Mary’s lament at the foot of the Cross has captured the imagination of composers across the centuries. Three new settings receive their premieres next monthThe popularity of the hymn “Stabat Mater”, written in the thirteenth century, comes and goes, it seems, in 200-year cycles. It was set by many composers before the sixteenth-century Council of Trent dropped it from the liturgy as a concession to the charge of Mariolatry by the Protestant Churches. (Palestrina set it in 1590, but, as with Allegri’s Miserere, not for performance outside the Sistine Chapel.) The eighteenth century passed “Stabat Mater” for inclusion at the Feast of Seven Sorrows on the Friday of Passion Week and composers from Joseph Haydn to Karol Szymanowski set it, but it was out of