Last week I got a very special mail from Mr. Keith Stroup. He recently purchased an orphaned leaf from a Flemish Book of Hours, which has a sizable portion of The Stabat Mater text scribed upon it. The leaf had been matted decades ago with the only information stating that it was scribed in Flanders ca. 1500. It begins with the last line of stanza 10: Ut sibi complaceam. It follows the Analecta version to the 20th stanza: Fac ut animae donetur. The last line Paradisi Gloria is missing. Mr. Stroup send me two pictures of the leaf.
This is the recto, or front of the leaf:

This is the verso, or back of the leaf:

Thank you very much Mr. Stroup!

 

Mr. Hubert Beckwith was so kind to contact me; he provided me with new information, an addition to the webpage Stabat Mater text. On this page Hans has written about the origins of Stabat Mater text:  …The oldest reference in a liturgical source is a Breviary from Arezzo, a manuscript dated 1417. ..
That seems to be incorrect now! Mr. Hubert wrote to me:

…Not long after your husband died, an earlier liturgical use of Stabat Mater was discovered. Here is a short article in English that describes: the discovery of the famous Stabat Mater being used as a sequence in the Gradual produced by a convent of Dominican nuns in Bologna in the later thirteenth century. This is by far the earliest known manuscript example of this hymn used as a sequence rather than as a devotional hymn. It has been commonly believed that the hymn only became used as a sequence in the late middle ages. (Its melody there is not found in other sources.)  The article links to a research study by Cesarino Ruini (in Italian) that discusses the discovery in great detail.  Follow the link “scarica questo file PDF.”  I hope you can find someone to translate it.
As a brief summary: The sentences about early sources might be changed to something like “The Stabat mater first appeared as a liturgical sequence in the later 13th century, in a Gradual from a Dominican convent in Bologna. Since the beginning of the 14th century it can be found in prayer books.
Again, many thanks to you and your late husband for your richly informative and elegant website…

I wil make a correction to the webpage as soon as possible. Thank you very much Mr. Beckwith!

I have got a mail from Heikki Hattunen:
Hello! Thank you for your website. The Finnish translation on your site is a poetic one. I wish you could add one which is accurate word-by-word. This helped me understand the meaning of each word when preparing to sing the text.
This is by Juhani Koivisto (juhani.koivisto@operafin.fi). 
http://laura.siba.fi/xwiki/bin/view/Laura/View?id=1b10487dd21c5c66e9d29ea1af00a054&tr=1
Sincerely, Heikki Hattunen

Thank you very much, Heikki! I have added this translation to my site.

Mrs Rui Sano contacted me about James Dillon, she wrote

Accidentally I came across your website when I was looking up something else about Stabat Mater, it’s amazing to learn there are hundreds of Stabat Mater’s composed and recorded!
I thought I should drop you a line because I was surprised your list didn’t include the Stabat Mater by James Dillon. I was very lucky to be at a performance in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London in 2015. It was one of the most beautiful and moving concert experience I ever had! I particularly adore the Vivaldi and Pergolesi versions, now I hope to hear the Dillon version again, despite it’s great success it seems there are no CD recordings of the work, a great shame!! Thank you for such an otherwise informative website.

I have never even heard of James Dillon, so I was very happy with the information. Now James Dillon is on the list of Missing CD’s. I discovered James Dillon is a contemporary British composer. He was commissioned to write a Stabat mater for the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK) for an ensemble, choir and electronics.
The Stabat Mater text is expanded with a number of other texts including excerpts from the radical French writer Julia Kristeva’s essay on the Stabat Mater, Rainer Maria Rilke’s early Visions of Christ, John Donne’s A Valediction and excerpts from a letter to Picasso from his mother (in May 1937 Picasso’s mother wrote to him from Barcelona that smoke from the burning city during the fighting made her eyes water). On Youtube you can watch a video about James Dillon.

Last week Mr. Hendrik Decker was so kind to contact me about Liszt’s transcriptions of Rossini’s Stabat Mater. Mr. Decker wrote:

Today I assisted a performance by Albert Martínez-Lorente Romero (trombone) and Francisco Javier Jiménez Martínez (church organ) of an arrangement of the Cujus Animam movement of Rossini’s Stabat Mater by Franz Liszt, in the Jesuit church Iglesia del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús in Valencia (Spain), I thought that this might be of interest to you, since, on your web page that covers Liszt’s Stabat Mater, no mention is made of the existence of Liszt’s arrangement of Rossini’s Cujus Animam, originally for piano. Apart from the original arrangement for piano and the version of Liszt’s arrangement of Rossini’s Cujus Anima for organ and trombone, as heard today, also an adaptation of Liszts’ arrangement of Rossini’s Cujus Anima for organ and voice exist, according to what can be foud of the world wide web…

As I could not imagine that Hans would not have known about these Liszt transcriptions, I checked, and indeed on the Liszt page Hans says: Liszt frequently made transcriptions for piano from famous compositions of other composers; one was Rossini’s Stabat Mater. However, Mr. Decker provided me with interesting and valueble extra information and thanks to him, I could order a CD  with Liszt’s piano version of Cuius Animam Gementem. You can listen to it here:

It is 8 pm and silence descends on the main auditorium of the Oosterpoort Theatre in Groningen (The Netherlands). On stage, a few hundred young people aged between 16 and 18 are lined up behind an orchestra. The youths are the students of the 10^th, 11^th and 12^th grade of the Parcival College in Groningen, which is the school my niece’s children attend. The Parcival College educates the students according to the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, who founded the anthroposophy movement.

The conductor, one of the teachers, ascends the stage. The orchestra begins to play and the voices join in. Enthralled, I listen to Verdi’s Stabat Mater. This short but complex piece is the opening of the concert, an annual performance in the week before Easter in which all 900 students and over 100 staff participate. The students know the words by heart and the enthusiasm in their voices as they sing is deeply moving. Later in the evening they perform Ramirez’ Missa Criolla. In between, the pop choir of the 7^th grade perform songs from different era’s in various styles and languages. The 9^th grade sing songs in Dutch, which they wrote themselves. The highlight of the evening is the percussion session of the 8^th grade. The setting is an airport: people are going on holidays, are waiting on a loved one, and someone is in a rush to catch a plane. There are business people, pilots, mechanics and adventurers. We are brought on a journey by the students, who choreographed the performance and wrote all the rhythms themselves. They use not only drums, but also a selection of different objects, such as shopping trolleys, suitcases, umbrellas and bicycle pumps. It sounds great and it is very entertaining to watch. I came for Verdi’s Stabat Mater, but the whole programme was very impressive and surprising. It was a wonderful evening, thanks to the Parcival College.