What attracted me in writing a stabat mater, and more generally a religious piece, was to write a work that could be played in a sacred place, a church, in a place conducive to calm, meditation and contemplation. In the writing of this work, therefore, I had, as a red line, interiority, calmness, contemplation, a return to oneself…

The idea of the Stabat Mater is by Catherine Bolzinger who asked me if I was interested in putting a Stabat Mater into music. Yes of course I am interested in !! My idea was to put in music the Stabat Mater Speciosa which is a text not very much put in music, compared to the Stabat Mater Dolorosa that we know more.

The Speciosa is about the birth of Jesus, so there is a joy, a brightness that emerges from the text. My work has been to find, through harmonies and contrasts, this luminosity, this call to life that the birth of a new born gives.

I obviously wanted to compose the text in Latin. I therefore appealed to M. Lefauconnier who translated the text and “dissected” the intentions. His first reading was that the Speciosa had the same form, the same metric as the Dolorosa. Interesting … The painful words are changed into words of joy, respecting the placement of tonic accents… I was guided by this idea of ​​mirror between the two texts, a mirror between a dark text and a luminous text. M. Lefauconnier also speaks to me of the “quality of the writing” of the text. For him, this Stabat Mater Speciosa refers more to popular Latin, to everyday Latin, than to Latin literary … This other indication led me to listen to popular medieval music and to bring me closer to this idea of a text of joy, compose for the “people” in order to reflect on a joyous event.

This Stabat Mater Speciosa is written for six women voices of Voix de Stras’. It is a work in eight movements lasting about 27 minutes.