Pergolesi: Stabat Mater

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736) clearly belongs in the category of those miraculous comets that in the old days used to appear time and again on the firmament of fine music, but so often died very young, each time leaving behind a perplexed world trying to figure out how such youth could have possibly reached both at such amazing compository mastership and such extraordinary spiritual depth. Chopin died age 39; Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, age 38; Mozart, six weeks before his 36th birthday; Schubert, as early as age 31. Ever fragile Pergolesi, however, after only 5 years of being a composer in his own right, died of tuberculosis at age 26! In these 5 years, he wrote - beside a variety of instrumental music - some 10 (serious) operas and about a dozen of spiritual works. Among the latter is this Stabat Mater, written shortly before his untimely death in March of 1736. The work reveals, of course, Pergolesi&position in music history: 25 to 30 years younger than Vivaldi, Telemann, Rameau, Händel, and Bach, and on the other hand 22 years older than Haydn, he stands like the Bach sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel and Wilhelm Friedemann, as well as Gluck, somewhere between the great masters of the Baroque and what then was to become the First Viennese School (or, to use the German term, the &Klassik&consisting first of Haydn and Mozart, but then also of Beethoven and, to a lesser extent, Schubert. Yet, Pergolesi did not live long enough to see the scenes change from the late...