VERA BELL

It’s difficult to describe the depth, complexity, and intensity of this work, comprised of ten phases, of which only the first and last are melodically related. It’s lush, late Victorian, unapologetically dramatic. The sorrowful mother stands at the cross, who is this man? What person would not weep? Oh mother, fountain of love, make my heart blaze, let me share with you the pain you feel for your son, who died so needlessly. Chosen virgin among virgins, allow me to weep with you. Grant that I may also bear the fate of his passion, his death. Defend me from burning in the flames on the day of Judgment, and while my body decays, give my soul to Paradise. 

National Gallery, Washington
Pietro Perugino, Mary at the Cross, 1482

Whatever your deistic, or atheistic, belief, there’s something about majestic choral works that makes them infinitely more than just oh-what-a-lovely-tune. Certainly numerous people have had Roman Catholic conversions in church whilst hearing a mass or an oratorio. They’re the ultimate reminder of the power of song. In addition, there’s something very seductive about the identification of human mourning with that of the Eternal Feminine, Goethe’s Ewig-Weibliche, the Platonic Form of the mother. This personification of grief can be traced much further back in human history, at least to Greek and Celtic mythology. Thirteenth century scholars of the Church produced this Latin text, communicated by various means to the population at large. 

The discovery of antibiotics in 1928 has arguably made the experience of death and its subsequent grief less immediate to many during the last few decades. But Dvořák completed his towering work in 1877; its anguish is intimately bound up with his own on the deaths of his three very young children, deaths made bearable by their transmutation into a universal appeal to a form of eternal life. The Stabat Mater lets us glimpse the ultimate purpose of religion.

Place: Christ Church, Silchester Road, St Leonards Date and time: Saturday 5 April 7 p.m. Tickets via the choir’s website (hastingsphilchoir.org.uk) or The Bookkeeper, 1A Kings Road, St Leonards, £22.50/£18/£13.50. Students, under 18s, jobseekers and universal credit £5, or pay what you can.


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https://www.hastingsindependentpress.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/ARTSTodiStabat-562x1024.jpghttps://www.hastingsindependentpress.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/ARTSTodiStabat-150x150.jpgHIPArtsMusicChrist Church,Silchester Road,VERA BELLVERA BELL It’s difficult to describe the depth, complexity, and intensity of this work, comprised of ten phases, of which only the first and last are melodically related. It’s lush, late Victorian, unapologetically dramatic. The sorrowful mother stands at the cross, who is this man? What person would not weep?...The Hastings & St Leonards non-profit community newspaper