For years music had been one of the simple ways our family reflects and prepares our souls for the greatest feast of the Christian year. With so many littles, employing music in our Lenten devotions it is an easy, no-cost way to help tune their hearts to the sacrifice of our Lord and prayerfully await the “Easter-Feaster,” as they are fond of saying. The calmer Lenten musical works that we use as our soundtrack for the season are a gentle reminder of the penitential tone we are called to embrace.
Our practice has been to listen to a different musical setting of the “Stabat Mater Dolorosa” each Friday of Lent. This Latin hymn from the 1200’s consists of 20 stanzas depicting the experience of Our Blessed Mother at the foot of the Cross and is often sung as part of the Stations of the Cross. Although the debated authorship of the hymn is attributed to a few like St. Bonaventure, or Jacopone da Todi, a Franciscan friar, Pope St. Innocent III is the one that always comes to my mind first.
This Lent, I want to invite your family to join us as we delve a little deeper into a Romantic era setting of this medieval hymn, Antonin Dvořák’s Stabat Mater. Similar to our Advent Calendar with Handel’s Messiah, every Friday I’ll offer a selected listening from the featured masterwork and a related music appreciation lesson, based on our Easy as ABC method, for your whole family to enjoy.
As free listening, the whole work is in the playlist below:
https://open.spotify.com/album/5JyGACt4RgA5BJhMptIZgH