Tulsa Opera: Stabat Mater
Holy Family Cathedral
April 26, 2025
No one suffers like the Catholics.
It was a fact (and it is a fact) made clear to me in Holy Family Cathedral last Saturday night, when Tulsa Opera performed Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s punishing Stabat Mater (1876-77), an 85-minute dirge portraying the horror of Mary during the death of Jesus. Looking up at the cathedral’s massive Gothic Revival altarpiece, with its looming Christ on the cross, its mourning disciples, and its anguished angels, I withstood a barrage of Czech grief appropriate to the bloody underpinnings of the religion.
The Stabat Mater is not unique to Dvořák; it’s a 13th-century Catholic poem and hymn that was also set to music by the storied likes of Haydn, Schubert, Liszt, and many more. But Dvořák, himself a Catholic, brought a certain je ne sais quoi to the work. The quoi in question? Suffering. While it’s been debated whether or not Dvořák composed his Stabat Mater as a reaction to the death of his two-day-old daughter in August 1876, it has not been debated that his two-day-old daughter died in August 1876. I therefore support the idea that Dvořák felt keenly the reality of the death of a child, and funneled it into this slow, angry, and plaintive work.
The first movement set the tone for the rest of the piece, featuring high wails of fury and pain amidst the soft, trudging chord changes. Aaron Beck conducted a 17-person orchestra and a 43-person chorale, along with four soloists, through the ten movements of Dvořák’s op. 58. Soloist Mary Ann Stewart, who recently terrified and astounded me in The Medium, affected a more mournful tone here with her resonant soprano.
The small size of the orchestra, in addition to the chorale being split down the middle with their halves placed on opposing wings of the cross-shaped sanctuary, made filling the massive space with sound a challenge. A piece like this demands volume, and I felt that the size and spacing of the players struggled to achieve it. In the second movement, a sleepy boredom overtook me; perhaps my volume-addled Millennial brain is too coddled by headphones to be moved by such a soft, slow piece. In the fifth movement, I wrote down, “Starting to feel that ‘How Much Longer Could This Possibly Last’ panic.” Even then, I was barely over halfway finished.
Recently, I read a Substack piece by New York mezzo-soprano Mary Rice titled “It’s Good You’re Bored at the Symphony, Actually,” wherein Rice considers that exact point. Like a soundbath or a meditation retreat, she says, a slow piece of classical music may help the brain to settle. For many people in a rushed world, her argument goes, concerts like this may be the only space in which their brain can release its ironclad grip long enough to even experience a passive state, much less the desirable embrace of boredom. Unfortunately I’m a manic and judgmental critic with a background in rock drums who, with the voraciousness of a gambling addict, prefers every piece of art to oscillate between its highs and lows as quickly as one of those metal-spring door-stops. I meditate regularly; I don’t need classical music to do it for me.
In retrospect, Stabat Mater spoke to me in a different way. My confused boredom, which settled in around the sixth movement and did not let up until the grandiose explosion of major tonality and raised voices in the tenth, was not fundamentally different to the very boring sitting and waiting that we did when my grandmother and grandfather died within six months of each other: lots of staring into space, lots of quiet crying, only occasionally punctuated by a cluster of sobbing sopranos. Grief is not some straight shot; it’s a war of attrition between you and hopelessness, and sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose.
Suffering, in other words. That thing we all do. The Catholics are brave enough to systematize it, to their credit, and they do it damn well.
Returning to a YouTube recording of the piece to refresh my memory, I find a comfort in its slowness that I didn’t find during the performance. Perhaps that’s simply familiarity; I’d never heard this piece before attending this concert, and while I wonder if I do myself a disservice by going into a performance with no foreknowledge, that’s just how it has to be sometimes. We’re born knowing nothing; we suffer; we die. Dvořák knew that. And he gave us 85 minutes to remember it.
