini turned out operas at a 

startling rate during the twenty years of his active composing career, sometimes as 

many as three or four annually. William Tell was his 38th work in the genre, finished 

when he was 37 years old. His previous operas made brilliantly inventive use of the 

musico-dramatic formulas and cliches of the late Classical era, and his music proved 

to be precisely suited to the taste of audiences throughout Europe — he was the most 

popular composer of his time. In 1824, he moved to Paris to become director of the 

Théâtre Italien, and there became fully aware of the revolutionary artistic and political 

trends that were then gaining prominence. In music, the Romantic movement was 

heralded by such works as Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz, first seen in 

the French capital in 1824. In politics, republican sympathies were again festering, 

and stage works that portrayed the popular struggle against oppression and tyranny 

stirred considerable sentiment. Auber’s opera La muette de Portici of 1828, based on 

the 17th-century Neapolitan revolt against Spain, not only proved to be a popular 

success, but also caught the spirit of the times in both its music and its subject. Rossini 

was too closely attuned to public fashion to ignore the changing audience tastes these 

pieces portended, and he cast about for a libretto that would keep him abreast of the 

latest developments in the musical theater while solidifying his position in Paris. 

Schiller’s play William Tell, based on the heroic Swiss struggle against tyranny in 

the 14th century, had recently been introduced to Paris in a French translation, and 

created much interest. Rossini decided that the drama would make a fine opera (or, at 

least, a salable one), and set the minor playwright Jouy to work on the libretto. Jouy 

made a botch of the undertaking (“certainly one of the poorest jobs in libretto annals,” 

assessed Milton Cross), and Hippolyte Bis and Armand Marrast were called in to put 

the book into final shape. Rossini seems to have taken special care to incorporate 



the emerging Romantic style into this epic work, as evidenced by its subject matter, 

symphonic scope and attention to dramatic and poetic content. The French public 

followed intently the progress of the new piece through frequent press reports — it 

was Rossini’s first opera written exclusively for Paris. From the summer of 1828, when 

word of the project first surfaced, through the following spring, when several delays 

were reportedly caused by prima donna incapacity (actually, Rossini was withholding 

the work’s premiere to press negotiations with the government over a lucrative 

contract for future — never realized — operas) until the premiere in August 1829, 

William Tell kept Parisian society abuzz. Once the opera finally reached the stage, it 

was hailed by critics and musicians, but disappointed the public, who felt that its sixhour 

length was more entertainment than a single evening should decently hold. (The 

score was greatly truncated when it was staged in later years.) Whether the new style 

of the opera was one which Rossini did not wish to pursue, or whether he was drained 

by two decades of constant work, or whether he just wanted to enjoy in leisure the 

fortune he had amassed, William Tell was his last opera. During the remaining 39 years 

of his life, he did not compose another note for the stage. 

The Overture to William Tell is essentially a miniature tone poem in several 

evocative sections. Peaceful dawn in the Swiss mountains is depicted by the quiet 

song of the cello quintet that opens the Overture. The following furious music signifies 

a violent thunderstorm. The subsequent English horn theme portrays the calm after 

the tempest and the pastoral beauty of the Swiss countryside. The final section is one 

of the most famous strains in symphonic music. Rossini originally wrote this theme 

seven years earlier in Vienna as a quickstep march for military band, and borrowed it 

for William Tell to accompany the triumphant return of the Swiss patriot troops in Act 

III and to provide a blazing conclusion to this splendid Overture. 

Hymn to Matter (1978) 

Kenneth Leighton (1929-1988) 

Leighton’s Hymn to Matter is scored for piano, timpani, percussion 

and strings. The performance time is thirteen minutes. This is the 

first performance of the work by the Grant Park Orchestra. 

Kenneth Leighton, one of Britain’s most distinguished 

mid-20th-century composers and music teachers, was born in 

Wakefield, Yorkshire on October 2, 1929. He studied piano and was a chorister at 

Wakefield Cathedral as a boy, and entered Queen’s College, Oxford in 1947 as a 

student of classics and music; his principal composition teacher was Bernard Rose. 

Upon his graduation, in 1951, he won a Mendelssohn Scholarship, which enabled 

him to study in Rome with Goffredo Petrassi. After returning to England the following 

year, Leighton taught at the Royal Naval School of Music and the University of Leeds 

before joining the faculty of the University of Edinburgh in 1955. From 1968 to 1970, 

he was University Lecturer in Music and Fellow of Worcester College at Oxford; he 

earned his doctorate from the university in 1970. In October 1970, he was appointed 

Reid Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh, a post he held until his death, 

in 1988. Leighton’s distinctions included the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize (1950, 

1951), Busoni Prize (1956), Trieste Prize (1965), Bernhard Sprengel Prize (1965) and 

Cobbett Medal for distinguished services to chamber music (1968), as well as an 

honorary doctorate from the University of St. Andrews (1977). 

British musicologist and choir director Richard Cooke wrote that Leighton’s 

compositions — an opera (Columba), two symphonies, concertos for piano, organ 

and flute, a number of smaller orchestral scores, many sacred and secular vocal 

works, chamber music, organ and piano pieces — are characterized by “a compelling 



balance of intellectual rigor and romanticism.” His Hymn to Matter, commissioned 

in 1978 for the opening of the new Chaplaincy Centre at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt 

University, one of Scotland’s leading scientific teaching institutions, sets a text by the 

controversial French geologist, paleontologist, philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre 

Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), whose culminating work, The Phenomenon of Man, 

describing his view of the unfolding of the cosmos and the evolution of humanity, 

was prohibited from publication by the Catholic Church until after his death. Teilhard 

wrote Hymn to Matter, which he included in a collection of his mystical and spiritual 

writings published posthumously as Hymn of the Universe (1961), in August 1919 to 

express a vision he had had of “a world charged with the grandeur of God” when he 

was serving as a stretcher-bearer in the World War I battle at Verdun in eastern France, 

which claimed some 700,000 lives during its ten horrific months. Leighton’s setting 

matches Teilhard’s words with music that suggests both the weight of their subject 

and the spirituality of their message. 

Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock: you who yield only to 

violence, you who force us to work if we would eat. 

Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, untameable passion: you who unless we 

fetter you will devour us. 

Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever new-born; 

you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever 

further and further in our pursuit of the truth. 

Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss 

of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our 

narrow standards of measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God. 

Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should 

remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of 

God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield 

to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our 

souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless. 

I bless you and you I acclaim: not as the pontiffs of science or the moralizing preachers 

depict you, debased, disfigured — a mass of brute forces and base appetites — 

but as you reveal yourself to me today, in your totality and your true nature. 

You we acclaim as the inexhaustible potentiality of existence and transformation 

wherein the predestined substance germinates and grows. 

We acclaim you as the universal power which brings together and unites, through 

which the multitudinous monads are bound together and in which they all 

converge on the way of the spirit. 

Stabat Mater (1831-1832, 1841) 

Gioacchino Rossini 

Rossini’s Stabat Mater is scored for pairs of woodwinds, four horns, two trumpets, 

three trombones, timpani and strings. The performance time is 60 minutes. The Grant 

Park Orchestra and Chorus first performed this work on July 23, 1966, with Julius 

Rudel conducting. The soloists were Martina Arroyo, Beverly Wolff, Michele Molese 

and Raymond Michalski. 

The Stabat Mater is a 13th-century sequence (i.e., a sacred Latin poem with most 

of its lines paired in end-rhyme), usually attributed to the Franciscan monk Jacopone 

da Todi, which tells of the piteous anguish of the Mother of Christ as she stands before 

the Cross. Though regularly used for personal and communal devotions from the time 

of its creation, the Stabat Mater was not officially accepted into the Roman Catholic 

liturgy until 1727. By the early 19th century, the text had been treated by such masters 


as Josquin, Palestrina, Lassus and Haydn, but the outstanding setting of the verses 

was considered at that time to be the one that Giovanni Battista Pergolesi made in 

1736. After hearing Pergolesi’s work in Naples in 1820, Gioacchino Rossini vowed 

never to put himself in competition with it by composing the same text, but in 1831, 

he was prompted to change his mind. 

In February 1831, Rossini’s friend, patron and financial advisor, Alexandre-Marie 

Aguardo, a naturalized Frenchman of Spanish birth, arranged to take the composer 

for a visit to his native land. In Spain, Rossini was feted by King, court and public 

alike, but he was most warmly welcomed by Aguardo’s friend Don Francisco Varela, 

a cleric, a court counselor and a passionate admirer of his music. Varela longed to 

have his very own work in the composer’s hand, and suggested the Stabat Mater as 

an appropriate text. Rossini, who had formally retired from composition two years 

before with William Tell, at first demurred, but was eventually cajoled by Aguardo 

into supplying this ardent request from such a distinguished source. Sometime after 

returning to Paris, Rossini completed six movements of his Stabat Mater before an 

attack of lumbago, exacerbated by his chronic problems with gonorrhea, confined him 

to bed for an extended period. Giovanni Tadolini, a native of Bologna, a fellow alumni 

with Rossini of that city’s conservatory and then conductor of the Théâtre Italien in Paris, 

was enlisted to finish the job. On March 26, 1832, the Stabat Mater was dispatched to 

Varela with an appropriately flowery dedication and the stipulation that the score was 

not to be sold or published, but with no indication of the dual authorship of the music. 

Varela responded by sending Rossini a magnificent gold snuffbox studded with eight 

diamonds. (It is unknown what payment Tadolini received.) Varela reserved his new 

work for performance until Good Friday of the following year, when it was given by 

more than a hundred singers at the chapel of S. Filippo El Real in Madrid. 

Rossini thereafter paid little attention to his Stabat Mater until 1837, when Varela 

died. The manuscript for the work was purchased at that time from Varela’s estate 

by one Oller Chetard, and four years later came into the possession of the Parisian 

publisher Antoine Aulagnier. Aulagnier sought Rossini’s permission to issue the work, 

but was summarily refused on the grounds that the Stabat Mater was intended only 

for Varela’s use and that it was essentially incomplete in any case. Rossini drew up a 

contract assigning the rights for the score to Eugène-Théodore Troupenas, publisher of 

his last four operas, and litigation was joined. The ensuing legal battle was decided in 

favor of Rossini and Troupenas, which made it incumbent upon the composer to finish 

the work that he had abandoned to another hand a decade before. Private readings 

of the Stabat Mater were given in October 1841 at the Parisian salons of the Austrian 

pianist Henri Herz and the pianist-composer Pierre-Joseph-Guillaume Zimmerman, and 

word of this “new” composition by Rossini, his first substantial creation in a dozen years, 

began to circulate among the city’s music lovers. The brothers Léon and Marie Escudier, 

music publishers and long-standing admirers of Rossini’s compositions, arranged a 

public performance for January 7, 1842 at the Salle Ventadour, which proved to be a 

spectacular success, though the composer could not attend because he was busy in 

Bologna directing the affairs of the Liceo Musicale. Rossini himself superintended the 

first Italian performances of the Stabat Mater, however, which took place in Bologna 

on March 18, 19 and 20. Gaetano Donizetti, whom he was seeking to install on the 

Liceo’s faculty, served as conductor. The Stabat Mater again triumphed, as it did all 

across Europe and America — it was performed at least a half-dozen times annually 

in Paris after 1842, Michael Costa led some 3,000 singers and instrumentalists in its 

presentation in following years at the Crystal Palace in London, Rossini was made a 

knight in the recently instituted Order of Merit in the Sciences and Arts by King Friedrich 

Wilhelm IV of Prussia in 1842 largely because of its reception, and it was given in such 

foreign parts as New York, Philadelphia and Boston within months of its premiere. The 

brilliant success of the Stabat Mater was mitigated for Rossini only by the death of 

A38 2012 Program Notes, Book 3 

Friday, July 20 and Saturday, July 21, 2012


Aguardo in April 1842. The work was adapted for use in Rossini’s funeral service at La 

Trinité on November 21, 1868, and heard again when his remains were reburied among 

those of other heroes of Italian culture at Santa Croce in Florence in May 1887. 

Rossini’s Stabat Mater, though based on a text which limbs the sorrows of the 

mother of Christ, encompasses a wide range of emotions in its ten movements, from 

stern tragedy to hopeful expectancy. Like Verdi’s Requiem, the Stabat Mater has been 

accused of borrowing too much of the theater to wrap the ancient liturgical words, 

though Rossini preferred to think of the music’s long melodic arches and undeniable 

drama not as sacrilege but as opera’s offering to the Church. Indeed, in the last four 

movements — those which he added in 1841 — Rossini anticipated the brilliance and 

emotional weight of the most ambitious passages in Verdi’s Requiem (whose initial 

inspiration was, perhaps not coincidentally, Rossini’s death). This intensity of expression 

is really quite extraordinary, since Rossini was not overtly religious, though he never fully 

outgrew the cultural foundation of Catholic tradition in which he had been raised. When 

the priest at his last rites asked the obligatory question about his beliefs, the dying 

composer responded, “Would I have been able to compose the Stabat Mater and the 

Petite Messe solennelle if I had not had faith?” From the quiet introspection of its two a 

cappella movements to the titanic wailings of its closing fugal Amen, the Stabat Mater 

is one of the greatest documents of sacred music of 19th-century Romanticism. 

Introduction (Chorus and Soloists) 

Stabat Mater dolorosa 

The sorrowful Mother stood 

juxta crucem lacrimosa 

weeping by the cross 

dum pendebat Filius. 

where her Son was hanging. 

Aria (Tenor) 

Cujus animam gementem, 

Her spirit cried out, 

contristatam et dolentem, 

full of anguish and sorrow, 

pertransivit gladius. 

as if pierced by a sword. 

O quam tristis et afflicta 

o how sad and distressed 

fuit illa benedicta 

was that blessed Woman, 

Mater unigeniti! 

Mother of the only-begotten Son! 

Quae maerebat et dolebat 

How She grieved and suffered 

et tremebat cum videbat 

and trembled as She saw 

nati poenas inclyti. 

the agonies of her Son. 

Duet (Soprano, Mezzo-Soprano) 

Quis est homo qui non fleret 

What man would not weep 

Christi Matrem si videret 

to see the Mother of Christ 

in tanto supplicio? 

in such torment? 

Quis non posset contristari 

Who would not be saddened 

piam matrem contemplari 

seeing the pious Mother 

dolentem cum Filio? 

grieving for her Son? 

Aria (Bass) 

Pro peccatis suae gentis 

For the sins of the world, 

vidit Jesum in tormentis, 

She saw Jesus in torment 

et flagellis subditum. 

and beaten down with whips. 

Vidit suum dulcem natum 

She saw her sweet Son 

moriendo, desolatum, 

dying in desolation, 

dum emisit spiritum. 

giving up His spirit. 



Chorus and Recitative (Bass) 

Eja Mater, fons amoris, 

Ah Mother, fountain of grief, 

me sentire vim doloris 

let me feel thy grief 

fac, ut tecum lugeam. 

so that I can mourn with you. 

Fac ut ardeat cor meum 

Let my heart burn 

in amando Christum Deum, 

with the love of Christ, my God, 

ut sibi complaceam. 

so that I may please Him. 

Quartet (Soloists) 

Sancta Mater, istud agas, 

Holy Mother, grant this: 

crucifixi fige plagas 

fix the wounds of Him who is crucified 

cordi meo valide. 

firmly in my heart. 

Tui nati vulnerati, 

With thy injured Son, 

tam dignati pro me pati, 

who suffered so to save me, 

poenas mecum divide. 

let me share His pains. 

Fac me vere tecum flere, 

Let me weep beside you, 

crucifixo condolere, 

mourning the crucified One, 

donec ego vixero. 

as long as I shall live. 

Juxta crucem tecum stare, 

To stand by the cross with you, 

te libenter sociare 

and to willingly join you 

in planctu desidero. 

in weeping is my desire. 

Virgo, virginum praeclara, 

Virgin, most famed of all virgins, 

mihi jam non sis amara, 

do not be severe with me now, 

fac me tecum plangere. 

let me weep with thee. 

Cavatina (Mezzo-Soprano) 

Fac ut portem Christi mortem, 

Let me bear Christ’s death, 

passionis fac consortem 

let me share His passion 

et plagas recolere. 

and remember His wounds. 

Fac me plagis vulnerari, 

Let me be wounded with His blows, 

cruce hac inebriari, 

inebriated with the cross 

ob amorem Filii. 

and your Son’s love. 

Aria and Chorus (Soprano) 

Inflammatus et accensus 

Lest the flames consume me, 

per te, Virgo, sim defensus 

be my protector, O Virgin, 

in die judicii. 

on the day of judgment. 

Fac me cruce custodiri, 

Let me be guarded by the Cross, that I 

morte Christi praemuniri, 

may be strengthened by Christ’s death 

confoveri gratia. 

and cherished by His grace. 

Quartet (Soloists) 

Quando corpus morietur, 

When my body dies, 

fac ut animae donetur 

let my soul be granted 

Paradisi gloria. 

the glory of heaven. 

Finale (Chorus and Soloists) 

Amen in sempiterna saecula. Amen. Amen, for ever and ever.

rossini's Stabat Mater - The Grant Park Music Festival

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