Bergson Voices: Passion Concert Featuring Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater

Once again this year, our Passion concert is a profound meditation, a kind of retreat, a time to find peace. The program opens with the “St. John Passion” by Johannes X. Schachtner, artistic director of the Bergson Voices, which also serves as a reflection on historical settings of the Passion.

This is followed by one of the most famous sacred works of all time: Giovanni Pergolesi’s *Stabat Mater*. He composed it in 1736 while gravely ill with tuberculosis in a Franciscan monastery. A few weeks later, he died at the age of just 26. His early death contributed to an even greater demand for his works—especially the *Stabat mater*. In the decades that followed, it became a European bestseller, copied, printed, and performed countless times.

Johann Sebastian Bach valued the work so highly that he not only studied it but also revised it himself, turning it into a cantata—a highly unusual move for Bach. We also present the *Stabat mater* as a Passion cantata, though in a version arranged by Johann Adam Hiller, who succeeded Bach as Thomaskantor in Leipzig.

Pergolesi’s setting was likely so impressive precisely because he truly portrays the grieving, pain-stricken Mary at the foot of her son Jesus’s cross as such. Up until Pergolesi, it was customary to always imbue the Mother of God with a sense of the sublime, the majestic, and the ethereal—both in music and in painting. Here, she is portrayed to us as a human being, as a simple woman, as a mother who must endure the loss of her son.

And that is precisely what makes the work so immediate and direct; that is exactly why it still moves us today.

Bergson Voices

Bergson Phil’

Musical Director: Johannes X. Schachtner