Last week, I attended a New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s performance of two works based on the Stabat Mater, a thirteenth-century poem/hymn based on the suffering of Mary as she watched Jesus’s death on the cross.
The first Stabat Mater was by Rossini, a nineteenth-century Italian composer, with the orchestra backed by a choir and featuring four magnificent soloists. I loved listening to the oboes, bassoons, and French horns (I always have a soft spot for the horn).
The performance was sung in the original Latin, but there was an English translation in the programme. The text speaks of Mary’s loss and sacrifice:
The grieving Mother stood
weeping by the Cross
where hung her Son.
But it does describe why Jesus chose to die:
For the sins of His people
she saw Jesus in torment
And our reaction to Jesus’s sacrifice:
Grant that my heart may burn
in loving Christ, God,
that I may please Him.
It was a magnificent and beautiful performance, full of emotion, wonderful to listen to and to watch. The music is a mixture of pain and joy—the pain of the crucifixion, and the joy of being one with God in Jesus through His death and resurrection.
The second item on the programme was the premier of a new Stabat Mater by Victoria Kelly a contemporary New Zealand composer. In the pre-concert talk, Kelly described something of her writing process, commenting that she was making changes right up until the last minute. As a writer, this rang true: it can be hard to get past the desire to revise and edit, revise and edit, and release a title into the world.
The interviewer asked Kelly if she’d started composing with the music or the words—the writer analogy would be whether we plot or not (aka are we plotters or pantsers).
Kelly said she started with the words … or rather, she started by rejecting text of the original Stabat Mater and writing her own.
She said she grew up in a Christian home but rejected her family’s faith. The text of her Stabat Mater perhaps gives some insights into why she rejected Christianity. Kelly’s Mary does not weep for her Son. Instead, she fights for him.
As Kelly is quoted in the programme:
I found Mary’s suffering impossible to conceive and the glorification of it hard to accept.
Kelly’s Mary literally takes up a sword to save her son. She says her Mary is not passive, allowing the death of her son. She is active in preventing his death.
In doing so, Kelly perhaps shows her misunderstanding of Christianity.
Mary following Jesus to His painful death is not Mary passively allowing the Romans to kill Jesus. Rather, it is Mary’s faith in action, her outward demonstration that while she doesn’t understand what God is doing and why her son, Jesus, has to die, she trusts that God knows what He’s doing.
Kelly’s Mary forgets the central tenet of the Christian faith: that Jesus was the single perfect sacrifice for our sins, dying to fulfil the law that might live free from the law and receive our salvation through Him.
As tragic and emotional as Mary must have found Jesus’s death, I don’t believe she stood before the cross and blamed God. Instead, I think the Mary who sang praises to God when she found out she was going to be an unmarried teenage mother would have been giving thanks for his life—and hers.
What might Mary have given thanks for?
That she’d married a man who believed in Yahweh, not a man who would put away his pregnant fiancé, or sacrifice his sons to appease the gods, or give his daughters to “serve” in the heathen temples.
That she hadn’t died while giving birth to Jesus or any of her subsequent children with her husband, Joseph.
That Jesus didn’t die of any of the myriad childhood illness we have now largely eradicated through global public health initiatives such as vaccination.
That Jesus survived to adulthood, took over his father’s business as a carpenter in Nazareth, then took over his Father’s business of preaching repentance and salvation.
What Mary may not have known right then (but certainly knew later) was that Jesus’s death was necessary.
Without his death, he couldn’t have been resurrected. Without his resurrection, we wouldn’t have been released from the law. We wouldn’t be able to come directly to God ourselves. We would have been trapped under a law that can’t be kept. Jesus kept and fulfilled the law, and his death and resurrection was the final chapter in that journey.
Kelly said she wanted her Stabat Mater to provoke listeners to tears.
It did.
But perhaps not for the reason Kelly had anticipated. By rejecting Mary’s suffering and sacrifice, she has rejected Jesus and His sacrifice for her, for me, for you, for all of us.
Thanks for sharing, Iola.
I often think that Jesus’ death would have been a tragedy, if not for the resurrection. I’m sad that Kelly missed the point of the story and saw only tragedy, but glad you enjoyed it, understanding the spiritual significance, which, in my view, adds more beauty to the music.
Thank you for reading 🙂