Knechtseden Early Music Festival

Countless composers have set the medieval sequence Stabat Mater dolorosa to music, from Josquin Desprez and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina to Krzystof Penderecki and Arvo Pärt. But perhaps the most famous version dates from the 1730s. At the age of just 26, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi died in the spa town of Pozzuoli near Naples after a failed attempt to overcome tuberculosis. He spent the last months of his life there in a monastery, working f...