Fauré/Messager:|Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville

When two composers work on a piece, the extraordinary is bound to result: this was the case with the “Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville”, which Gabriel Fauré wrote together with his student André Messager, as well as with Bach’s rendition of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. Johann Sebastian Bach never visited Italy, but he had a profound musical interest for the Mediterranean country, performed the works of Palestrina and rearranged concertos by Vivaldi. Bach studied the Stabat Mater by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi from a hand-written copy. He liked it so much that he spent considerable time on it: Not only did he replace the Latin words with a German adaption of the 51. psalm and tailored the music to fit the new text, but he also made several other changes. He replaced movements, changed their structure, enhanced the autonomy of individual parts and skilfully recomposed entire sections. Nevertheless, he paid his Italian colleague a great deal of respect and left the character of the piece unchanged. Therefore, Bach’s “Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden” is as totally Bach as it is Pergolesi. With the “Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville” the Mädchenchor Hannover, directed by Gudrun Schröfel, embarks on a journey to the France of late Romanticism. The Hannover Allgemeine Zeitung called the girls” choir’s performance “a feast for the ears!”