In the compositional parable of Pasquale La Rotella (Bitonto, March 5, 1880 ─ Bari, March 20, 1963) sacred music is an important and at least as significant as the one that saw him an opera composer, conductor, teacher and first director of the Liceo Musicale “Piccinni” in Bari.

Most of his sacred production dates back to the years when he was magistro et rectore of the “Schola Cantorum” of the Regia Basilica Palatina of San Nicola. It will be necessary to climb over chronologically two wars and forty long years of brilliant and multifaceted career as an all-round musician to find new pages of sacred music. The occasion to put the famous text of Jacopone Da Todi into music came to him from the celebrations for the 230th anniversary of the birth of Tommaso Traetta. In close correlation with the work of the famous countryman, La Rotella decided to deal with the treatment of one of the highest subjects of Western sacred art, composing, at the venerable age of seventy-seven, “his” Stabat.

PAPERBACK ISBN# 978-1-948651-04-2
HARDCOVER ISBN# 978-1-073751-40-2
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS # 2018914979