Carrying the Cross of Creation or Haydn in the Woods
The project involves taking a set of instrumental sonatas written by Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) in 1786 and asking how they might be performed today so as to help an audience come to terms with what is going on in the world. This project is not designed as a piece of didactic, activist or political art, but it results in performances that tell stories about the state of the natural world today, using music, silence, image, and word (where necessary). The project emerged from my doctoral artistic research at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg. It is one of three main strands in my forthcoming dissertation; the others centre on a cantata by Handel, Ah che pur troppo è vero (1709) and on Haydn’s dramatic cantata Arianna a Naxos (1789). These three strands are intertwined with a fourth, the music of Arvo Pärt, which provided me with a methodological springboard from the practices of early music and text right into the midst of the challenges of today’s world.
Haydn’s set of sonatas was originally entitled Musica instrumentale sopra le sette ultime Parole del nostro Redentore in Croce. It is usually referred to as The Seven Last Words from the Cross.
Each of the meditative sonatas is based on one of the the “words” spoken by Christ when he hung on the cross on the first Good Friday, as reported in the gospel narratives of the New Testament. The sonatas were written for orchestra, but exist in other contemporary versions, including several for solo piano, one of which I chose as a basis for my performance. My approach to these pieces involves finding ways of embodying in my fingers, as far as is possible, the varied emotional content of each sonata. Rather than thinking of musical embodiment as primarily a matter of the mind, the intellect, or of the heart alone, I am trying to find a holistic way of expressing the content of each piece. This involves detailed analysis and moment-by-moment exploration of the possibilities of musical embodiment, including specific sequences of thoughts, feelings and fingerings. It includes experimentation with ornamentation and improvisation to prepare for performances in front of a different audiences. I perform the pieces with added cadenzas, which gives me the possibility of being able to interact with an audience ex tempore. I have experimented with cadenzas that are not only related to eighteenth-century musical style and practice, but which suggest connections between Haydn’s music and today’s world of musical expression.
One fundamental change that I have introduced into the performance of these pieces is to allow each of the seven last words to migrate from the voice of Christ to the voice of creation herself. This explains the overall title for the project (event/performance): Carrying the Cross of Creation. It is a phrase that came into my mind while preparing for performances at the 2024 Kalv Festival in the west of Sweden. The subtitle, Haydn in the Woods, alludes both to the juxtaposition of unlikely materials, and uses a pun to suggest that something may be hiding in the woods, as well as Haydn!
Haydn’s sonatas are prefaced by a short dramatic musical introduction, and conclude with a movement representing the cosmic earthquake that took place when Christ died. This was designed to enable meditation on the earthquake that followed Christ’s death on the cross. Haydn’s sonatas were commissioned by a Catholic priest in Cádiz, where, thirty years earlier in 1755, there had been a major tsunami caused by the earthquake in Lisbon. This came to have special importance in European history because it challenged the accepted understanding that a natural disaster was the work of God. Eighteenth-century philosophers such as Voltaire and Rousseau wrote about it, suggesting what it might mean. From the point of view of the original performance of the Seven Last Words in 1786, however, it meant that the audience, some of whom would have experienced the Lisbon earthquake and ensuing tsunami in Cádiz, would have been able to link it with the earthquake at Christ’s death. In some way this neatly actualised the meaning of the seven last words. This physical link between the original story and the recent history of Cádiz made me ask the question: might there be a way of linking Christ’s death with prophecies that predict the forthcoming death of our planet. After all, the Bible hints that God reveals himself not only in Christ but in the created world.
A further interesting point is that it’s quite possible that the money put up for the commission of Haydn’s work was obtained from profit made in transatlantic trade with the American colonies. I don’t (yet) have sufficient documentary evidence to describe this in more detail, but it shows the possible entangled relation between historical sponsorship of culture and the slave trade.
Apart from performing Haydn’s music in relation to today’s climate challenges as experienced by the natural world, I plan (in later performances) to have some kind of interaction with the audience in the breaks between the sonatas. These would originally have been filled with homilies, or other texts; and that is how they are normally performed today. The sonatas are in any case too intense to flow on from each other directly.
Haydn himself later recounted the circumstances of the first performance (in his Preface to the 1801 Breitkopf edition):
Some fifteen years ago I was requested by a canon of Cádiz to compose instrumental music on the Seven Last Words of Our Saviour On the Cross. It was customary at the Cathedral of Cádiz [this is a mis-remembering on the part of Haydn] 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 centre 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.
This would certainly have qualified as a “performance” in today’s terminology, as would the method of payment: he was paid in gold coins stuffed inside a cake!
The music is wildly expressive, and beautifully crafted. The sonatas are imbued with an emotional depth that has been likened in its musical intensity to Beethoven’s late string quartets. But, at the same time, its lofty sensibilities have been considered too abstract for a modern audience, and it has been termed “part of the dead culture of eighteenth-century sentimentality”. How can this music to relate to today’s world of crises?
It is interesting to speculate that in composing them Haydn may have made use of a meditational practice he might have learnt as a choirboy in St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. This is the Ignatian (Jesuit) practice of “composition of place”, which involved using the imagination to develop a full sensory experience of the situation behind the words of a meditation.
As already mentioned above, each of Haydn’s sonatas relates to a specific “word”, which is uttered by Christ at a particular moment while he hung on the cross at Golgotha, the place of the skull. He was not on his own: two others were crucified alongside him, and there were several if not many other groups of people present. By thinking about the scene as a whole, including how hot it was, what it smelled like, what it might have sounded like, and what emotions onlookers might themselves have felt, you “compose the place” in your imagination, using your memory as an inspiration alongside (in this case) the music you heard.
Haydn might even have used this technique in composing some of his secular works. In this case a concert could have provided an opportunity for an audience to meditate on aspects of human life that were outside the religious framework of the church. An example would be Haydn’s cantata Arianna a Naxos, which is preceded by a text that exactly describes its setting, and which Haydn’s music recreates in sound, in just the manner of a “composition of place”.