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The genial Italian died in November, 1868, and Patti paid her last tribute of respect to his memory by taking part in the performance of his immortal "Stabat Mater," which was given on the occasion of Rossini's burial service.
Such brutal opacities of accompaniment as we find in Rossini's Stabat or Verdi's Trovatore, where the strings play a rum-tum accompaniment whilst the entire wind band blares away, fortissimo, in unison with the unfortunate singer, are never to be found in Wagner's work.
It is worth noticing that the masterpieces of the spiritual work of Indo-Europeans, taking the pure religious sentiment, and not the imaginative reason, for their basis, are works like the Imitation, the Dies Irae, the Stabat Mater works clothing themselves in the middle-age Latin, the genuine native voice of no Indo-European nation.
They affect one the "Stabat Mater," for instance, and the "Ave Verum" very much in the same way as the figures which stare down, dingy green and blue, from the gold of the Cosmati's mosaics: childish, dreary, all stiff and agape, but so solemn and pathetic, and full of the greatest future.
The Inflammatus in Rossini's Stabat Mater, which is written for dramatic soprano, contains the high C, and no one who has heard Nordica sing it need be told of the noble effect a great dramatic soprano can produce with it.
And he sang alone to the sky and the dusty rocks and the solemn grave. He sang the 'Cujus animam gementem pertransivit gladius' of the Stabat Mater, as none had sung it before him, nor perhaps has ever sung it since that day he alone, without other music. They came also to the words 'Fac ut animæ donetur Paradisi gloria, and the word was a name to him who listened silently in their midst.
In some instances a more generally religious and ideal cast is given to the figure; she stands with outspread arms, and looking up; not weeping, but in her still beautiful face a mingled expression of faith and anguish. This is the true conception of the sublime hymn, "Stabat Mater Dolorosa Juxta crucem lachrymosa Dum pendebat filius."
If the hymn, "Stabat Mater dolorosa," was written in Latin, this could be only that it might in time find its true language and incomparable phrase at last that it might await the day of life in its proper German.
Other priests, a score of them, filled the altar-stalls; one, seated on the right between two boys, would presently preach. The procession halted somewhere over in the distant: arches, the organ thundered the "Stabat Mater." Susan could only see the candles and the boys, but the priest's voice was loud and clear.
We were quite ignorant in those days, it is needless to remark, of the fact that this cool, proper-looking Bailli was a great musician, a first-class performer of the STABAT MATER, whose inspiration however depended on his having the shoulders, very DECOLLETEE ones too, of a charming nightingale, over whom the Opera and Opera-Comique fought for many a day, as the desk he laid his music on.
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