Joseph Haydn was commissioned by a canon of Cádiz, José Sáenz de Santa María, Marqués de Valde-Íñigo, to compose a work for performance on Good Friday 1787 in the city’s Oratorio de la Santa Cueva. The result was the orchestral version of The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross, which Haydn arranged shortly afterwards for string quartet, a version that was to prove an enduring success.

More recently, in 2008, the composer José Peris Lacasa, a student of Milhaud, Boulanger and Markevitch, provided a version for string quartet and soprano voice, with the latter singing the Latin text originally written by Haydn under the first violin part. Far from distorting the original piece, this version, performed here by the Pražák Quartet with the Irish soprano Helen Kearns, sheds new light on one of Haydn’s great masterpieces.