Haydn: Seven Last Words (quartet version)

The Lindsays are giving us their own last musical words about now, indeed they may have disbanded already. The combination of a wish to improve my collection of their work, the time of the religious calendar, and my lack of a quartet version and a cd version of Haydn's great Good Friday masterpiece brought this disc up to the top of my priorities for purchase. It should be a safe choice for any collector I'd say, not just sound but sympathetic, meditative and full of understanding as well as beautifully played. Haydn was too professional and experienced, as well as too free from self-complacency, not to realise that a work consisting of 7 longish slow movements presented a challenge in terms of keeping the hearers' attention. However he had spent his career in meeting and indeed seeking challenges, and he rose to this one too, even adding an eighth slow movement by way of a prelude. Haydn referred to the pieces as taking ten minutes each, which indicates to me that he expected the repeats to be observed, and that is what the Lindsays accordingly do. Anyone, believer or atheist, who can be bored at what he or she finds here has a soul needing saving indeed in my own opinion.

Haydn also described the pieces as `sonatas', meaning this in the old-fashioned sense of `instrumental compositions'. The liner cites a contemporary notice as saying that the Seven Words are `cast in more or less strict sonata form'. That tries to have it both ways obviously, but it still describes them quite well in the formal respect. These extended pieces show the characteristics of setting out their material in two different keys, and developing it and recapitulating it in the main key, that are the basis of Haydn's great formal invention which has been the framework of so many colossal masterpieces since his time. It is a form designed to support the grander style, and it is called on to frame its inventor's special devotional offering for the central event of the Christian year.

Take with more than a pinch of salt what the 1788 notice says about being `able to guess in practically every note what the composer meant to convey'. What the composer meant to convey was the sense of awe and contemplation appropriate to the Good Friday service. Anyone who could guess without first being told which piece goes with `Father forgive them' and which with `Mother behold thy son' is a better guesser not only than the author of this inanity but than the composer, taking only this random instance. This is not the music of representation, but the music of an occasion. Contrast is not the name of what it's about, consistency and edification are that. The performance and recording are excellent and really call for no more comment. What elevates this issue above the ordinary is the set of meditations from John Taylor, sometime Bishop of Winchester. Dr Taylor is keenly sensitive to the power of this music and of music in general. It intensifies his sense of the message that he reads in the Christian gospel, and it should have any of us thinking to any depth we are capable of. For me it all means something else. This text, central to a culture 2000 years old and more, has a defined status, for believers, of truth. Every step in the narration, from this viewpoint, has universal significance. For me, the moral inferences are one thing, the narrative another. `Traditional Christianity has said that this is what this man did, not in fantasy but in reality' says Dr Taylor. Indeed, but nothing can be true, or become true, just by being believed, however fervent the belief and however many the believers. There is no such thing as a compulsory belief, because only actions can be compulsory and a belief is not an action - one either believes or does not believe, or cannot make one's mind up about, anything whatsoever. To believe something is to find it true or probable, and that is a state of affairs like finding oneself lost, not an action like finding one's car-keys. St Matthew's gospel relates that Christ was convicted of blasphemy in a Jewish court. The penalty of death by stoning for that was automatic, so it is not compatible with the Roman military penalty of execution by crucifixion, and therefore one or other (or indeed possibly either) of these events certainly did not happen. A hypothetical crucifixion may indeed give rise to the usual moral reflections, but the whole basis of Christianity is that the crucifixion of Christ was not invented but true, which it may or may not have been.

Ancient manuscripts like the gospels are subject to corruptions of all kinds, including deliberate invention, and the stronger the partisan motives of the scribes the likelier invention is. If we start by defining the narrative as true by some kind of stipulative definition, then we have control over the truth. Only we don't. Proper textual criticism is hard enough to find when it's a matter of the Greek and Latin classics. When it's a matter of a text deemed above such criticism it's a miracle to find it at all, but Enoch Powell's The Evolution of the Gospel brings both professional competence and academic detachment to the question, and while it's always possible to question his reasoning and conclusions, it's not possible to close down the issue on a basis of `it's true whatever it is'.

The powerful associations of the story of the crucifixion don't go away just through considerations like these. I have no idea what Haydn really believed, but he knew the significance of his theme, and so do I. If there really is a divine creator whose son died to save us, it is a theme of an importance to reduce all others to insignificance. For my own part, if there is any manifestation of divinity it is music itself, whatever kind of divinity it manifests.