Archives for October 2019

Mater Dolorosa and Anna Akhmatova

27-10-2019

Through my Ultimate Stabat Mater Website I frequently receive messages from music lovers, musicians or composers about performances, recordings and compositions of the Stabat Mater. It always make me happy but I was extra surprised when Mr. Richard Blackford from England contacted me. He informed me he had been commissioned by the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus and Orchestra to compose a Stabat Mater and it was only when he came across four poems by Anna Akhmatova that a completely different approach occurred to him. So he had not just used the Latin text but combined it with some poems of Anna Akhmatova from her cycle Requiem, written in 1938, the Stalin-period, when her son Lev had been arrested and in prison for a long time. Indeed, I was surprised because, years ago, I got a Stabat Mater by Georgi Dmitriev (from Russia) in my collection and he too did use the Requiem poems by Akhmatova in his Stabat Mater. I told Richard about Dmitriev’s composition. We came in contact and I decided to attend the London premiere of his Stabat Mater on October 19th in the Cadogan Hall where I had the opportunity to meet Richard in person.

I had an exciting, wonderful evening! I was deeply impressed by Blackfords Pietà. He chose this title after revisiting Michelangelo’s statue in St. Peter’s in Rome. In the program book Richard says: I had seen it many times when I had lived in Rome, it was the luminescent beauty of the marble that struck me this time. How could something so sad , so poignant in its expression of a mothers grief for her son, be at the same time so beautiful, so inspiring of hope?
Please listen to Richard Blackford discussing his Pietà.

Finally, I have to confess something. When I was back home again I was looking for my Dmitriev CD and I found out that Dmitriev did not use a single word of the Stabat Mater text except the title of his composition: Stabat Mater Dolorosa!

New: Niels la Cour

09-10-2019

Mr. Hubert pointed me to several CD’s missing on my site. I just added one: Niels la Cour from Denmark composed in 2005 three Marian songs for mixed choir: Totra pulchra es, Stabat Mater and Regina caeli. Only two stanza’s (1 and 9) are sung. The Stabat Mater song is only 2.28 minutes. From the booklet:
Niels la Cour has reworked the famous Stabat Mater hymn en miniature and picked out a few individual verses which he juxtaposes in two very different textural types. He stages the emblematic introductory words of the piece “Stabat Mater Dolorosa”, in a decidedly dolorous madrigalistic harmony. Then Mary’s sorrowful vision of her son on the cross is conjured up in ghost like quickly fading fugato. From there the movement leaps to the beginning of the second half of the hymn , which praised the motherly love of Mary. Here La Cour unfolds a grand optimistic-sounding fugato followed by stepwise-descending melismata towards an open cadence that leads back to the torment of the “Stabat Mater”.

A modern translation into German

08-10-2019

What a special surprise to receive a German translation of the Stabat Mater text! But I was even more impressed after I found out that the translation had been done by Philippa Wills, a 17(!) year old student from King’s School in Worcester.
And of course, I did wonder how a 17 year old girl could get interested in translating a Latin text from the Middle Ages!
This is what she wrote to me:

…I am a 17 year old student, interested in Latin, German and Linguistics so I knew I wanted to translate something as part of my Extended Project Qualification. I read through quite a few Latin poems, but many were fairly long, or difficult to understand.
When I read the Stabat Mater I was completely arrested by the simplicity of the words, but the pathos of the piece is what I found captivating. The shades of grief felt by the Virgin Mary were lamented, in fact James Macmillan even goes so far as to label it as the ‘ultimate Kindertotenlied.’ My religious background made the context comprehensible to me, but my translation is aimed at a modern German audience, who do not need a religious background to access the translation. I translated it into German, because the pre-existing German versions I found all used very heavy, old German and I wanted to make it accessible to a current audience. I think that whilst Latin texts have an integrity in the original language, the decrease of Latin in a Globalised world means that these texts will lose their meaning, as less people understand them. Therefore, translating them, whilst losing the original plaintive nuances of the Latin, has benefits, since it can reach a larger audience. Of course, a translation is only a version of the original, but one could suggest that the meaning of the text finds new expression through a different language as the idiosyncrasies of that language document it in a different way…

It was an honour for me to add Philippa’s translation to my site. Her German translation is a part of her dissertation for her Extended Project Qualification, titled: A Translation of the ‘Stabat Mater’ text into German for a modern German audience. It contains 13 pages. Her research also gives new insights into issues surrounding the translation of a text, such as how close it should remain to the original, and how far it should be tailored to the intended audience. Thank you, Philippa, you did a brilliant job!