Stabat mater

Fac ut portem: tempo de sarabande -

Inflammatus et accensus: animé et très rythmé - adagio subito -

Quando corpus: très calme

Nearly fifty years ago Poulenc declared that “if people are still interested in my music in fifty years time it will be for my Stabat Mater.” He believed that he had put “what is best and most authentic” of himself into his religious music and that he had contributed “something new” to that area of the repertoire. After all, whenever he was involved in a work he felt to be particularly important he had gone back to the sanctuary of Rocamadour to deliver it into the protection of the Black Virgin - including, above all, the Stabat Mater, which he was to dedicate on its publication in 1951 “to the memory of Christian Bérard to confide his soul to Notre-Dame of Rocamadour.” He must have felt that his prayers had been answered when, in the midst of composing the piece, he reported that “suddenly genius has come to me and in three weeks I have written eight of the twelve movements. I think they are very moving and I will not be going back on them.”

Poulenc had chosen to commemorate his late friend, a celebrated stage designer, with a Stabat Mater because he feared that a Requiem would be too pompous. Indeed his setting of the medieval Stabat Mater text does have a kind of chastity about it, avoiding sentimental religiosity on the one hand and operatic theatricality on the other. The one deliberate indulgence in the score is the solo soprano part which is there, he said, “to give body to the tragedy”and which, for maximum effect, is held in reserve until the sixth movement (Vidit suum) at the very centre of the work. Even then, to sustain the characteristic tone of the piece, he doesn’t silence the chorus but blends the two vocal elements into a richer version of the same basic texture, as he does also in the two other movements, the tenth (Fac ut portem) and twelfth (Quando corpus), where the soprano intervenes.

As this distribution of vocal colour suggests, the emotional weight of the work falls mainly in the second half, not least in Fac ut portem which, in the gravity of its sarabande rhythms, anticipates the beginning of the third act of Poulenc’s disturbing opera, Dialogues des Carmélites. There is, however, no lack of drama in the first half - in the violence of the second movement (Cujus animam gementem), for example, and the desperate urgency of the fifth (Quis est homo). Curiously, bearing in mind the sense of the words, the fourth movement (Quae moerebat) is as joyful in its way as the seventh (Eja Mater).

The most important aspect of the structural symmetry is that which balances the more seriously thoughtful sections round the central Vidit suum. The largely unaccompanied third movement (O quam tristis), though more restrained in expression is no less tragic than the tormented tenth (Fac ut portem). Finally, in apparently simplistic but actually highly effective gesture characteristic of the composer, he recalls at the end of Quando corpus the gently evocative opening bars of the work. If it is another reminder that somewhere behind the foreground Stabat Mater there is a background memory of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, it is no less moving and no less authentic Poulenc for that.