Victoria Kelly is a glamorous woman, but when I bump into her on the street, she looks as if she hasn’t slept for weeks. “I did it,” she says, her voice equal parts jubilation and exhaustion. “I handed it in yesterday.”
“It” is Stabat Mater, a major piece for choir and orchestra commissioned by the NZSO as a response to Rossini’s own Stabat Mater (literally: “the mother was standing”). The works are being performed together in Wellington and Auckland early next month.
“Finishing a big work is always a wrench,” Kelly says, several months and lots of sleep later. “There’s a strange sense of finality, as well as doubt about whether or not I’ve managed to say exactly what I wanted to say. Is it the piece I hoped it would be? Handing over the work is a form of surrender.”
What Kelly’s piece is not is a Stabat Mater, music based on the 13th-century liturgy that describes the Virgin Mary’s suffering at the foot of Jesus’s cross. Very deliberately, Stabat Mater – in Kelly’s conception –is a title, not a state of being or even a religious proclamation. Like her Requiem (2023), this is steadfastly secular, even as it acknowledges the forms and imagery of sacred music, particularly Bach, whose St John Passion was a touchpoint.
“I’m not a person of faith, but I have tried to access that vast tradition of vocal and instrumental music,” Kelly says. “The Mary in my piece does not do what the Mary in the Stabat Mater does. I’ve imagined an alternative version of her story, where she doesn’t accept the torture of her child; she saves him.”
Stabat Mater is dedicated to Kelly’s own children. “I thought about how I would respond if I were standing at the foot of the cross. At first, my version of Mary was angry and vengeful, because that’s how the [hymn] Stabat Mater made me feel. But then I changed my mind. I realised the piece was really about power, not rage. And that rage is the loss of power.”
Subsequently, Kelly doesn’t use the hymn’s original text, and she instead wrote her own words: “This Mary does not weep … She does not wait … She does not mourn.”
Musically, Mary’s power is represented by a white crystal singing bowl. Mary, as she does in The Bible, drifts in and out of frame, rarely referred to directly but always present in essence.
“You hear this bowl return at different points throughout the piece, separating various ideas,” Kelly says. “You know, it’s not a loud statement; it’s a quiet constant. Her power is there, enduring, and unrelenting, amidst all the noise.”
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra: Stabat Mater, Michael Fowler Centre, October 2; Auckland Town Hall, October 3.
