Seven Last Words Past — Aspect Chamber Music Series

PROGRAM NOTES

THE SEVEN LAST WORDS OF OUR SAVIOUR ON THE CROSS

Introduzione

Sonata I Pater, dimitte illis, quia nesciunt quid faciunt (Father, forgive them, for they

know not what they do)

Sonata II Hodie mecum eris in Paradiso (Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise)

Sonata III Mulier, ecce filius tuus (Woman, behold thy son)

Sonata IV Deus meus, Deus meus, utquid dereliquisti me? (My God, my God, why

hast Thou forsaken me?)

Sonata V Sitio (I thirst)

Sonata VI Consummatum est (It is finished)

Sonata VII In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum (Into thy hands, Lord,

I commend my spirit)

Il Terremoto (The Earthquake)

When the choral version of Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross was published, in 1801, it was prefaced with an explanatory note by the composer, adapted from a conversation with his early biographer Georg August Griesinger:

About fifteen years ago I was asked by a canon of Cádiz to prepare an instrumental work on the Seven Words of Jesus on the Cross.

It was customary at the time to perform an oratorio at the Cathedral of Cádiz every year during Lent, to enhance the effect of which the following circumstances contributed not a little. The walls, windows and pillars of the church were covered with black cloth; and only one large lamp hanging in the middle lightened the sacred darkness. At midday all the doors were closed; now the music began. After a descriptive prelude, the bishop ascended the pulpit, pronounced one of the Seven Words and delivered a discourse thereon. When this was ended, he came down from the pulpit, and fell to his knees before the altar. This pause was filled by music. The bishop ascended and left the pulpit for a second and third time, etc., and each time the orchestra came in at the end of the sermon.

My composition had to fit the requirements of this ceremony. The task of composing seven Adagios, each of which was to last around ten minutes, and each to succeed the other, without tiring the listener, was not of the easiest; and I soon found that I could not keep to the prescribed duration.

Haydn had received the commission for the Seven Last Words from Cádiz in 1785, and it is likely that he composed the original version of the work in that year. It is scored for a large orchestra, including four horns, and with trumpets and timpani reserved for the final earthquake, where they contribute to the weight of a conclusion marked fff – one of the earliest instances of such an extreme dynamic marking. In order to ensure the music’s widest possible dissemination, Haydn also supervised an arrangement for string quartet which was published in the summer of 1787, simultaneously with the orchestral score. The quartet transcription was largely based on the string parts of the orchestral score, into a copy of which Haydn wrote the necessary alterations. In sending the annotated score to the Viennese publishers Artaria & Co., Haydn told them: ‘I am enclosing herewith all four amended parts, in the hope that the copyist will understand me well, and in particular will prepare each part in such a way that it is suitable for quartet.’ At the same time, Artaria issued a piano transcription corrected and approved by the composer, though not actually made by him.

As things turned out, the three versions of this famous work published in 1787 were not Haydn’s own last word on the matter. In 1796 he adapted the music as an oratorio, with words supplied by Baron van Swieten, the librettist of The Creation and The Seasons. In this final manifestation the work is notable above all for the new and imposing prelude for wind-band – one of Haydn’s very few large-scale pieces in the key of A minor – that prefaces the third part of the oratorio. Haydn also took the opportunity of expanding the size of the orchestra he had used in his first version, adding parts for clarinets and trombones. The wind-band prelude also features a contrabassoon – an instrument Haydn was to use again in The Creation.

Each of the work’s seven central panels has as its epigraph one of the Seven Last Words in its Latin form. Haydn designed the opening bars in each case as an instrumental setting of the text, though the underlay of the words is not always immediately apparent. The procedure is heard at its most straightforward in the five-note motif that runs, almost in passacaglia style, through the sixth movement – a syllabic representation of the words ‘Consummatum est’.

Not the least remarkable aspect of the work is the manner in which it manages to convey the meaning of the text within what is a strictly symphonic musical form. The music, indeed, always expresses the sentiments of the words in such a way that – as Haydn pointed out in a letter to the London publisher William Forster – ‘it will have the deepest effect on the soul of even the most uninitiated listener’.

The guiding principle behind the music is, in fact, that of sonata form (not for nothing does Haydn attach the label of ‘Sonata’ to each movement), though the music’s structure is invariably accommodated to the Biblical significance and the emotional requirements of each individual piece. With the single exception of the first Sonata, Haydn goes so far as to indicate a repeat of the opening section (i.e. the sonata form’s exposition). The introduction with which the work begins is a clear sonata design, too, with an opening subject in the minor, and in a stentorian ‘double-dotted’ rhythm, and a second subject that transforms the same rhythm into a warmer idea in the major. Following a brief central development section, Haydn omits the bulk of the second subject from the recapitulation, leaving the music firmly entrenched in the minor. In so doing, he enhances the warmth of the first Word, where we find the same double-dotted rhythm in a more consolatory form, in the major (‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’).

In the second Word (‘Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise’), the grave opening subject is subsequently transformed into a second theme of Gluckian sweetness that offers a vision of paradise (its continuation offers a foretaste of Haydn’s famous melody for Gott erhalte), with arpeggios and gentle pizzicato chords suggesting the sound of harps. Haydn’s ultra-refined orchestral palette in the original version of this piece included not only four horns, but also, during the greater part of the exposition and recapitulation, a muted solo cello doubling the first violins’ melody.

For the third Sonata, Haydn moves into the radiant key of E major. Here, the ‘sighing’ phrases of the opening acquire a more plangent, dissonant tone in the exposition’s second stage, where they are transferred to the cello. The climax of the piece occurs in the recapitulation, where, in a remarkable passage, strong off-beat accents above a chromatic, syncopated line played in unison by viola and cello lead to a resplendent fortissimo in C major whose resolution back into the home key overlaps with the onset of a further reprise of the ‘sighing’ theme, in such a way that the first phrase of the theme is played in the preceding forceful dynamic, and the second quietly.

To Haydn, the key of F minor was as personal as were G minor to Mozart and C minor to Beethoven. It was in F minor that Haydn wrote some of his most tragic works: the ‘La Passione’ Symphony No.49, the string quartets Op.20 No.5 and Op.55 No.2, the great Andante con variazioni for solo piano, and the late cantata known as Scena di Berenice. Perhaps we should not be surprised, then, to find Haydn turning to the same key for the most mournful of the Seven Last Words, ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ Here, the abandonment of Christ is depicted in the halting unaccompanied violin phrases that alternate with more fully-scored passages. In the recapitulation, the unaccompanied phrases are extended, and punctuated by an isolated cello note. Their sinuous contour, moreover, suggests the shape of the Cross.

The arid character of the music in the fifth Sonata – extended passages of pizzicato to which the first violin contributes nothing more than an intermittent falling phrase in long notes (the same phrase that in Sonata III was associated with Christ’s mother), so that the music is essentially devoid of any theme – offers a vivid depiction of the words ‘I thirst’. Again, the music becomes more intense in the second half of the piece, communicating Christ’s pain and anguish.

The five-note motif that runs through the sixth Sonata, as an implied setting of the words ‘Consummatum est’, is played at the outset in a stark unison fortissimo. The manner in which the motif comes to rest on a note of a whole bar’s duration, over which Haydn writes a fermata, lends it an unmistakable air of finality. Although the second subject, in the major, is more consolatory, it is underpinned by the same five-note motif which runs like a guiding thread through the entire piece.

In the last of the Sonatas (‘Into thy hands, Lord, I commend my spirit’) the violins are muted throughout, lending their sound an ethereal quality. At the end, the departing spirit of Christ is evoked in a series of pianissimo pizzicatos which allow the concluding earthquake to erupt with all the more force when the mutes are removed. (In the orchestral score the final pizzicatos coincide with a long-sustained note in octaves in the bass register of the horns, joined a bar later by the same note in the flutes, with both wind parts marked sempre più piano.) The tearing of the veil separating the Holy of Holies from the remainder of the temple is depicted in graphic fashion by the grating sound of a reiterated tightly-sprung rhythmic figure that descends over a span of two-and-a-half octaves: ‘And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.’

Program notes by Misha Donat, 2023

SEVEN LAST WORDS

Introduzione

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