A. Dvořák - Stabat mater

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841-1904) started work on his cantata Stabat mater, originally designated by the opus number 28, on the 19^th of February 1876, finishing the first version on the 7^th of May of the same year. He then returned to the work only after more than a year, at the beginning of Octover 1877, and completed it in definitive form after less than six weeks, on the 13^th of November. Dvořák's autograph of the original version of the Stabat Mater of 1876 remained inacessible to the professional public for many years, and so little precise was known about it  it. Most experts believed that it was a „piano sketch“ (particel), which the composer then simply instrumentated in the autumn of 1877. When its current owner provided access to the autograph just a few years ago, however, there was great surprise when it turned out to be an almost fully worked up „piano version“  which did not originally contain parts  5–7, i.e. the choral Tui Nati vulnerati, the moving tenor solo with choir Fac me vere tecum flere and the choral Virgo virginum praeclara, and differed in many other details from the later orchestral version. Evidently Dvořák had also sent this version to Vienna in 1876 as one of the supplements to his third application for a state scholarship for young artists without means.

In the definitive version of Dvořák's Stabat Mater, what is striking is above all the    compositional assurance of the thirty-six year-old composer, apparent both in the skilled exploitation of traditional („retrospective“) techniques and in their confrontation and combination with supremely modern musical techniques drawing particularly on the sources of Wagnerian and Lisztian harmony and sound, but also operatic idioms of the day.  Dvořák's Stabat Mater, op. 58 was first performed in Prague on the 23^rd of December 1880 at a concert organised by the Society of Music Artists (Tonkünstler-Sozietät). The soloists were Eleonora z Ehrenbergů, Betty Fibichová, Antonín Vávra and Karel Čech, with the orchestra and choir of the Provisional Theatre conducted by Adolf Čech. Another important performance in Brno on the 2^nd of April 1882 was conducted by the composer Leoš Janáček. After the tremendous response to the British premiere in the Royal Albert Hall in London on the 10^th of March 1883,  Dvořák was invited to make his first concert appearance in London. The repeat performance of the work with the conductor conducting a year later (13^th of March 1884) launched the series of Dvořák's immense successes in England, and his fame was soon to spread throughout the Anglo-Saxon world.