Stabat Mater Dolorosa

(Lat. "His mother stood grieving")

   Latin poem thought to be of Franciscan origin, traditionally ascribed to Jacopone da Todi (d. 1306), sung as a sequence (since the 15th century) and an office hymn in Roman Catholic liturgy. The Council of Trent excluded it from the liturgy along with most other medieval sequences, but in 1727 Pope Benedict XIII restored it for use on the Feast of the Seven Dolours on 15 September.

   The 15th-century Eton Choirbook contains three polyphonic settings and continental composers contributed stile antico settings well into the 18th century, including celebrated compositions of Giovanni da Palestrina and Orlandus Lassus, both in eight voices. Today the text is heard most often in concert, set for chorus and instrumental or even symphonic accompaniment by composers of later periods: Antonio Caldara, Giovanni Pergolesi (1736), Giocchino Rossini (1841), Franz Liszt (part of his oratorio Christus, 1862–1866), Antonín Dvořák (1877), Giuseppe Verdi (as the second of his Quattro Pezzi Sacri, 1898), Francis Poulenc (1950), and Krzysztof Penderecki (1962).