When Gioacchino Rossini’s thirty eighth opera, William Tell, was premiered in August 1829 in Paris, no one suspected that this would prove to be the spectacularly successful composer’s final stage work. As the years passed and the famous composer failed to compose a single new opera, rumours spread that the master’s “great silence” was the result of some creative crisis. It was as though opera was regarded as the only genre that counted. And yet Rossini had certainly not given up composing: he composed his Soirées musicales, the Stabat Mater, the Petite Messe Solennelle and a string of works for piano and voice, which the composer labelled Péchés de Vieillesse. But despite this, there is no denying that in the early 1830s, Rossini’s self-confidence as a composer seemed shaken. Some have traced this to the collapse of his health, others to the death of his parents. And yet others – and this is perhaps the more convincing explanation – see in the background the emergence of new musical trends.

This may be why in 1831, when during a tour of Spain, a rich noble from Madrid Don Manuel Fernandez Varela asked Rossini to compose a Stabat Mater, Rossini’s initial reaction was to reject the idea outright. For him, Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater represented the perfect setting of the medieval text attributed to Jacopone de Todi and he did not wish to invite any comparisons. Finally though, he acceded to Varela’s request with one condition: that the work would not to be printed. They agreed terms and payment was in the form of a golden snuff box encrusted with diamonds.

In 1837 Valera died and his relatives found the manuscript of the Stabat Mater among his belongings which they promptly sold to a French publisher for 5000 francs. When the composer learned of this, he sought out the publisher and threatened him with legal action if they ignored his wish that the work not appear in print. He had a rather good reason for this because of the original 12 movements of the Stabat Mater Rossini only composed six. At the time of composition in 1831-32, he was suffering from a bout of lumbago and he made his friend Tadolini compose the rest. While the lawyers huffed and puffed, Rossini swiftly completed the work, condensing the six missing movements into four (today’s 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 10th movements) before offering it to his own Paris publisher, Troupenas, who meanwhile had sued the first publisher for “forgery and theft.” The court eventually decreed that the contract with Varela did not permit his relatives to publish the work: the music was Rossini’s who could do with it what he saw fit.
Its first public performance took place on January 7th 1842 in Paris. Among the audience was none other than the poet Heinrich Heine who expressed his rapture: in his view the work was conceived far more in the spirit of Christianity than Mendelssohn’s oratorio St. Paul. Adolphe Adam, the composer of Giselle, published a detailed and enthusiastic analysis of the Stabat Mater. All things considered, both the press and the audience received Rossini’s new work with enthusiasm. The only negative voice belonged to a young German composer by the name of Richard Wagner who sent a rather satirical report about an “important event” to the Leipzig Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.

The first Italian premiere took place in Rossini’s own city, Bologna but the composer’s was suffering badly from nerves and was neither present at the dress rehearsal or the first performances. It was conducted by Gaetano Donizetti and among the soloists were the British soprano Clara Novello (after whom Schumann named his Noveletten piano pieces) and the Russian tenor Nicolai Ivanov.
Rossini’s Stabat Mater and Verdi’s Requiem are frequently compared and often, subjected to the same charges. Both works derive from a composer who can far more closely be linked with stage rather than ecclesiastical music. Both composers were celebrated as national heroes and both composers each received one negative criticism from a distinguished German musician (in Verdi’s case, it was the conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow.) Finally, the presence of religious character in both works is often questioned. This is particularly true of the Stabat Mater where we discern not just Rossini’s operatic character (in places, such as the 7th movement, there are concrete operatic procedures in plain view) but often the composer is accused of using hedonistic music to set the sorrowful text. How can the image of Mary looking at the crucified Christ be linked with the cheerful music which Rossini furnishes to the words “cujus animam gementem”?

Twenty years later, Rossini expressed his own opinion on the mater: he did not regard the procedure in which a composer tries to shape every word of a text into music as rational. He feared that the musical form would suffer as a result. Compositions, in his opinion – and as he explained to his biographer and friend Zanolini – must express the text’s “moral atmosphere.” When we hear Rossini’s Stabat Mater, then this work, to use the words of Heinrich Heine, “lightens the horrors of the death on the cross” and through it “the feeling of infinity embraces everything.”