For a composer who died at age 26, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736) wrote an awful lot of music. At least, there’s an awful lot of music attributed to Pergolesi. Most of it wasn’t by him at all.
Stravinsky was the most famous dupe. The Russian, never one to waste someone else’s good tune, based his ballet Pulcinella on pieces he believed to be by Pergolesi. Scholarship has subsequently revealed that the earlier composer had little to do with those works.
That was hardly Pergolesi’s fault, except it kind of was. The last piece he wrote, the Stabat Mater P77, became so popular after the composer’s (likely tubercular) death that publishers appended his name to any old rubbish, knowing that people would buy it based on the attribution alone.
Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, however, isn’t any old rubbish. Many composers have set music to the words that recount the Virgin’s suffering during Christ’s crucifixion, but Pergolesi’s version has stuck fast. For Vanessa Kay, whose Luminata Voices perform the work and other Easter pieces in Auckland on April 6, the music’s ongoing popularity lies in the way it makes people feel.
“If something makes me feel a certain way, I want to be part of it or share it; that’s what Stabat Mater does for me,” Kay says. “I’m a get-the-shivers person. We’ve looked it up and [autonomous sensory meridian response or ASMR] is a phenomenon some people get and some don’t. So to all my choirs I say, ‘If I’m conducting and I’m shivering, you have moved me in a way I think is special.’”
Baroque scholars might object to a shiver-based approach to the music, but Kay knows her stuff. She’s a music teacher and former member of the New Zealand Youth Choir who earned a master’s in choral conducting under the great Karen Grylls. Besides, Luminata make no claims to period accuracy. For the Stabat Mater, they use an arrangement for female choir and string quartet, rather than the more usual two voices with small group. The work loses the chiaroscuro shadow-play of the original but gains a depth of sound appropriate for the venue, St Matthew-in-the-City, in Auckland, a much larger space than Pergolesi composed for.
A different flavour of church, too. Does Kay, a practising Baptist, feel the need to reconcile singing a deeply Catholic work in the Anglican St Matthew?
“I think the story is still the same, it’s just from a different angle,” she says. “We know Mary was there at the cross and this music takes you closer to that idea. Over the years, I’ve sung all sorts of music. I don’t feel it was taking me somewhere different, that was just the point of view, but I think the idea of being a Christian is that you are open to everything and accepting of everything.”
Luminata Voices, Stabat Mater, Saturday, April 6, St Matthew-in-the-City, Auckland.
