The Good Friday Devotion (addresses)
The Good Friday Devotion
Addresses given by the Precentor, Canon Anna Macham
Friday 3 April 2026
Hildegard of Bingen, O Cruor Sanguinis
Address 1
Our Good Friday Devotion today starts at the end of Jesus’ journey towards the cross. The disturbingly beautiful prayer of Hildegard of Bingen we just heard sung to her own chant, alludes to the dramatic descriptions in the Gospels of the moment of Jesus’ death, and the earthquake, solar eclipse, and other miracles that accompanied it. Such was the cosmic significance of this stupendous event, this short lyric reminds us, that even nature itself revolted, bearing witness to its God.
Hildegard’s chant is dramatic, but the immediacy and the power of this antiphon stem from a more personal inspiration. Hildegard of Bingen was a visionary, and her visions, as well as her poetic style, involved a kind of synaesthesia that brought together the visual and the auditory in a unique way. “I see, hear and know all at once,” she wrote to her secretary, the Benedictine monk Guibert of Gembloux. In one act of spiritual imagination, she both mystically “sees” the shedding of Christ’s sacred blood and “hears” the cry of the outraged earth. In this multi-sensory experience, blood and sound flow in a single stream, rising with the terror of the earth and descending with the pity of heaven (see Barbara Newman, Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia 2nd ed., Cornell, 1998, p.270).
In the next hour or so, we explore the meaning of the cross through the music of female composers throughout the ages. In doing this, we hope to discover perspectives that haven’t been heard before, as much music by historic women composers of sacred music is only now being unearthed and rediscovered. This will lead us to consider biblical texts that we don’t often think about on Good Friday, or in relation to the crucifixion. And it may provoke us- as does Hildegard’s striking, synaesthetic vision of the cross- to think about Jesus’ death differently, and to picture it in our minds in a different way.
For a woman in the twelfth century, it was highly unusual for Hildegard of Bingen to be composing music. As well as a composer for her own and other monastic communities, she was also a visionary, theologian, preacher, scientist and physician, as well as a prodigious letter writer who numbered kings, emperors and popes among her correspondents. She gained papal approval for her visionary writings and experiences, but her reputation waned after her death until she was rediscovered in the late twentieth century by writers of the New Age movement and feminist scholars. This was a time when a new enthusiasm for rejecting the hierarchy of organised religion, and also for recovering the supposed simplicity and authenticity of early music and its spirituality, was reaching its peak.
Yet Hildegard’s theology of the cross is very far from the concerns of twentieth century feminist theologians. Far from emphasising the vulnerability of Jesus on the cross or identifying with his wounds, she follows earlier theologians in portraying the cross as a victory. At the beginning of Holy Week, we sang the well-known Latin hymn by the sixth century poet and hymnographer Venantius Fortunatus, “The Royal Banners forward go, the cross shines forth in mystic glow”. In another of her chants in which the cross features, “O Virgo Ecclesia”, Hildegard echoes his words: “the saviour raises his royal standard”, she writes and sings, “he ransoms all with his blood”.
For Hildegard, the struggle of Christ on the cross is a battle that results in victory. On the cross, Christ gives himself in love for humanity. The cross heals us and restores us to our original, fully human selves. Through the cross, Christ’s power is displayed and the universe, now drenched and covered by Jesus’ blood, is rescued from decay. For Hildegard, the cry of triumph, “It is finished”, is the cause of deep rejoicing, not just for human beings, but for the whole of creation.
Naturally, Hildegard turns to music- for her, the supreme embodiment of joy- to describe and express this mystery. Christ himself, in his incarnation, is music. In the womb of Mary, she writes elsewhere, are “all manner of music, in all blossoms of melody”. And in today’s chant, the cross is music too, for Christ’s blood- as we heard- cries out and sings the victory song of the cross. Its music unites earth and in heaven, for it resounds in both. Even while the elements are trembling and the whole earth laments his death, Christ’s very blood resounds and sings, reaching down and lifting us up, just as the female voices of Hildegard’s monastic community lifted their souls in praise (see Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St Hildegard’s theology of the feminine, UCP, 1997).
Yet in the daily realities of Hildegard’ life and times, Christ’s victory was not so readily apparent. Being united with Christ in his death meant lamenting the sin, corruption and lies that often prevailed in the Church and its life. And while the idea of Christ going into battle with the enemy on the cross might seem alien to us, for Hildegard and her community, fear of attack was a daily reality, because a long political dispute between the German Emperor and the Pope over the right to appoint bishops had left their own Monastery vulnerable. Hildegard’s music is innovative and unusual, with bold upward leaps, often of a perfect fifth, as at the start of today’s chant. By courageously singing together in unity and in harmony, her community resists schism and heresy, and- through the originality of her music- signals the new creation made possible by Christ’s sacrificial death.
As well as facing foes without, Hildegard also battled demons within. Many voices of the time argued that women religious should not sing, and Hildegard internalised such prejudices, describing herself humbly as “a poor little female”. But this didn’t stop her from daring to speak out. In a speech in 2010, Pope Benedict, quoted one of her visions in a speech about the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, in which he addressed the sins of the clergy. In this, as in many of her visions, Hildegard depicts the Church is as feminine and beleaguered and harassed. “They tear my robe, since they are violators of the Law, the Gospel and their own priesthood” she writes of the Church in the vision that he quotes; “they darken my cloak by neglecting, in every way, the precepts which they are meant to uphold; my shoes too are blackened, since priests do not keep to the straight paths of justice… or set good examples to those beneath them”. 850 odd years after these words were written, they still speak powerfully into the culture and safeguarding issues of today, where the organisation of large, ancient institutions like the Church all too often serves the institution and not the people, and where it is still too often powerful men whose voices are the most heard and respected.
In Hildegard’s times, the cross was seen as the place where the gift of the Eucharist was given to the Church, and where the Church is joined with Christ, becoming his bride. Like other medieval authors, Hildegard drew heavily on the biblical book of the Song of Songs to express this truth. The cross is the place of life, through which we are fed and nourished spiritually, and through which we have eternal life with Christ. We now jump forward in time to the Italian Renaissance, and to a polyphonic motet composed by a sixteenth-century nun named Rafaella Aleotti. Setting words from the Song of Songs, this motet expresses musically the idea that, just as Christ descends to us in mercy in the cross, so he exhorts us to arise with him , uniting ourselves with him in his death and confidently claiming our new identity as those redeemed by his blood.
Let us pray.
O God, the power of the powerless, you have chosen as your witnesses those whose voice has not been heard. Grant that we too may have courage to persist in proclaiming your word, in the power of our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.
Raffaella Aleotti, Surge, propera amica mea
Address 2
Having started our journey to the cross with the music of nuns, we turn our attention now to Vienna and the classical period of Mozart and Haydn. One of the most famous female composers of this period is Marianna Martines, the first part of whose setting of the Lenten Psalm Miserere Mei Deus we will hear in a few minutes’ time. Of Spanish descent, Martines was born in 1744. She lived in the heart of Vienna, by the Michaelkirche, the imperial court church where, when she was just 16, her first orchestral Mass in C was performed. Inspired by the subject of the cross, she approached it from a female perspective in her Oratorio about Helena, the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, who embarks on a quest to find the true cross on which Jesus was crucified.
Martines was well connected with other eminent musicians of her day. She was taught by Josef Haydn, who lived in the same building as her family. In later life, she hosted musical events and performed duets with Mozart. It’s believed that several of Mozart’s four-hand piano duet sonatas were written for performance by Martines and Mozart.
As a well-connected noblewoman, Martines enjoyed the patronage of the powerful ruling Empress Maria Theresa, before whom she performed her music. Music of this period looked back to classical antiquity, adopting its ideals of noble simplicity, grandeur, serenity and strength, and following an accepted principle of “just proportion and natural balance”. Theresa used the restrained decorum and perfect beauty of this musical style and the talents of female composers she employed to compose it to project a strong courtly, female identity. Charles Burney, an eminent music critic of the day, when he visited Vienna praised Martines’ music, including her Miserere, for being a symbol of the golden mean… and a balance between ancient and modern styles, “grave and solemn without languor or heaviness” (see The Cambridge Companion to Women Comosers, CUP, 2024, Ch.9).
But in some ways, writing music was harder in this period for women than it had been before. Medieval and Renaissance convents created some limited opportunities for talented female musicians to obtain the high-level musical training they needed to write complex, musical works, and to have these performed in the liturgical context of their own worship. But, while high level musical training was- unusually- open to her, as a woman of the nobility, the same noble breeding that connected Martines to the Empress was also constraining. It would have been utterly disreputable and improper for her to have written or published an opera or symphony in the way that the great composers of the period, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven did. Martines did write a wonderful Overture in C and many individual operatic arias, which are beautiful. While she evidently understood the limitations placed on her by society and by her class, it must have been incredibly frustrating not to have had the opportunity to do more.
In the long run, other factors worked against female composers of this period too. Later eras perpetuated a Romantic image of Mozart and Haydn as divine geniuses, whose sublime works came to them fully formed in flashes of inspiration from above. There’s something of this in the theologian Karl Barth view of Mozart. Writing theologically of its unearthly beauty, he makes the astonishing claim that in Mozart’s music we hear, in his words, “what we shall not see until the end of time- the whole context of providence”, concluding that “we must certainly assume that the dear Lord had a special, direct contact with him” (quoted in Patrick Sherry, Spirit and Beauty, SCM, 2002, p.2). No one would want to deny Mozart’s extraordinary talent. But the sole focus on a few uniquely “great men” and their “musical monuments” means that the achievements of other voices, including the 400 odd female composers of the same period that are now known about, have been obscured (see The Cambridge Companion to Women Comosers, CUP, 2024, Ch.9). Such a view also doesn’t recognise the human side of composing; the hard graft as well as genius, or the exhausting lifestyle of a professional musician; Mozart’s incredible achievements- like those of Martines and others- weren’t simply a gift from God or the work of pure genius alone, but the result of extreme drive and determination, dedication, entrepreneurship and hard work.
We associate the music of this period with delicate beauty and heavenly perfection. But in a Christian view of beauty, there must always be room for the human side of beauty, and this is seen supremely in the cross. In John’s Gospel, the word “glory” is closely associated with beauty. From Chapter 12 onwards, when Jesus starts to anticipate his “hour”, the time of his crucifixion, the language of glory starts to be used a lot, as Jesus approaches and contemplates his own glorification in the event of his death and exaltation on the cross.
One of the meanings of “glory” is “visible splendour”. It’s sometimes suggested that, by referring to Jesus’ death as his exaltation and glorification, John empties the cross of suffering and shame, so that it becomes like one of those very beautiful crucifixes made of gold and jewels that Christian Europe later produced. But John’s account of the crucifixion does nothing to mitigate the bleak horror and human degradation that crucifixion would suggest to ancient readers. Unlike the other Gospels, John recounts no supernatural accompaniments: no darkness at noon, no earthquake, no tearing of the temple veil. “Glory”, for John, is not to be found not by looking up to the splendour of heaven, but on the cross on to which Jesus’ disfigured body is lifted up.
John also emphasises Jesus’ single-minded, human dedication. He doesn’t ask to be saved from his hour but goes to Jerusalem, even though he knows he will experience the pain and humiliation of the taunts of the soldiers. He doesn’t flinch from his calling to die for humankind but relentlessly pursues it.
John’s Gospel therefore makes a connection with more earthly and human aspects of beauty, and its human cost. Like Mozart, Martines was very dedicated, writing and rewriting her work, and improving her craft. But she also knew setbacks and failure. Her big opportunity came when she was elected to the prestigious Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna, the first woman in its 108 years of existence to be granted this honour, which Mozart had been granted two years earlier, for which she was required to write a setting of Dixit Dominus, Psalm 109, which became her masterpiece. Yet the need to maintain her modesty and stay out of the public eye she never left Vienna to collect her award and her piece was never performed at the academy’s annual celebrations. That she never left the city means that she rarely wrote letters that might give us any clue as to her feelings about this or what she was like. She faded from view, and her reputation was lost, until now.
In the first part of her Miserere, Martines through her music urges God to transform our sin and failure, repeating the word “Dele” or blot out, as she delicately urges God to transform us. Written when she was only 22, this piece has been described as a “study in harmonic fluidity” where ultimately, through its harmonic shifts, the music blots out the past and makes a new beginning with the hope for a clean heart (see Irving Godt, Marianna Martines: A Woman Composer in the Vienna of Mozart and Haydn, URP, 2010, pp.70-71). So often we aim for perfection. But for all our dedication, setbacks and failures are part of our human experience, whether of our own doing or circumstances over which we have no control.
Beautiful and mournful, Martines’ piece expresses the heaviness of human sin, feeling weighed down and troubled- and longing for mercy and release, as we look to the cross, the ultimate symbol of failure in which we find true beauty, and in which all loss, disappointments and injustices will ultimately be redeemed.
Let us pray.
Christ, who hung deformed on the cross, but in whose deformity is our beauty, help us to look for you not in your glory in the clouds of heaven but in your body torn open. Touch our hearts with your mercy, and free us from the need to justify ourselves by our own anxious striving, that we may be abandoned to faith alone in your name, Amen.
Marianna Martines, Miserere Mei Deus
Address 3
“I feel I must fight for [my music], because I want women to turn their minds to big and difficult jobs; not just to go on hugging the shore, afraid to put out to sea.”
These are the words of Ethel Smyth, a British composer and suffragette, who lived from 1858-1944, and whose organ Prelude and Fugue on the chorale tune “O Traurigkeit, O Herzeleid”- “O darkest woe, O heart’s pain”- for Good Friday we will hear played to us in a few minutes’ time.
In this section of today’s Devotion, we move rapidly from Marianna Martines’ death in 1812 through the nineteenth century to the 1880s. Smyth’s Prelude and Fugue, along with her other chorale preludes, are generally thought to have been composed during her time studying in Leipzig as a young person around 1884. She seems at least in part to have been influenced by Brahms, who she met while she was there, and who later wrote a prelude and fugue on the same chorale text and tune. This was a time of revival of interest in Bach, whose music Smyth grew to love, and this along with her admiration of Brahms influenced the style of her own organ works.
“O Traurigkeit, O Herzeleid” is a hymn text that was originally published in German in 1628, and translated into English for the Chorale Book for England in 1863. The words depict with great emotional urgency the pain and suffering of Christ’s passion, which we also see in the Gospel texts. The words are introspective, laying bare Christ’s passion on the cross through the reality of our sin and through the atoning work of the Saviour. The short phrases that start each verse are arresting: God’s Son is dead! Ye tears, forth flow! They are designed to elicit our emotional response. Christ’s struggle evokes our sympathy for his plight, but also comforts us in our own struggle, as we meditate not just on our sin but on the redemption wrought there that gives us hope.
Ethel Smyth went through her own struggle to write this piece. Her Victorian major general father was very resistant to the idea of her going to study in Germany, believing strongly that she should turn her thoughts to marriage and starting a family instead. Declaring that he would sooner see her “under the sod” than in Leipzig, he banned her from leaving. But she rebelled, rejecting suitor after suitor and spending most of her time locked in her room apart from when sneaking out to concerts without a chaperone, having borrowed the money to do this from tradesmen. She refused to attend church or parties, until eventually- through sheer force of her personality- her father relented and allowed her to go (see Leah Broad, Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World, Faber, 2023, p.35).
Such rebellious behaviour was to characterise all of Smyth’s adult life. As well as being a serious composer, she became involved with the Suffragette movement in 1910, dedicating two years of her life wholly to this cause, after which she returned to music. During this time, she wrote the suffrage anthem “The March of the Women”, taught Emmeline Pankhurst how to throw stones accurately, was then jailed alongside her for throwing stones at the window of an anti-suffrage MP and famously proceeded to conduct her anthem from the window of her cell using a toothbrush as a baton.
Smyth courted controversy in other ways too. She dressed like a man, wearing [her famed] tweed suits, partly to make the point that she wished to be considered a serious composer of classical music alongside her male peers, and not to be dismissed as a composer of mere feminine frivolities, but also because of what we would now probably call her queer identity. Being open about this and her many passionate relationships with women was brave, in a context where such things were simply not talked about, and where the death penalty for male homosexual acts had only been formally abolished in 1861. On the other hand, one of Smyth’s closest confidants was her lesbian friend Mary Benson, wife in name only to the Archbishop of Canterbury Edward Benson, the couple having agreed that she would support his career, and in return that she could bring her female lovers to live at Lambeth- showing that, with Mary’s struggle to reconcile her sexuality with her faith, such issues were being discussed at the heart of the establishment, even at that time (Leah Broad, p.62).
Smyth was a life-long disruptor, scandalising her father and polite society. Her heartfelt passion for her female friends and lovers can be heard in her operas and songs, and feels about as far away from Christianity and her staunch Church of England upbringing as it’s possible to be. But Good Friday should make us ask whether this is really true. St Paul tells us that the cross is a scandal, a stumbling block to respectable religion and to those who would have us believe that Jesus’ place is not with those who we wish would be quiet, those viewed as an embarrassment to polite society, or who have been pushed to the margins, excluded and shunned, or whose passion has been silenced.
Ethel Smyth certainly knew how to shock people. But she didn’t see it as a scandal to be passionate in her music, even her religious music. Her beautiful and powerful Mass in D is a large scale work dedicated to a devout Catholic friend Pauline Trevelyan, and defied convention. This was a time when the culture of Victorian society and the Church was still too conservative to accommodate serious musical contributions by women. Its modern, original, energetic and forthright musical style shocked people because it was seen as too masculine, falling short of a womanly churchly ideal. The latter was the way in which George Bernard Shaw conversely chose to interpret the work, asserting that the Mass was merely “decorative”- which was only, he said, to be expected, because “If you take an average mundane young lady, and ask her what service to religion she most enjoys rendering, she will probably, if she is a reasonably truthful person, instance the decoration of a church at Christmas” (Broad, p.87).
There was a cost, to Ethel Smyth, in being so bold, both in her musical style and in her political and sexual views. But her life and religious music show that there is more place for emotion in our faith than we often give credit for. Chorale preludes of the type we’re about to hear come from the Lutheran tradition. Perhaps surprisingly for a Church reformer, Luther was not suspicious of music’s emotional powers. He believed passionately in music’s ability to uplift the gloomy or listless spirit and thus arouse devotion. Luther even believed that music can sharpen and intensify the mind’s powers, not despite but through emotional stimulation.
Smyth’s Prelude and Fugue that we will listen to now invite us to engage emotionally with the cross. The original chorale melody, given on your service sheet, is decorated, using different devices to bring out the bitter anguish of the text and returns in full at the very end, after the piece has built to its emotional climax. The scandal of the cross affirms Jesus’ fierce love and empathy for sinful humankind; the music of his passion invites us to consider our own sinfulness and allow our emotional response to the pain and suffering of Jesus’ death to bring solace in the midst of all that pains us.
Let us pray
God of compassion, whose Son endured for us the pain of the cross and the mockery of the crowd, bless us as we follow in your way. Unify the sufferings of our lives with your passion, that they may bear fruit for our souls in ever deeper kindness and ever richer humanity, that through them we may be empowered to show in the world something of your love and gentleness, Amen.
Ethel Smyth, O Traurigkeit, O Herzeleid
Address 4
In this final section, we arrive back where we started, at the moment of Jesus’ death. The words of the Agnus Dei, Lamb of God are from the Prologue of John’s Gospel, but they also point forward to the climax of John’s narrative, the moment when all is accomplished. “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” This has become an iconic statement resonating down through the centuries in Christian liturgies, symbolism, art, hymns, and poetry. We say it every week in the Eucharist, before receiving communion, recalling the sacrifice made by Jesus on the cross. We sing it, or hear it sung, in countless (different) musical settings that span the entire time period of the works we’ve looked at today and more. We make it into a prayer, addressing Jesus directly: “You take away the sin of the world” in an act of confidence and trust that we really are redeemed but where we’re also genuinely pleading for mercy, for ourselves and for the world. Yet when John the Baptist first says it, at the start of John’s Gospel, it’s startling, surprising.
To picture Jesus as a sacrificial lamb is terrible and utterly unexpected. We might think of the shocking image of the bound lamb, a highly naturalistic still life painting by the Spanish Spanish Renaissance artist Francisco Zurbaran showing a young lamb with horns, lying starkly on a stone slab, its feet bound with rope. Such an image speaks of intense vulnerability, helpless, innocent- and totally unprovoked- suffering and pain. A lamb is fragile, small and undefended. It speaks of the vulnerability of God expressed in Jesus.
Yet it also speaks of liberation. John tells us that the crucifixion takes place at the time of the Passover, when the Passover lambs are being killed. This is a Jewish festival, recalling the foundational story of Israel’s liberation from Egypt led by Moses, from the book of Exodus. Just as the Jewish people, trying to escape, sacrificed lambs and daubed blood on their door posts, to avoid death, so for Christians, the death of Jesus is the fulfilment of the Passover sacrifice. Here in this person, through this one death, a transformation is happening, utterly identified with humanity at this intensely vulnerable, agonised moment of crucifixion, but also utterly identified with God and God’s liberating love. In John’s Gospel, the branch of hyssop is a give-away sign of this meaning, indicating that Jesus’ thirst on the cross is more than just physical, indicating a desire for the will of his Father to be done. Although its stems aren’t strong enough to bear a sponge soaked with wine, its meaning is symbolic, recalling the hyssop that was used in the exodus from Egypt to sprinkle the blood of the Passover lambs on the doors of the Israelite’s homes to avoid death and herald their deliverance.
As well as being the climax of the story, the “Agnus Dei” is the climax of the Mass. The tradition of composing for the Mass goes back to the Renaissance, when composers used the work to demonstrate their skills, to create the “masterpiece” or signature work that placed them in the company of master composers, benefitting from the transmittal of knowledge from one generation to another, each great musician standing on the shoulders of those who had come before. As time went on, mass settings arguably got further away from the humble image of the lamb, as composers sought to express themselves through larger-scale forms more suited to the grandeur of a concert hall than a church.
That so few mass settings by women historically are known, even now, is perhaps not surprising given the Church’s historical limitations on women’s activities in liturgical music. Imogen Holst’s Mass in A minor was composed while she was a student in Vaughan Williams’ class in 1927, aged just 20. It’s impossible to know what her aspirations for it or any of the other compositions she won prizes for whilst at College were, whether she dreamed of having it performed in a liturgical setting, or whether she saw it purely as an academic exercise.
As a young person, Holst’s Mass setting was written under Vaughan Williams’ guidance, and the influence of his Mass in G minor can clearly be felt. Yet she still preserves her own distinctive voice throughout, particularly here in the Agnus Dei, which is tranquil and prayerful. Mournful and reflective, solemn and introspective, it is an original work in its own right, and is easier and more natural to sing, with its sustained beautiful phrases and shows the influence of Howells as well as Vaughan Williams. Like Vaughan Williams’ mass, it was composed after the First World War with all the suffering and loss of life that that entailed, and goes back to the a cappella tradition of Tudor church music, with its undulating, chant-like melodies and intricate harmonies, making it particularly suitable for liturgical use. As the parts imitate each other and interweave, there’s a strong sense of yearning for God’s mercy.
Agnus Dei, Lamb of God, connects the Old Testament Passover Lamb with Christ, the true Lamb of God who offers himself for the salvation of the world. This is a universal symbol, that takes in war and conflict and all the unspeakable ways in which human beings hurt each other. Yet in making the prayer our own, we express our need for God’s mercy and our trust in God’s power because of the cross to forgive sins and reconcile our beautiful yet broken and fragile world.
There’s a sense in Holst’s Agnus Dei of reaching out for something beyond ourselves, a quality of spiritual yearning that, while the music feels effortless, represents a whole world of turbulence underneath, until finally the increasingly agitated entreating of God in the final Miserere, is offered up to God for resolution and reconciliation in this very personal moment of prayer.
Let us pray.
Vulnerable God, you challenge the powers that rule this world through the death of your Son on the cross, and through the needy, the compassionate and those who are filled with longing. Make us hunger and thirst to see right prevail, and single-minded in seeking peace; that we may see your face and be satisfied in you, through our Saviour Jesus Christ, Amen.
Imogen Holst, Agnus Dei