Let me take you back to the place where I became acquainted with Haydn’s Seven Last Words on the Cross (Die Sieben Letzen Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze).
Picture, if you will, a low-ceilinged room in a slightly musky academic building. For many decades, this building, Hill Hall, housed the music department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The room in question was our “listening room”— an airless chamber where, on a solid wooden table, six or seven turntables stood (not always in working order). In addition, the table held a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and two or three cassette recorders. Strewn around the table were headphones (also not always in working order) waiting to be plugged into these devices. Such listening facilities would have been typical in the mid 1970s, even for a music library with the vast collection we had.
My memory of this room alternates between recalling it as fully internal and as having a window. Either way, the light was dim, the air was stale, and walking into it felt like being sucked into a stifling tunnel from which one wouldn’t emerge for several hours.
Indeed, it was more than “several” hours. We graduate students spent countless hours in this room, plowing through lengthy lists of pieces assigned for our musicology classes. We needed to learn those pieces, and learn them well. Being in that room offered virtually the only way for us to do this, so we waited, scores in hand, for our allotted time slot to use the equipment. There were no comfy options for access to music back then like iTunes, YouTube, or Spotify.
And yet, day by day, through those headphones, the treasures of our Western musical heritage poured forth into our often addled brains. From the cornucopia of works encountered during those days, one of the most striking was this unusual piece by Franz Joseph Haydn. Looking back, I’m surprised that such a nuanced work communicated as powerfully as it did (via surely a scratchy LP). But it did.
Written by a man whose career was international for its day (with star status in Germany, Italy, and England), the piece continued an existing tradition of expressing Christ’s final words in a musical setting. So in that respect, Haydn’s idea was not innovative.
But unlike settings by Renaissance or Baroque composers, Haydn envisioned this composition first as a solely instrumental work. He later would construct a version with vocal (choral) parts superimposed primarily as doublings to the instrumental lines. But his overall concept remained one of expressing instrumental color. He also made an unusual and popular arrangement for string quartet as well as a version for solo keyboard.
In terms of structure, he called each of the approximately ten-minute long musical expressions of Christ’s words a “sonata.” Not surprisingly, each is cast in a slow tempo, with markings varying between adagio, lento, and largo. Then, as if that were not enough stately drama, Haydn added a slow introductory movement to the beginning.
Ever the dramatist, Haydn decided to conclude the work with one additional movement: a brief musical depiction of the earthquake (ll terremoto) that rent the Temple curtain at Christ’s death. Marked Presto e con tutta la forza (Fast and with all force), this whirlwind movement struck Haydn’s listeners as some of the most exciting and violent music they had ever heard!
I find Haydn’s Seven Last Words on the Cross to be one of the most striking musical compositions ever penned. Poignant, tender, somber, and utterly moving, this work penetrates and moves the soul. It was commissioned for performance during Holy Week, specifically for Good Friday services in Cádiz, Spain in 1786. In both its instrumental or vocal forms, it can precede a liturgical service, frame it, or be presented separately in some form of public concert.
Perhaps surprisingly, Haydn’s rendition for string quartet has retained the most popularity to this day. It presents string players with the serious challenge of creating sufficient color, drama, and tension to engage an audience throughout a stately, slowly moving, hour-long performance.
The work I most love by Haydn was composed during this same period of his life: his large-scale oratorio The Creation. While in London in 1791, Haydn had been amazed upon hearing brilliant performances of oratorios written by his earlier compatriot, Georg Friedrich Handel. Various contemporaries recorded in detail his awed response to these performances. From his enthusiasm came two groundbreaking oratorios: The Creation and The Seasons.
Sometime I’d like to tell you how I first heard The Creation. It was not from a recording played in an airless room, that’s for sure, although it was during the same time period. Suffice it to say, I was knocked off my chair (literally) by the music. But I’ll save that story for another day.
For now, I hope the two movements I’ve selected from Haydn’s Seven Last Words on the Cross will be a blessing for you and your family during the final days of Holy Week. One, of course, is that fabulous “earthquake” music (Il terremoto). I couldn’t resist that!
But the other selection comes from the body of the composition—the third Sonata (fourth movement) which sets the words Mulier, ecce filius tuus (Mother, behold thy son). What moment of the Crucifixion was more moving than the tender words Christ gave to the grieving Mary?
May you enjoy exploring this work by one of Western traditions’ most innovative master composers as we move into the brightness of Easter.