Who Knew? Obama - The Classical Music Performer

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/us/11beliefs.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=Haydn&st=cse

Ritual on Jesus’ Words Includes a Familiar Voice

By PETER STEINFELS
Published: April 10, 2009
If you were listening to Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Christ” performed last Tuesday in the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago, you would have heard a familiar voice reading the Gospel passage (Matthew 27: 51-54) about how “the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, and the graves opened,” and the centurion and others guarding Jesus “feared greatly, saying, ‘Truly, this was the son of God!’ ”


That voice was recorded in a 2000 performance at the chapel. Then, the voice belonged to a young African-American legislator, chosen because of his civic leadership on Chicago’s South Side. Now, of course, it is the voice of the president of the United States.

In 2000, Barack Obama not only read that dramatic Gospel passage before Haydn’s finale, he also delivered the introduction to the piece’s opening movement. His role was hardly noteworthy in 2005, however, when this column reported on Haydn’s “Seven Last Words” and the Vermeer String Quartet, the group that had been performing it annually since 1997 in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel.

The focus of the column was on the musicians’ earlier discovery that, for them, the work was transformed when they performed it not as a concert piece but restored to a church setting, with spoken meditations between the slow sonatas inspired by each of Jesus’ seven final utterances from the cross as found in the Gospels.

That is the way Haydn’s work was first presented on Good Friday 1787 in a darkened cathedral in Cádiz, Spain. Millions of Christians heard meditations of that sort on Friday in Good Friday church services, some featuring Haydn’s music, others with music by other composers.