An imaginative, secular retelling of Haydn’s Seven Last Words
“The story of the end, of the last word of the end, when told, is a story that never ends. We tell it and retell it – one word, then another, until it seems that no last word is possible.”- Mark Strand, The Seven Last Words
Haydn’s The Seven Last Words string quartet composition from the late 18th century requires several leaps of the imagination. It recounts the story of Christ’s crucifixion and his passage into a luminous afterlife in a series of lush, moving sonatas.
As Michael Parloff observed in a lecture five years ago, “Haydn is going to tell us what the words mean using music that has no words.”
The CMSC rehearsing last Sunday
It is usually performed in tomb-like darkness, a convention dating back to its premiere on a Good Friday in the late 1780s in a church in Cadiz in Spain, where the priest used black cloth to block out the midday sunlight. This overturns the rules of live performance where performers are under a bright spotlight. Listening to this epic piece in darkness can be akin to a séance, which religious discussion of the afterlife sometimes is – as is being moved by the music of composers long dead. The Easter story resonates powerfully because so many of us want that conversation with dead loved ones to continue.
The Chamber Music Society of Colombo’s performance on September 29 heightens the challenge of Haydn’s audacious gamble to tell us this story without words. Like many before it, the performance abandons the practice of reading the memorable dialogue of the crucifixion — “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” or “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” — during the performance, confining these evocative words to the programme notes. Instead, Mark Strand’s elegant poem on these events will be read early on.
And because concertmaster Lakshman Joseph-de Saram’s conception of performing The Seven Last Words is a secular one, the CMSC dispenses with the convention of hosting this concert in the week or so before Easter.
As Lakshman says, “The reason we don’t read out the Seven Words of the Cross is because this is for everyone. We don’t want to exclude people.” Lakshman’s teacher of chamber music and violin in the late 1980s, Stanley Bednar, taught it this way when Lakshman was at the Manhattan School of Music: “As a teenager, I liked that approach. He said, ‘This belongs to everyone…don’t put speed bumps in front of people appreciating the universal meaning.’”
In another paradox, however, at a rehearsal last Sunday, Lakshman repeatedly used words, eloquently returning to the story of the crucifixion to coax more out of the music from the quartet: violinist Sulara Nanayakkara, Illana McNamara playing the viola, Rochana Ramanayaka (violoncello) and, in a supplementary role, double bass played by Nilanthi Weerakoon. A second take of the introductory music, which envisions Christ’s walk to the cross while being mocked, heckled and whipped, was played with such vigour after Lakshman’s reminder of this Biblical backdrop that it seemed as if the musicians were using their bows as instruments of self-flagellation.
By contrast, the Grave e cantabile in C minor, C major, which usually comes after the reading of “Today, thou shalt be with me in paradise” has an elegiac melody. Lakshman said that this sonata is offering “a glimpse of paradise… Christ’s mind is in a delirious state. There is no hint of pain, there is no darkness. It’s all light and innocent.” Indeed, if paradise has a playlist, large parts of The Seven Last Words would play on a continual loop.
At the rehearsal, this sense was amplified by Lakshman’s lyrical playing of the first violin. Haydn’s music in The Seven Last Words is so powerful that when a side door near the stage at the Goethe Institut eerily swung open twice at twilight for no apparent reason last Sunday, it seemed as if otherworldly beings were joining the audience. This defining composition also radically altered Haydn’s career. In another leap of the imagination, writing the string quartet version of The Seven Last Words set him on the road to composing several quartets in the last decade of his life, even though Haydn had early on been the pioneer of the orchestral symphony.
The commissioning of The Seven Last Words offers stories within a story. It was commissioned almost 250 years ago by the priest of an outwardly unremarkable church in the port of Cadiz. The city was extremely wealthy then because it was the most convenient port connecting the ships of the Americas with Europe in that era of globalisation, a European parallel to Colombo’s significance as a port for hundreds of years. The Mexican priest of the church was the son of a rich aristocrat. This, and a rich parish, allowed him to be an important patron of religious music, which Haydn’s benefactor and employer for five decades, the Hungarian prince of Esterhaza and Galantha, found boring.
The Hungarian prince divided his time between Vienna and a summer palace in Hungary, where he sometimes dallied for weeks after his original date to return. In a precursor of these wordless seven sonatas, Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, used similar techniques of dimming lights and momentarily silencing instruments to convey a wider meaning. The Farewell Symphony’s debut in 1761 featured musicians blowing out their candles and dramatically exiting the stage with their instruments as the music continued towards its conclusion until only the concertmaster remained. This was Haydn’s witty way of reminding the prince that his musicians needed to return to their wives and families from the overextended stay in his summer palace. Chastened and charmed by this subtle strike action, the prince took the hint.
For Lakshman, The Seven Last Words, staged this year exactly a decade after the CMSC first performed it in Colombo, connects at a personal level to 9/11. “Whenever September comes by, I feel a need to remember,” he says. His brother’s German first wife, who had frequently taken Lakshman as a teenager to listen to the New York Philharmonic, was in one of the World Trade Center buildings and died that day. That unimaginably horrific attack and the retaliatory invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan continue to reverberate in this endless annus horribilis of inconceivable Israeli brutality in Palestine.
In another historical echo, Haydn’s employer, the Hungarian Esterhazy prince, had a grandfather who made his name in the defence of Vienna against the armies of Sulaiman the Magnificent in 1683 and subsequently the reconquest of Hungary from the Turks. History repeats itself as tragedy and then again as tragedy.
Listening to The Seven Last Words is another reminder that the world is unable to learn the lessons of forgiveness and magnanimity central to many religions and at the very core of these scenes of Christ’s crucifixion. The irony seems even more poignant in this imaginative, secular performance by the CMSC of Haydn’s great work.
The CMSC will perform Haydn’s The Seven Last Words at the Goethe Institut next Sunday, September 29 at 7 p.m. Tickets at
www.ticketministry.com and the Department of Coffee bookshop
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