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Comedy in the Stabat Mater?

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Although some of the movements of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater are more lighthearted than the text would suggest, what I’m really referring to is the comedy of errors in dealing with the orchestra parts.
 
It started a few weeks ago when I was marking up my full score with my preferred articulations, dynamics, bowings, etc., and started to transfer the markings into the parts before mailing them to the players. That’s when I discovered that the second violin part was totally different in the second movement from what appeared in the full score. Not just a not here and there, but completely different. And not just the second movement — almost all the movements were different! Any time the two violins played in unison (which is quite a bit of the time) the editor had invented a new part.
 
Then it turned out it wasn’t just the second violin. Anytime the viola doubled the continuo (which was pretty often) the editor invented a new part. Those of you who have read my posts before know I’m not very interested in authentic performance or the “composer’s intent” and have no problem with such changes, but (a) these were really bad, with un-Baroque double-stops and awkward voice-leading, and (b) why weren’t they in the full score? It was the same edition (Breitkopf). It would be close to impossible to conduct when players are playing something which isn’t in the full score.
 
So I fished out some Kalmus parts I had in a file and started transferring my markings to them. Of course they were full of editorial dynamics and slurring and articulations which didn’t agree with my score, but at least the notes were the same, or mostly.
 
Then we get to the vocal score, which was the G. Schirmer edition. I discovered some of the discrepancies during the rehearsals, such as the augmentation of the final half-dozen bars in the last movement. But others didn’t turn up until the last minute, such as the one-measure cut in the 8th movement and the one-measure substitution later in the same movement, where the editor just replaced a measure of music with something else in the chorus part. At the dress rehearsal, what’s to do besides cut those measures (which were really half-of-one-bar-and-half-of-the-next-bar) in the orchestra? And one movement was in a different time signature (2/2 instead of 4/2). 
 
Sure would have preferred to spend the dress rehearsal working more on music and less on reconciling parts.
 
Argh. Maybe someone will come out with a decent edition where everything matches. And put it on CPDL.
 
Image: Pergolesi cartoon by Kim Frost

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  2. Hi John, it was Johann Sebastian Bach, who arranged the
    Pergolesi Stabat Mater, with new text (author unknown), and created
    the “Motetto a due voci, 3 Stromenti a Cont. di G. B. Pergolese’
    (which was written in Bach’s hand on his draft score) sometime
    between 1745 and 1747. Bach’s parts were discovered in the 1960s in
    the Berlin Staatsbibliothek…typically for Bach, he wrote the
    organ part, and a student (in this case his son-in-law JC
    Altnickol) wrote out the orchestera parts. The major diffferences
    (from Pergolesi) are in the 2nd violin and the viola parts, and
    then the differences to account for the different text, and the
    Dresden Court style of arranging Italian music, and some more minor
    (but significant) changes that are characteristic of Bach’s music
    in general..The text is not a German translation of Stabat Mater,
    but a new German text, paraphrasing Ps 51, “Tilge, Höchste, meine
    Sünde.”

  3. Allen.  The edition you needed does indeed exist.  When I decided to program it, a year and a half ago, I downloaded it from the internet and had absolutely NONE of the problems you encountered.  I can’t tell you right now whether I found it on CPDL, Werner Icking, or somewhere else, but I still have the PDF files and there were NO discrepencies at all.  Beware of modern editors!!  And especially of mixing editions–always a questionable business.
     
    I did it with a small women’s ensemble–in fact I had only a couple of men that semester, and looked to the Pergolesi BECA– USE I could do it with women alone (although it certainly would have been intended for choirboy and countertenor).  And I broke it up into solo and duet movements and 3 or 4 choral movements, including the first and last.  In other words, I was not a fanatic about historically-informed performance (although thankfully my keyboardists were able to realize the figured bass).  My son, on the other hand, did several performances of it as the alto soloist in duet performances with very fine baroque ensembles, and I don’t believe they had any problems with discrepencies, either.
     
    As to the lighthearted approach you found in the score (as opposed to the “comedy of errors” you described), the simple fact is that Pergolesi’s approach to this VERY sad and moving text represents neither the melodramatic baroque nor the emotionalism of the romantic era.  He and his style were what we now term Pre-Classical, and he obviously did not subscribe to the dictum that “Major is Happy and Minor is Sad” (to quote my 2nd grade music teacher!).  The trick is to find what’s in the music on its own terms, which I have to admit my son did a lot better than I did, because I, like you, found the clash of moods rather difficult to deal with.
     
    Since the man wrote this music while he was dying, and dying at an obscenely young age, perhaps he NEEDED the upbeat mood that he wove so well into this setting.  Or maybe it was something much more metaphysical.  But we’ll never know.
     
    I didn’t know that Bach had reworked this music.  (Which Bach was it, specifically?)  He certainly did a good job with some of Vivaldi, who was also more Pre-Classical than baroque in a lot of ways, but in this case that seems a bit more like reverse engineering from a later style to an earlier.
     
    All the best,
    John

  4. Hi Allen, I am guessing you know about the extensive
    revisions (restructurings – rewriting) by JSB (BWV 1083). It would
    be interesting to see how much of the Breitkopf set is actually the
    JSB revisions, just not catalogued (entitled) as such. What a
    nightmare. Good luck!

    Do you know the film “Jesus of Montreal”? The Pergolesi figures
    prominently in that outstanding film.

  5. Allen – Check out the Tartini “Stabat Mater.”  No strings; a cappella; on CPDL.  Lovely.  We’re doing it as a trio TTB; could be done as written (SSA); you can use your imagination for other voicings.
     
    Ron Duquette

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