Stabat Mater Speciosa by Lionel Ginoux, for women choir – piece dedicated to Catherine Bolzinger
Lionel Ginoux introduce us to his work:
What attracted me in writing a stabat mater and more generally a religious piece was to write a work that could be performed in a sacred place, a church, in a place conducive to calm, reflection and meditation. In the writing of this work, I had as a red thread the interiority, the appeasement, the meditation, the return on oneself...
The idea of the Stabat Mater came from Catherine Bolzinger who asked me if I was interested in setting it to music. Yes, of course I am interested... However, my idea was to set the Stabat Mater Speciosa to music, which is a text that is not often set to music, compared to the Stabat Mater Dolorosa, which we know more about.
The Speciosa is about the birth of Jesus, so there is a joy, a luminosity that emerges from the text. My job was to find, through harmonies and contrasts, this luminosity, this call to life that the birth of a newborn child brings.
I obviously wanted to compose on the Latin text. So I called on Mr. Lefauconnier who translated the text for me and "dissected" the intentions. His first reading was that the Speciosa had the same form, the same metric as the Dolorosa. Interesting... The painful words are changed into words of joy, respecting the placement of the tonic accents… I was guided by this idea of a mirror between the two texts, a mirror between a dark text and a luminous text. Mr. Lefauconnier also spoke to me about the "literary quality" of the text. For him, this Stabat Mater Speciosa refers more to popular Latin, to everyday Latin, than to classical Latin… This other indication led me to listen to popular medieval music and to get closer to this idea of a text of joy, composed for the "people" in order to meditate on a joyful event.
Two videos introducing to this work by the choir "les Voix de Strass’” who has created the piece:
