When Haydn took on a commission in 1785 to set music based on Christ’s final utterances as recorded in the New Testament, he was intrigued by its source, two faraway churches in the southern Spanish town of Cadiz. In accepting the invitation, he also saw an opportunity to write a major sacred work outside Austria, where a royal edict prohibited instrumental music at high masses.
Besides, the busy composer and conductor that he was, Haydn didn’t want to pass up the challenge of what he called “composing seven consecutive adagios, each approximately 10 minutes long, without tiring the listener.” He didn’t mention, however, that a priest would read each of the “Seven Last Words” before a movement and deliver a sermon as well. He was clearly more concerned with fashioning music that would match the cadence and mood of the text.
From its debut in Cadiz with a full orchestra, “Seven Last Words of our Savior from the Cross” has held public’s attention, even if they had to put up with the religious verbosity between the musical “interludes.” Haydn crafted a version for string quartet soon after, turning his meditations on the durability of the spirit into even more intimate and direct expressions of faith.
That version, often performed with the scriptural passages intact, has remained popular. A year or so ago, the Brentano String Quartet–the fine, spunky, 10-year-old group that has taken the chamber-music world by storm–decided to go a step further. Its members wanted to revamp the text, given that some of them weren’t Christian or even attached to institutional religion.
First violinist Mark Steinberg looked around and found a kindred soul in Mark Strand, a former U.S. poet laureate and a Pulitzer winner who teaches at the University of Chicago. Like the Brentano, Strand is skeptical of religious sentiments. For his text, he reached into the Gospel of Thomas, the controversial Gnostic “Bible.”
Their “re-interpretation” of the “Seven Last Words” was presented Friday night in Mandel Hall. And it proved to be a fascinating update, one that addressed the simultaneous distrust of ancient, remote wisdom and eagerness for postmodern mythopoeia so indicative of our times. Strand’s seven poems, each retaining only one succinct phrase from the canonical Gospels, make no mention of God or Christ.
As read by Strand, in his silver-tongued mellowness spiked with gravitas, these poems are ruminations of a man who has come to accept the cyclicity of life after having known pleasure and pain. The outlook is almost Buddhistic. Many of the images are potent and resonant, though Strand isn’t above New-Age platitudes such as “the truth of disguise and the mask of belief were joined forever.”
The Brentano played the nine movements–an Introduction and the Earthquake finale frame the seven “last words”–with passion and finesse. They sounded stuffy or timid at times, especially in the second segment (not enough gaiety) and fourth (more anguish needed), but they made up for that in the fifth (aptly operatic) and seventh (exquisite stretch of beatitude) and concluded with a fittingly bracing “earthquake.”
Their performance demonstrated, once again, that Haydn’s music transcends time, text and religion–even when the accompanying words are so rapturously secular.
