Via Crucis

On March 6, I am playing Liszt's Via Crucis, a series of meditations to accompany pilgrims through the Fourteen Stations of the Cross.

Only today have I gotten serious about preparations for this, having just now completed four hours of work on it. I played it once before, back in 2005, and the piece offers few technical challenges. But it calls for considerable intensity of emotion. I had forgotten how powerful it is.

There is an introduction, quoting Vexilla regis (“The royal banners forward go”), and fourteen short meditations. I have only a few minutes, so I will not go into detail beyond mentioning three striking moments:

--- the Sixth Station: St. Veronica wipes the Face of Jesus. Liszt gives the chorale “O Sacred Head sore wounded,” or with the German text, O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden, with a most amazing eight-bar coda.

--- the Eighth Station: the Daughters of Jerusalem. One hears the wailing of the women, and at the last, a terrifying eight-bar Allegro marziale on full organ, as Jesus envisions the imperial legions coming to destroy and kill.

--- the Twelfth Station: Jesus dies on the Cross. This is one of the longest movements of the work. There is a recitative-like section where He speaks the Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani, and then In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum. There follows another most amazing passage, passing through several major keys for the first time in the work, to the words: Consummatum est – It is finished. Finally, the chorale O Trauigkeit.

There is a lot of music this weekend. I am playing the B minor Prelude and Fugue of Bach for Sunday morning, and the Bach setting of O Lamm Gottes from the Eighteen Chorales for Evensong. The adult choir is singing the Evensong psalmody in unaccompanied plainsong: Psalms 22 and 23, for the Fourth Evening. The youth choir has a South African freedom song which we sang at last summer's RSCM: Bawo, Thixo Somandla. And there is much more – the Howells “St. John's Cambridge” Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, the Smith Responses, good anthems for the adult choir at Eucharist and Evensong.

I must get back to work on these things.