The Seven Last Words

The Seven Last Words was Programme II of the Rudolf Kempe Society’s 2018 Songs of Apollo Word and Music season, given on Good Friday, 30 March 2018, at 7.30 pm at the Kempe Studio at The Muses, 58 Waterside, Stratford-upon-Avon, under the heading Lent in the Third Millennium. Devised by Cordula Kempe, it set Joseph Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of our Saviour on the Cross in its string quartet version, Op. 51, beside “Reflections on the Biblical Text in Drama and Poetry” – the Gospels in the King James Bible alongside Shakespeare, John Donne, modern drama and twentieth-century poetry – read by three actors. The music was played by the Bacanu Quartet, the Society’s Young Ensemble for 2018, coached for the programme by Cordula Kempe. The performance was dedicated to the memory of her brother, Dr Friedemann Oettinger, and given in aid of the Rudolf Kempe Society International Young Artists Platform.

Performers

Bacanu Quartet – RKS Young Ensemble 2018. Founded in Birmingham in 2016 by the violinist Cristinel Bacanu, a young group of very experienced players whose repertoire already ran from Bach to Ravel.

• Cristinel Bacanu – violin. Born in Bucharest into a musical family, he studied at the George Enescu School of Music, the National University of Music in Bucharest and Ohio University, then took a Master’s in violin performance on a full scholarship at Arizona State University. A freelance violinist, violist and teacher in Birmingham, a regular guest leader and soloist with Midlands orchestras and a member of Cordula Kempe’s Bergonzi Quartet, he had been an alumnus of the Society since 2013. In this concert he played Cordula Kempe’s own violin, made in Cremona in 1755 by Michelangelo Bergonzi.
• Sally Hobbs – violin. Brought up in Dudley, she studied at Birmingham University, played in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Simon Rattle in 1989–94, then became principal second violin of the Pretoria State Theatre orchestra in South Africa and a founder member of a township teaching programme visited by Yehudi Menuhin. Back in the UK from 2001, she became Head of Strings for Birmingham.
• Anna Chippendale – viola. A music graduate of Sheffield University (2000), where she trained alongside the orchestra of Opera North and developed a keen interest in experimental new music; since then a freelance orchestral player and teacher in the Midlands.
• Jadie Carey – cello. A music scholar at Solihull School and a student of Christopher Bunting and Joan Dixon at the Royal College of Music, with master classes from William Pleeth; she played in the Durban Philharmonic and was offered the co-principal post in Johannesburg before returning to freelance with Midlands orchestras including the CBSO and English Strings.

Readers

• Nicholas Day – a long-standing Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actor (RSC seasons from Henry V in 1997 to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies in 2014; Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges and An Inspector Calls at the National), with many film and television roles and the author of On Bard Duty, about forty years of playing Shakespeare.
• Anna Carteret – an actor who joined Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre company in 1964 (Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice, Jumpers, The National Health) and later worked with Peter Hall, Howard Davies (Les Liaisons Dangereuses for the RSC) and Michael Blakemore (Copenhagen), as well as directing fringe productions herself.
• Andrew Woodall – a versatile actor who played the title role in Julius Caesar and Enobarbus in the RSC’s Rome season, a dozen productions at the National Theatre (including Ewan in David Hare’s Racing Demon), Edmund in Peter Hall’s King Lear at the Old Vic, and roles on television and in film.

Programme

The Bible readings were given in the King James translation.

Part I

• David Hare – Racing Demon, Act I Scene 1
• Dennis Potter – Son of Man, Act I Scene 1
• News headlines – graffiti, 2018
• D. J. Enright – Museum of Atheism
• Joseph Haydn – Introduzione: Maestoso ed Adagio
• D. J. Enright – Having the Last Word
• Timberlake Wertenbaker – Our Country’s Good (1787), Act I Scene 3
• Flavius Josephus – The Jewish War (AD 70), Book V, from Chapters 11 and 12
• Walter Jens – historical note
• Luke 23:33–34 – “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”
• Joseph Haydn – Sonata I: Largo (Pater, dimitte illis)
• William Shakespeare – King Lear, Act I Scene 2
• Stevie Smith – One of Many
• Yevgeny Yevtushenko – New York 1961
• Mircea Dinescu – In All Innocence
• Khalil Gibran – The Prophet: On Crime and Punishment
• John Donne – A Hymn to God the Father
• Luke 23:43 – “Verily I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with me in paradise”
• Joseph Haydn – Sonata II: Grave e cantabile (Hodie mecum eris in paradiso)
• Luke 2:46–50 – Jesus in the Temple
• William Shakespeare – Coriolanus, Act I Scene 3 and Act V Scene 3
• Matthew 10:34–37 – Peace
• Mark 3:34–35 – Family
• David Hare – Racing Demon, Act I Scene 6
• Joseph Haydn – Sonata III: Grave (Mulier, ecce filius tuus)
• John 19:25–27 – “Woman, behold thy son! Behold thy mother!”
• Anna Akhmatova – Crucifixion
• Mark 15:34 / Matthew 27:46 – “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”
• Gerard Manley Hopkins – No worst, there is null
• David Hare – Racing Demon, Act I Scene 9
• Zvi Kolitz – Yossel Rakover Speaks to God (translated by Cordula Kempe)
• Joseph Haydn – Sonata IV: Largo (Eli, Eli, lama asabthani?)

Interval

Part II

• Alfred Brendel – Philanthropist
• Editorial debate – news headlines, 2018
• Stevie Smith – God Speaks
• D. J. Enright – Disciple
• John 19:28–29 – “I thirst”
• Pablo Neruda – Let the Rail Splitter Awake
• Psalm 69:20–21 (David)
• Walter Jens – historical note
• Cordula Kempe – musical note
• Joseph Haydn – Sonata V: Adagio (Sitio)
• David Hare – Racing Demon, Act II Scene 2
• Revelation 7:16–17
• John 19:30 – “It is finished”
• Octavio Paz – Oracle
• Joseph Haydn – Sonata VI: Lento (Consummatum est)
• David Hare – Racing Demon, Act II Scene 11
• Luke 23:46 – “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”
• Luke 23:44–45 – The Earthquake
• William Shakespeare – The Tempest, Act V Scene 1
• Joseph Haydn – Sonata VII: Largo (In manus tuas, Domine), attacca
• Joseph Haydn – Il terremoto (The Earthquake): Presto e con tutta la forza
• John Donne – Resurrection

Epilogue

• Ezekiel 37:3, 5–6 – “Son of man, can these bones live?”

About the programme

In her introduction, Lent in the Third Millennium, Cordula Kempe described Haydn’s Seven Last Words, drawn from all four Gospels, as a climax of his work. It was commissioned in 1787 by the Cathedral of Cádiz for its Good Friday service and first played there by orchestra; Haydn later made a choral version, a piano version and the string quartet version published as Op. 51 – the most powerful, she argued, for its meditative intimacy and the dialogue between four individual voices. Rather than smoothing the work into a string of beautiful themes, she wanted to restore its violent drama, which throws players and listeners from glowing warmth to cold bleakness within a few bars, mirroring both Christ’s agony and our own wavering between faith and doubt – and to face the fact that Haydn ends the work with an earthquake.

She placed the music in its moment, the height of the Enlightenment on the eve of the French Revolution, and set beside it writers of every culture – believers, agnostics and atheists – who had wrestled with the question of how a good God can allow suffering. They found no answers, she wrote, but did find sources of hope, comfort and strength in human relationships and even humour, and the programme offered their words “as a tribute to Life, possibly after death – certainly before”.

A musical note in the booklet pointed out that Haydn shaped each sonata’s theme on the rhythm of the Latin words, except Sonata IV, which follows Christ’s original Aramaic, and that every theme first appears in the first violin – except in Sonata VI, “It is finished”, where all four instruments play it in unison. The booklet also quoted H. C. Robbins Landon, for whom the work contains “some of the most deeply felt music in all Haydn”, and was illustrated with Rembrandt’s etchings of the life and Passion of Christ.

In her welcome, Dame Judi Dench recalled performing the programme herself with Cordula Kempe and her friends, including her late brother Jeffery Dench.

Credits

• Devised, and programme booklet written and designed, by Cordula Kempe, Artistic Director of the Rudolf Kempe Society; welcome by Dame Judi Dench, Patron
• Dedicated to the memory of Dr Friedemann Oettinger, Lutheran theologian and supporter of interfaith work and the German Peace Movement
• Publicity, printing and archive recording: Max Ross