The Christian calendar regards Easter as its acme, for the message is all about the Resurrection. Though it is a movable feast and therefore not linked to a particular date, Easter also has an additional significance for all non-believers. It falls within the lambing season and that surge in the natural world when bare boughs give way to green shoots and rebirth in nature signals optimism and hope. Musically, it is often a time of the Passions, the Stabat Maters and the Requiem Masses, so it was rewarding to find the great Catalan musician Jordi Savall, now in his mid-eighties, choosing to celebrate this particular Eastertide by pairing two much less obvious works.
Despite the late-seeming opus number, Beethoven’s oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives was composed when he was still in his early thirties. At its premiere in 1803 it shared the programme with first performances of his second symphony and third piano concerto as well as a further outing for his first symphony. Those were the days when concerts really did fill an entire evening. The piece is significant for two main reasons. It was the composer’s first exploration in the direction of opera; in purely personal terms it forms a bridge between Christ’s suffering after being confronted with his imminent mortality and Beethoven’s own realisation, expressed in the Heiligenstadt Testament, that he was condemned to a world of increasing silence. Vocally too it is groundbreaking. In Bach’s sacred works the vox Christi is always given to a bass. Beethoven chooses a tenor, whose timbre is more likely to bring out the innocent and vulnerable qualities of a youthful Christ-like figure.
There is no Evangelist to take a narrative thread from the Gospels. The biblical accounts of what actually happened in the Garden of Gethsemane are in any case very brief, and Beethoven set his music to a libretto by the poet Franz Xaver Huber, about which the composer later had considerable misgivings. Like Christ in the Garden, Beethoven found himself alone and forsaken; the focus is not so much on dramatic outer events but on the inner turmoil being experienced.
The biggest share of the six main sections that form this work, introduced by recitatives leading to either an aria, duet or trio, and with the chorus largely relegated to a supportive role, is entrusted to the tenor voice. In the programme book for this performance by Le Concert des Nations and La Capella Nacional de Catalunya there was a reference to “Jesus as Heldentenor”. That is not what we had here. I liked the honeyed tones and the instinctive feel for a lyrical line displayed by the Croatian tenor Emanuel Tomljenović, and his diction was commendable. However, at the point when Jesus is seized by the soldiers and he sings “Meine Qual ist bald verschwunden” (= My agony will soon be over), the voice was beginning to tire and the heroic qualities of a Heldentenor were not really much in evidence. Nonetheless, in his duet with the Seraph, sung by the Spanish soprano Elionor Martínez, in which there is a growing acceptance of the pain yet to come, his ringing assurance that God’s love embraces the world felt quite operatic rather than merely sacral. Here also, and indeed earlier when pure dread begins to manifest itself, there was more than a hint of Florestan’s great monologue at the start of Act 2 in Fidelio, still two years off in the making.
Martínez herself was an appropriately angelic-sounding Seraph, with a sure awareness of a legato line and always secure in her top register. She was heard to particularly good effect in her early aria “Preist des Erlösers Güte” with its florid writing and coloratura elements. What I missed was a soaring quality that comes with a bigger voice. I suspect Savall’s intention was to have his voices very much integrated into the overall fabric, for the smaller role of Peter, sung by the Swiss baritone Manuel Walser, though warmly expressive, lacked dramatic energy at the start of the trio with Christ and the Seraph when he declaimed that “Fury rages in my veins”.
The drama came mostly from Savall’s players, numbering not quite forty, and the three dozen professional singers that make up La Capella. In his conducting Savall is not overly demonstrative and there is nothing of the micro-manager about him. Yet the control is always palpable, as is an instinctive feel for instrumental colour. His strings especially rewarded him with razor-sharp playing, sounding at times like the sharpest of blades cutting through silk. In the five-minute introduction to the oratorio, the bassoons, horns and trombones, together with the death rattle of hard-sticked timpani, conjured up a profound sense of impending gloom. In the chilling dissonances of “Verdammung ist ihr Los (= Damnation is their lot) acting as a choir of angels, in their rapid runs as a cohort of soldiers for “Entfliehen kann er nicht” (= He cannot escape) and in the angry incisiveness of their calls to seize the traitor and drag him quickly to judgement, La Capella were in commanding form. They stood as a single-tiered, semi-circular formation enveloping the players from behind. The final choral fugue, now representing the Angels, was driven along by Savall with a heady sense of invigoration.
Haydn’s work The Seven Last Words of our Saviour on the Cross is no less interesting in terms of its structure. It was originally commissioned for the 1786 Good Friday service in the Holy Cave Oratory in Cádiz, and consists of seven meditative sections framed by a slow introduction and at its close an example of the composer’s coup de théâtre, the earthquake referred to in St Matthew’s Gospel that signalled the death on the Cross. Actually, there are no seven last words as such: the number is purely symbolic, as is the case with the deadly sins. What we have instead are phrases attributed to Christ as he lay dying following a form of torture which, despite being common for many criminals at the time, was quite horrific.
Ideally, the Haydn should have come before the Beethoven, for the latter is far more dramatic and involving, whereas the former rarely departs from the rapt and reflective, but that would have been to put the last moments on the Cross before the scene in the Garden. I have to admit to a number of reservations about Haydn’s work, of which there are four different versions: the original orchestral one of 1786, a piano reduction, a voicing for string quartet and the choral model of 1796, which is what we heard here. The seven sections all progress in very stately fashion: three are marked Largo, two Grave, and one each Adagio and Lento. Thankfully, Savall kept things moving and brought the work in at fifty-four minutes, but the contrasts were simply not marked enough.
In moments of isolated joy, there were tantalising pre-echoes of what was to come in 1801 with The Seasons, but for the most part the dark overhanging clouds hardly lifted to allow much sunshine. The choral version is, I think, redeemed by the huge amount of work involved for the choristers. La Capella were certainly the heroes and heroines in this performance. They had immaculate poise for their a cappella introductions to the seven sections. Their colouring of the words, created by Johann Joseph Friebert and embellished by Gottfried van Swieten, was exceptional, from a heartfelt “Vater” to the highly expressive “Mein Gott, mein Gott, warum hast du mich verlassen? (= My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?) at the start of the fourth section. Unflagging to the end, they alone provided essential sparks of interest. Given what the composer was able to do elsewhere, I found the brief concluding Terremoto more of a damp squib than a scream-inducing earthquake.
By way of contrast, the vocal quartet, with the Swiss mezzo Lara Morger and the Catalonian tenor Ferran Mitjans joining Martínez and Walser, had comparatively little to do, apart from adding further ornamentation to the choral lines, though this in itself often created a fine tapestry of sound. Instrumental variation was present in details such as the solos for concertmaster in the fourth section, enhanced by the dark colouring of the two trombones. In the fifth section Sitio, where Christ cries out in thirst, the sense of anguish was heightened by the contributions of the two flutes, two horns and contra-bassoon. During the final section, where the key of E flat major underpins a quiet mood of resignation as Christ decares that he commends his spirit into the hands of the Father, the upper strings created lots of airy and swirling arabesques.
Empathy is an attribute much prized in the modern world. In these two works by Beethoven and Haydn there was no Via Dolorosa as such, no fourteen consecutive Stations of the Cross, but there was no mistaking the suffering. Individually, we may not experience the very greatest depths of this in the way that some do, but we can relate to all that torment. At the same time, the bleakest and darkest aspects of human existence are often balanced by an understanding that night inevitably gives way to day and that hope is a powerful force in providing the resilience necessary to life itself. Beethoven’s oratorio ends on a note of joy in C major; Haydn’s concluding message is one of redemption and transcendence.
Alexander Hall
Beethoven and Haydn
Beethoven – Christ on the Mount of Olives (Christus am Ölberg), Op. 85
Haydn – The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross (Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze), Hob. XX:2
Elionor Martínez (soprano); Lara Morger (mezzo-soprano); Emanuel Tomljenović (tenor); Ferran Mitjans (tenor); Manuel Walser (baritone)
Le Concert des Nations
La Capella Nacional de Catalunya; Choral Director Lluís Vilamajó
Elbphilharmonie, Grosser Saal, Hamburg, 3 April 2026
All photos © Jann Wilken
Top Image: Le Concert, La Capella, Jordi Savall, Emanuel Tomljenovíc, Elionor Martínez, Manuel Walser