The Masterworks Chorale performed Franz Joseph Haydn's Stabat Mater on Sunday, May 17, at Sanders Theater.
Stabat Mater means "sorrowful mother" in Latin, referring to Mary, the mother of Jesus. I was struck by the insistent and sometimes graphic desire to share Christ's and Mary's suffering:
"Fix the stripes of the Crucified deeply into my Heart."
"Make me a sharer in His Passion and ever mindful of his wounds."
"Let me be wounded by His wounds."
In these lines, Christ and his mother are not abstractions, distant figures of another era. Each singer longs to know them, as if they could be touched and felt.
Whether we're religious, irreligious, agnostic, or whatever, few people actually think and feel this way today. We don't think of Christ in such intimate terms, perhaps because we're afraid of being ridiculed -- it's just not the way a modern educated man thinks.
The experience of the concert reminded me of my conversations with my father, when I was a boy, and we worked together in the back of our candy shop. I went there after my high school classes were finished for the day. We worked alone for hours each night. Often we came around to talking about Christ, the apostles, Mary, Judas -- all of them as if they were people we might know, perhaps from our family, as if Doubting Thomas could appear in the doorway and could tell us, wasn't it perfectly normal to doubt that Jesus had returned? Or for Pontius Pilate to say to us that the crucifixion wasn't really his fault, that he had a state to govern for Rome. We discussed their motives. Did Christ have girlfriends? How could it be that Mary was a virgin? Did we really believe that? We had lots of time, of course, making candy, and talking.
It was brave of Masterworks to perform Stabat Mater.
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