rossini's Stabat Mater - The Grant Park Music Festival

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