Bach Matthew Passion Roskilde

This issue of the St. John Passion is also a special event in the world of music, because a choice has been made for Bachs very earliest version of this work (1724) in a reconstruction by musicologist Dr. Pieter Dirksen. The Netherlands Bach Society performs the work in a small-scale scoring with ten singers and eleven instrumentalists, no distinction being made between choristers and soloists. According to the most recent research, this scoring constitutes a very close approximation of the ensemble with which Bach gave the first performance of the St. John Passion. Bachs St. John Passion is less well known to some than his St. Matthew Passion: unjustly so, in many peoples opinion. Judge for yourself, as you treat both your ears and eyes to this performance of the Netherlands Bach Society…

Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) is often considered the most important German composer prior to J.S. Bach. He composed pieces in the secular and the sacred areas, including the first German opera, 'Dafne', which is unfortunately lost. A contemporary of Monteverdi, he also exists in the period of transition from medieval polyphony and Renaissance styles and the emerging Baroque era.

Bach’s lost St Mark Passion was first performed in Leipzig on Good Friday 1731 and a second time in 1744 in a revised version. Though Bach's music is lost, the libretto by Picander is still extant, and from this, the work can to some degree be reconstructed. Unlike Bach's earlier existing passions (St John Passion and St Matthew Passion), the Markus-Passion is probably a parody – it recycles previous works. Which of his own works Bach may have taken for his St Mark Passion led to numerous speculations. Differently from further reconstructions the Frankfurt musicologist Prof. Karl Böhmer used the revised Picander text from 1744 which schedules one Aria and a chorale more than the 1731 version. Other parts have been revised and complemented.

When it came to writing Passions, C. P. E. Bach was certainly far more prolific than his father, whose St. Matthew Passion is by far and away the model against which all others are currently measured. He wrote 21 of these, or rather, he wrote bits and pieces of each one, the rest of which was cobbled together from works by his contemporaries and even his father.