The St. Matthew Passion wasn’t the only choral work I performed for the first time in Holy Week. On Good Friday I went over to Oxford to sing in a scratch performance of Rossini’s Stabat Mater at St. Giles’s Church (I did something similar three years ago).
I must admit to a soft spot for this particular work, for all that Rossini seems after the opening to have forgotten the actual meaning of the words he was setting. I hadn’t heard it for a while, but I must have listened to my recording of it enough in the past to have absorbed the tunes, because most of them came back easily enough. As well as the chorus movements, we also sang the two movements scored for the soloists as a quartet.
We used the Novello edition (I declined to borrow the ancient vocal score from our university library, fearing that my misreading of the soprano clef in my part would cause me to come in a third too high all the time). This has a curious ‘English version’ – the word ‘translation’ would be inappropriate – called ‘Tribulation’. It’s religious in a general kind of way, but makes no reference to the Virgin Mary – or her Son! (It is much further away from the Latin than the toned-down version in Hymns Ancient and Modern). Novello did this elsewhere, for example in the Coronation Mass where the Ordinary of the Mass is turned into some selections from the psalms.
There are some truly horrendous “translations” around in scores – particularly modern ones by Rutter. I think the Coronation Mass thing you mention seems much more honest in not even trying to relate the English to the original.