Reviewed by James Roy MacBean
Friday June 09, 2017 - 12:21:00 PM
In spite of its many musical virtues, if Antonín Dvorák’s Stabat Mater were just another setting of the grief experienced by Mary, the mother of Christ, as she watched her son die on the cross, I’m not sure this work would be nearly as moving as it is once one is informed about the circumstances in Dvorák’s own life which gave rise to this composition. In 1875, the recently married Dvorák and his wife had a daughter, Josefa, who died at just two days old. Overcome with grief, Dvorák began work on a Stabat Mater. He didn’t get very far, perhaps only eight bars, when he put aside this work to fulfill commissions for other music. Two years later, his 11-month old daughter, Ruenza, died, and less than a month later, his son, Otakar, also died. The Dvorák family was suddenly childless, having experienced the deaths of three children in two years. Dvorák threw himself into composing his Stabat Mater, which he completed in 1877. In this work, one senses that Dvorák took the grief of Mary, mother of Christ, as a paradigm of his wife’s grief as well as his own at the death of their three children. The Dvorák Stabat Mater thus became both an intimately personal work and, at the same time, a universal work embodying the grief of any mother who sees her child die.
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