rossini's Stabat Mater - The Grant Park Music Festival

Friday, July 20 and Saturday, July 21, 2012
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
2012 Program Notes, Book 3 A37