Music for the grace of hope

by Petar PLAMENOV
19 April (Tuesday), 2011
Johan Sebastian Bach - Johannes Passion

St. Kliment Ohridski Sofia University
Aula Magna,
Start:19:30
Address:
Sofia, 15 Tzar Osvoboditel Blvd.
 
Conductor: Jossif Gerdzhikov
Soloist: Virgil Hartinger, Austria


"I had given them all the necessary things in order for them to carry out their work of spreading My words in the world. Yet what they did not know was that this last supper was only the beginning supper for those who would receive My Most Precious Body and Blood. "


JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH was born in Eisenach, Thuringia, on March 21, 1685 and died in Leipzig, Saxony, on July 28, 1750. Some of the music in the Saint John Passion goes back to Bach's years at Weimar (1708-17), but the bulk of the work was probably written at the beginning of 1724. It was first performed on Good Friday of that year, April 7, in Saint Nicholas's Church, Leipzig. Bach made revisions on three subsequent occasions. The score calls for tenor and bass soloists (Evangelist and Jesus), a solo quartet of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass (arias and the roles of Pilate, Peter, servant, and maid), four-part chorus, and an orchestra of two flutes, two oboes (doubling oboes d'amore and oboes da caccia), two solo violas d'amore, viola da gamba, lute, strings, and organ. The St John Passion, BWV 245, is a sacred oratorio from the Passions. During the first winter that Bach was responsible for church music at the St. Thomas Church, Leipzig and the St. Nicholas Church, he composed the St John Passion for the Good Friday Vespers service of 1724. The St John Passion is a dramatic representation of the Passion, as told in the Gospel of John, constructed of dramatically presented recitatives and choruses, commented by reflective chorales, ariosos, and arias, framed by an opening chorus and a final one, followed by a last chorale. Compared to the St Matthew Passion, the St John Passion has been described as more extravagant, with an expressive immediacy, at times more unbridled and less "finished."



The core of the libretto is Chapters 18 and 19 of the Gospel According to Saint John (in Dr. Martin Luther's German translation). Upon this, Bach superimposes an elaborate body of commentary, and for two reasons, one didactic and religious, the other artistic. Regarding the first, the purpose of performing a Passion on Good Friday was not just to tell the story as vividly and affectingly as possible, but also to teach its meaning. That is the function of the added material. As for the second reason, the interpolated arias and congregational hymns require music very different from that used for the Biblical narrative, and the sustained melodies and stable rhythms provide welcome contrast to the looser, less densely composed reciting styles of the Evangelist and the dramatis personae.

The hymns or chorales, as they are often called, in the Saint John Passion come from several sixteenth- and seventeenth-century hymnals. For the other "editorial" interpolations, Bach went chiefly to Der für die Sünden der Welt gemarterte und sterbende Jesus (Jesus Tortured and Dying for the Sins of the World) by Barthold Heinrich Brockes, a Hamburg senator and polymath, who published this poem, which quickly became immensely famous and popular, in 1712. (The three most important Hamburg composers of that period, Reinhard Keiser, Telemann, and Handel, all set it to music.) Bach's second source was a Passion based on Saint John by another writer from Hamburg, the poet and librettist Christian Heinrich Postel. For the soprano aria "Ich folge dir gleichfalls" (I follow Thee also), Arthur Mendel, who knew more about the Saint John Passion than anybody since Bach, cites as source Der Grünen Jugend Nothwendige Gedanken (Thoughts Necessary to Innocent Youth) by the Saxon poet and playwright Christian Weise. None of these texts is taken over verbatim, and we do not know who adapted them for this libretto. It could have been Bach himself.

 

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