Michael Talbot has suggested that Vivaldi's setting of the Stabat Mater was the result of a visit to Brescia by the composer and his father, Giovanni Battista, a native of that city, to take part in performances at the Oratorian church of Santa Maria della Pace for the Feast of the Purification on 2 February and for further ceremonies on Sexagesima Sunday in 1711 (Michael Talbot: The Sacred Vocal Music of Antonio Vivaldi, Florence, 1995).

Vivaldi provided the Chiesa della Pace with a commissioned setting of the Stabat Mater the following year, presumably to be identified with the surviving RV 621, for contralto, strings and continuo. Consisting of twenty verses, the whole poem, which had been eliminated from the liturgy by the reforming Council of Trent, was restored for use in full as a Sequence in 1727. Parts of the original medieval poem, however, remained in use, including the first ten verses, as set by Vivaldi, which were used as a hymn for Vespers on the Feast of the Seven Dolours of the Blessed Virgin on the Friday after Passion Sunday.

Vivaldi's Stabat Mater repeats the music of the first three movements, which set the first four verses of the hymn, for the following four verses. Since the three-line verses may be paired into six-line stanzas with the third and sixth lines rhyming, this arrangement makes prosodic sense. The first section of the work, in F minor, is imbued with the feeling of grief, with a chromatically descending bass-line lament. Cuius animam, in C minor, is a recitative that becomes an arioso, with a return to F minor for O quam tristis, a moving aria. The pattern is repeated in the following three sections of the work. Eia Mater is set in C minor without the basso continuo in a characteristically Vivaldian texture, with dotted violin figuration for the united first and second violins, accompanied only by the violas. The original key is restored for Fac, ut ardeat, with its gently lilting 12/8 metre. The setting ends with a fugal Amen.

Writer: Keith Anderson