No sacred poem of its length has drawn more music. The roll of Stabat Mater settings runs practically continuous from the Renaissance to the present, Josquin and Palestrina in the polyphonic golden age, Domenico Scarlatti for ten voices, and then Pergolesi's setting of 1736, composed in the last weeks of his life at twenty six, which became one of the most printed and performed works of the entire eighteenth century, its opening duet of grinding suspensions the very sound of the pierced soul.
Haydn's large setting carried his early fame across Europe. Rossini, long retired from opera, produced a Stabat Mater whose theatrical fervour scandalized some and thrilled everyone else. Dvorak composed his, the first great Czech oratorio, in the years he lost three children, and it is impossible not to hear the biography in it. Verdi placed a Stabat Mater among his final works, the Four Sacred Pieces, and the twentieth and twenty first centuries kept faith with the text, Szymanowski's luminous Polish setting, Poulenc's, and Arvo Part's spare tintinnabular meditation among many. The poem's attraction for composers is structural as well as devotional, a long text that moves from picture to petition, from grief observed to grief requested, offering music the same journey inward that the words make.