ECHOES FROM
Meditations on Franz
Joseph Haydn’s The Seven Last Words
of Christ
edited by
Richard Young
REVIEWS
HAYDN’S MUSIC ON CHRIST’S LAST WORDS, A TRANSFORMING JOURNEY FROM CONCERT HALL TO SACRED SETTING (headline)… In the 19th century, the Good Friday Three Hours Devotion gained favor in Protestant churches, and Haydn’s “Last Words” entered into the concert repertory. It was as a concert piece that the Vermeer String Quartet performed it almost two decades ago, only to discover, as the group’s violist, Richard Young, recalled, that “despite its incredible beauty, we find that the Haydn made a wearying impression.” All the movements were intense and all but one slow. ‘We trudged offstage to the polite applause of the worn-out audience,” Mr. Young later wrote. The quartet decided that the solution was to restore Haydn’s work to its original sacred setting. They began performing The Seven Last Words of Christ during Holy Week with speakers delivering meditations on each of Jesus’ utterances. The experience, Mr. Young found, was transforming. “Though we knew the music so very well,” he said, “we had never before been obliged to relate to it in its intended context.” In 1994, the quartet recorded the Haydn work with an introduction read by Jason Robards and meditations delivered by noted scholars and pastors, including excerpts from previously taped sermons by the Rev. Billy Graham and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The recording was nominated for a Grammy. AN OVERWHELMING MOMENT TESTIFIES TO THE POWER OF PLACE (heading). Mr. Young’s unassuming, touching account of these events is found in Echoes from Calvary, recently published by Rowman & Littlefield. He remembers the impact of seeing the Rev. Kelly Clem explain her faith on the evening news just after Palm Sunday in 1994. That day a tornado had hit her rural Alabama church, sparing her and 123 other worshipers, including her youngest child – but taking the lives of 19 others, including an older daughter. Mr. Young determined to ask Ms. Clem for the meditation on Jesus’ dying instruction to his mother (“Woman, behold your son!”) and his beloved disciple (“Behold your mother!”). In a soft, clear voice, Ms. Clem began her meditation on the creation of this new kind of family, saying, “It is perhaps the most difficult thing a mother should ever have to face: watching her own child’s death.” Echoes from Calvary contains most of those 1994 meditations plus 78 more, usually no more than a few paragraphs each, that various invited speakers have delivered at the Vermeer performances over the years. They include two reflections by rabbis on Jesus’ soul-searching cry from Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” They include the thoughts of a Hindu leader, of a senior official of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and of scholars and pastors from every other possible current of Christianity. There are Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox, the celebrated and the little known, university scholars and in-the-trenches pastors, evangelicals and liberals, women and men, clergy and laity, African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians. In a closing essay, Martin E. Marty, the eminent historian of American religion and virtual senior statesman of mainline Protestant Christianity, admits that he worried that a volume collecting so many reflections on a mere seven biblical phrases (four of those reflections are his) might prove repetitious to the point of boredom. Not so, he found – and he is right. Almost every page offers some fresh insight. Echoes from Calvary comes with two CDs. One features still another performance of Haydn, with other speakers than on the 1994 disc (which is still available). The second contains passages from the work that illustrate an essay by Mr. Young on “The Words and the Music.” Needless to say, with or without Mr. Young’s prompting, one hears the work, restored to its sacred setting, afresh: with an appreciation for the slow, relentless pace, the subtle shifts, the defining notes opening each movement, the dramatic passages subsiding into light melodies breaking, in turn, into plaintive cries or sudden outbursts. At a performance on Wednesday at the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago, the Rev. Addie L. Wyatt, who worked closely with Dr. King in the civil rights struggles and became a force in the labor and women’s movements, spoke from a wheelchair about Jesus’ final utterance. “On March 8, 2005, I celebrated my 81st birthday,” Ms. Wyatt said, adding, “God, in his own divine providence, is teaching me how to begin counting the years as months, counting the months as weeks, counting the weeks as days, and making it a habit of saying, ‘Any day now, I’ll be going home.’ I don’t know about you, but when that time comes, I want to be able to say, like Paul, ‘I have fought a good fight. I have kept the faith,’” she continued. “I want to say, like Jesus, ‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.’” For Mr. Young, the moment was overwhelming. “I could barely read the music,” he said, “for the tears in my eyes.”
New York Times (Peter Steinfels)
Echoes from Calvary is more like a sixth-century church mosaic than like an image on a high-definition television. The picture that emerges demands more of the viewer, an attitude less passive and more engaged. The book is a compilation of 86 meditations on the Seven Last Words of Christ by 76 contributors (including high recognition names like Martin Marty and Billy Graham as well as CT staff Stan Guthrie and David Neff). But just because it features so many distinct voices, don’t expect the book to suffer from the fragmentation of most multi-author volumes. It retains its focus because of the passion of the Vermeer String Quartet’s violist, Richard Young, for restoring a work of classic spiritual music to something like its original context… After a 1987 performance of the Haydn work by the Vermeer Quartet, the cellist remarked to Young that the audience ‘just had the experience of their lives and don’t even know it!’ That was when the Vermeer was just playing the music. Young soon realized that the music needed the spoken word in order to let the audience reflect and absorb. So Young and the Vermeer began to bring Haydn’s work and Jesus’ words into a new light. Eventually they began a series of yearly concerts at the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel, with speakers drawn from a variety of Christian traditions and occasionally from another religious community. The result was a newly invigorated classic that appealed beyond the chamber music crowd and bridged all sorts of ethnic and social gulfs… Echoes from Calvary opens multiple doors to meditation. One can take these meditations one at a time, reading and pondering them individually. One can read one meditation from each of the Seven Last Words and then go back and begin the cycle again, reliving the Crucifixion ten or more times. One can read all the meditations on a single saying from the cross, and then ponder them together. One can enter through Haydn’s music, listening, then reading, then listening again. The book comes bundled with two discs, one with both music and spoken meditations, the other with just the music. Listening to the music is made more meaningful by Richard Young’s essay, “The Words and the Music,” and Grover Zinn’s “the History of Meditation on Jesus’ Seven Last Words.” Haydn wrote with musical symbolism, choosing notes that both mean and evoke. Take, for example, Haydn’s choice of a simple two-note melody (a descending minor third from the fifth to the third of the major scale) to illustrate Jesus’ word to his mother. Many years later, composer and music educator Zoltan Kodaly identified these same two notes as the playground call of children in almost every musical culture. “More apropos here,” writes Young, “these are the two notes with which children call their mothers.” Similarly, when Haydn responds to “Why have you forsaken me?” his melodic line and his accompaniment voices are out of sync. “This conveys not just a disorienting, off-kilter sensation,” writes Young, “but a feeling of frustration and even panic.” Knowing these things, we hear Haydn with new ears, and he helps us to hear Jesus with new ears. Meditation always takes time and intentionality. This book is an excellent aid to structuring intention and a richly rewarding way to spend slow time.
Christianity Today (David Neff)
Young, the violist for the world-famous Vermeer Quartet, brings together some outstanding reflection and commentary on the seven words, from luminaries such as Martin Marty, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Peter Gomes, Martin Luther King Jr., and Andrew Greeley… This marvelous pairing of music and great preaching will inspire Christians of many different traditions.
Publisher’s Weekly: Religion Bookline
This splendid offering is a labor of love from many hands. Young, violist of the Vermeer Quartet, has collected prose meditations written and delivered at performances over the past 16 years by the likes of Martin Marty, Billy Graham, Peter Gomes, and Andrew Greeley. Entries range from the spiritually illuminating to the intellectually or politically challenging. The volume concludes with helpful treatments of the music by Young himself and of the history of meditation on the Last Words by Grover A. Zinn. The book includes two CDs of the Vermeer Quartet’s performance of the piece… Highly recommended.
Library Journal (Graham Christian)
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