Haydn's "Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross" Comes to Verbatim Books in Stunning Performance with Spoken-Word Pieces Included

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, March 27) my husband Charles and I planned to attend an intriguing concert event at the Verbatim Books store on 30th Street and North Park Way. It was a co-production of the Hausmann String Quartet, a quite good local group consisting of violinists Isaac Allen and Bram Goldstein, violist Angela Choong and cellist Alex Greenbaum, and a local spoken-word ensemble called So Say We All. The program consisted of the string-quartet version of Franz Josef Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross, originally composed in 1786 for chamber orchestra at the behest of Don José Saenz de Santa Maria of Cádiz, Spain to perform at the dedication of a new church, the Oratorio de la Santa Cueva. Haydn later arranged the work for string quartet (1787), solo piano (1787) and vocal soloists and chorus plus orchestra (1801). Haydn explained the work’s unusual genesis in a preface to the 1801 edition: “Some fifteen years ago I was requested by a canon of Cádiz to compose instrumental music on the Seven Last Words of Our Savior On the Cross. It was customary at the Cathedral of Cádiz to produce an oratorio every year during Lent, the effect of the performance being not a little enhanced by the following circumstances. The walls, windows, and pillars of the church were hung with black cloth, and only one large lamp hanging from the center of the roof broke the solemn darkness. At midday, the doors were closed and the ceremony began. After a short service the bishop ascended the pulpit, pronounced the first of the seven words (or sentences) and delivered a discourse thereon. This ended, he left the pulpit and fell to his knees before the altar. The interval was filled by music. The bishop then in like manner pronounced the second word, then the third, and so on, the orchestra following on the conclusion of each discourse. My composition was subject to these conditions, and it was no easy task to compose seven adagios lasting ten minutes each, and to succeed one another without fatiguing the listeners; indeed, I found it quite impossible to confine myself to the appointed limits.”

Only the final section, labeled “The Earthquake” (“Il Terremoto”) and presumably meant to represent the Resurrection, is fast, loud and uptempo. Though the work is frequently performed today as a concert piece, a number of performances attempt to reproduce the original format of sermon and music alternating. In some cases modern poems are included in place of the original texts, and last night’s rendition featured members of So Say We All (described in the postcard-like program as “a 501[c][3] literary and performing arts non-profit organization whose mission is to create opportunities for individuals to tell their stories, and tell them better, through three core priorities: publishing, performance, and education”) reading texts between the movements. The readers were Roger Apton (in a segment called “¿Donde está mi madre?” that dramatized the plight of migrant children forcibly separated from their parents under former President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies), Jessica Petrenczik (“Sight”), Liz Roccoforte (“Ode to Nicknames”), David Schmidt (“It’s Friday”), Frank DiPalermo (“I Want to be AN ELDER But I don’t Know How”), Victoria Derr (“Spinning Myself Back In”) and Marina Brown (“Biography”). For me the most powerful readings were Schmidt’s – a grim fantasy in which the ruling classes have totally suppressed all dissent and taken power with a grim determination to stamp out even the hint of opposition before it can take root and create a mass movement, only his tale ends with the reminder that it’s only Friday and Sunday (i.e., the Resurrection) is coming – and DiPalermo’s.

DiPalermo’s contribution was a piece about being a 61-year-old married Gay man who lived through the AIDS crisis, centered around a close friend of theirs who was in acute pain from AIDS and begged them for help with a merciful, relatively pain-free death. To achieve that, they bought him barbiturate pills and intended to feed him a lethal dose, which they could only do by dissolving the pills in a glass of Coca-Cola because he literally could no longer swallow. While they were doing this, they also had to contend with their friend’s fiercely bigoted and homophobic mother, who decided to use the last moments of her son’s life to lecture him about his “sinful” lifestyle and tell him he was going to hell for all eternity. Fortunately, as things turned out, the pills put him to sleep before he could expire, and the next day he was taken to a hospice, put on morphine and given the quiet, dignified death he’d wanted, blessedly sans the commentary from his mother that he was meeting the fate he deserved and would rot and suffer in hell. The combined rendition of Seven Last Words by the Hausmann Quartet and So Say We All was quite powerful and moving, though Charles said he would have appreciated it more if the spoken-word pieces had been more closely cued to the sentiments of the words of Jesus as referenced in the original (“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” “Today you will be with me in paradise,” “Mother, behold thy son,” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?,” “I thirst,” “It is finished” and “Father, unto Your hands I commend my spirit”), and it made me long for the days when St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral used to do a similar set of concerts throughout almost all of Holy Week (another seemingly permanent casualty of COVID-19). The Hausmann String Quartet's next public appearance is a free concert Monday, April 15 at 6 p.m. at the San Diego Public Library downtown called "Sounds and Swells," a live performance of music by Haydn, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Debussy and Terry Riley accompanying film footage of local surfers: https://hausmannquartet.com/event/sounds-swells-2/.