Seven Last Words

Joseph Haydn’s The Seven Last Words (in German: Die sieben letzten Worte) as a poignant, interdisciplinary experience. Together with stage director Peter Leung and scenographer Sophia Simensky, the Dudok Quartet brings music, imagery, light and space together into a single whole. By interspersing Haydn’s seven slow movements with new interludes, his meditations on suffering, silence and humanity are brought into the modern day. This ensures the music doesn’t just sound like something from the past; it feels immediately relevant to our lives right now. 
 
Space plays a key role in this. Through rich and immersive visual design, an intense and intimate atmosphere is created in which audience and musicians truly encounter one another. Just as in Cádiz, where the work was first performed in a darkened church in 1786, a space for total concentration is born. What you hear is what you see. What you see is what you hear. This is how you experience Haydn anew: not from a distance, but up close.