Writing the first 'Seven Last Words from the Cross' in Welsh

I felt hugely honoured when I was asked to compose a new setting of Christ’s “Seven Last Words” for Easter this year. I also felt the weight of 500 years of tradition on my shoulders. 

The canon of works that transport us to the foot of the cross to hear Jesus’s final words includes delicate Renaissance polyphony, grand oratorios, masterful contemporary works defying categorisation, and even musical theatre (thanks, Andrew Lloyd Webber). What could another new version possibly bring to the table?

Welsh, for a start. When it’s premiered on Good Friday at Saint Deiniol's Cathedral in Bangor, my composition will be the first-ever “Seven Last Words” to be sung in Welsh. 

For those of you trying to remember what Christ’s “Seven Last Words” actually were, there’s something you should know. They’re not individual words at all. They’re seven distinct statements, beginning with the familiar, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”, before cycling through different emotional states, such as “I thirst” and “It is finished”, before arriving at the epic, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” 

How do we know he said all this? We don’t. The Seven Last Words are actually a harmonisation that unites different quotes from the four accounts of the crucifixion in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John to create a single narrative in the shape of these seven statements. When taken together, these words from a dying man provide the complete spiritual architecture of Christian existence. No wonder they have inspired composers for centuries. 

The tradition of setting them to music evolved out of Medieval Passion settings. An extraordinary early example isMaria Plena Virtute, written in c1510, by Robert Fayrfax - one of Tudor England’s most significant composers. The Latin text contains six of the seven last words (and paraphrases the seventh) in an astoundingly intimate meditation on the Passion story, oscillating between narrative and personal contemplation. 

Unlike so much of religious art which can distance us from a spiritual connection with its monumentality, Fayrfax’s piece brings us closer in with his deeply expressive setting of the text. I’ve tried to create this kind of intimacy and humanity in my new setting, too, for example with repetitions of “O Dad” (“Oh Father”) and “Iesu cofia fi” (“Jesus remember me”) that feel like personal pleas.

Heinrich Schütz’s setting from 1645, widely considered to be the first complete musical setting of the Seven Last Words, also uses solo passages to create immediacy. We have moved from Renaissance polyphony to Baroque oratorio. Jesus is ‘played’ by a solo tenor. A choral prelude and postlude offer commentary. Narrative is delivered in recitative-like passages. For me, something of the text’s secret power is lost in this formalised dramatic structure, but the laser-sharp clarity in how Schütz sets the German vernacular text, compiled from the Luther Bible, is an inspiration. 

When it came to setting the Welsh, I have often used a simple, unadorned approach similar to plainchant, the unaccompanied early Christian musical tradition of chanting the liturgy in unison, which also heavily imbues James Macmillan’s mesmerising Seven Last Words from the Cross from 1994. This provides a clear, direct, yet fittingly solemn presentation of the powerful text, which is taken from the first complete translation of the Bible into Welsh by William Morgan, published in 1588.

The use of plainchant also, perhaps surprisingly, anchors the piece in North Wales because I’ve drawn musical inspiration from The Bangor Pontifical: an exceptional and unique medieval manuscript that contains substantial plainchant. My composition also incorporates fragments of Psalms from the Welsh translations of Edmwnd Prys, a 17th-century Welsh poet and sometime Archdeacon in Bangor who died 400 years ago this year.

At the premiere, my piece will be heard with additional texts read between each of the seven movements. Interestingly, this is the same approach that was taken for one of the most well-known “Seven Last Words” of them all. 

Joseph Haydn’s version was first performed in Cádiz on Good Friday, 1787. The seven expansive, slow movements, highly unusual for the time, are purely instrumental. When setting the Seven Last Words, are words even needed at all? At the time, Hadyn said, “Each of the texts is represented and expressed purely by instrumental music… in such a way as to awaken the deepest feelings within the soul.” Following the orchestral premiere, Haydn created a choral arrangement of the piece, as well as an arrangement for string quartet, which brings a heightened, and welcome, sense of intimacy to the work.

Nearly 200 years later, the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina also created an instrumental ‘Seven Words’ – which is perhaps my favourite interpretation of them all. Her gut-wrenchingly beautiful piece for solo cello, bayan (Russian accordion) and string orchestra is about as far away as you can get from the Haydn. Raw, painful, and almost cinematic outbursts describe the horror of the scene, contrasted with moments of profound luminescence from chorale-like strings that speak of unconditional love, forgiveness and transcendence. 

In this brutal dichotomy, Gubaidulina pinpoints the crux of the challenge facing any composer setting the Seven Last Words: how to express an archetype of human suffering as well as universal love – all in the same piece. Every setting wrestles with this; each composer must make their own decision. Macmillan pits shockingly violent “hammer-blows” in the strings against otherworldly choral writing. The doom-laden opening chords and chilling brittleness of guitar-picked glissandi in Nico Muhly’s The Street (14 Meditations on the Stations of the Cross) contrast with a bittersweet berceuse for ‘Jesus meets his mother’ and a haunting unsung setting of "However low I fall, let me not fall far from you”, from Alice Goodman’s jaw-dropping text. 

I chose to interpret this dichotomy as the solemnity of suffering versus the triumph of transcendence. The bittersweet, crushed harmonies underscoring the words "maddau iddynt” (“forgive them”) express the ambivalence of loving those who cause you the most harm. The arid austerity of “Y mae syched arnaf” (“I thirst”) gives way to more joyful and mellifluous melodies as we hear the promise that God will provide for us. The text in the final movement is chanted repeatedly, sometimes solemnly, sometimes triumphantly - expressing the stark duality of the unfolding events on the cross.

Music is particularly good at expressing these complex, abstract emotions and spiritual dimensions of Jesus’ final hours. But many of these pieces also stay anchored to the physical world, too, most notably by the inclusion of musical depictions of the cross itself. 

In Gubaidulina’s work, long-drawn-out drones of the cello and bayan are “crossed through” with vertical gestures from the string orchestra. Monumental cruciform shapes are traced out in the score with multiple strings glissandi. When the cellist’s bow steps behind the bridge in the final movement, for Gubaidulina it’s a symbol of crossing over into another world. In Arvo Pärt’s incredibly austere, yet beautiful, setting of the St John passion, Passio, the 75-minute narrative unfolds according to several pre-ordained patterns, all derived from chiastic, or X-shaped, structures.

Taking inspiration from these incredible works, my setting begins and ends with ‘cruciform melodies’: where lines drawn between two pairs of pitches create the shape of a cross. Whenever these appear, they gradually get bigger as the musical intervals expand – expressing the enormity and inevitability of the crucifixion. 

This brings me to the final challenge every composer setting Seven Last Words faces: how to end it. After all of that adagio loveliness, Haydn’s setting ends suddenly with a furious depiction of the earthquake that is said to have coincided with Christ’s death. I end mine with a little surprise too – one that speaks of transcendence.

Fayrfax concludes ecstatically, with an extended ‘Amen’. Gubaidulina chooses a breathless solo cello that flatlines into nothingness. Macmillan draws on traditional Scottish lament music in a haunting instrumental postlude. In the introduction to the score, he writes “liturgical detachment breaks down and gives way to a more personal reflection”. In doing so, he has brought something unique of his homeland, and his identity, to the setting of a text that is universal. 

My setting, in Welsh and ‘of’ Wales in so much of its inspiration, has also allowed me to bring my own sense of identity into this major work. But, more than that, I’m aware that my piece is part of a movement to nurture a stronger sense of identity for the Church in Wales at a time when Wales is the ‘least Christian’ place in the UK, according to censuses.

“We need to be talking about God in all the ways across the spectrum that people in Wales might encounter or explore God”, Canon Siôn Rhys Evans, who commissioned the piece, told me. “It’s much more than Bible readings and sermons… That’s why commissioning music in Welsh, and by Welsh composers, is so important.”

My piece is, primarily, a piece for Bangor; a piece for Wales. I’ve created it not as a monumental piece of art to evoke the fear of God in its audience, but to bring people together in communal reflection and personal contemplation of the universal messages of friendship, forgiveness, and unconditional love. If I manage to achieve even just a tiny bit of this, I will be a very proud composer indeed.

A shorter version of this article was published in The Guardian on 07/04/23.