Carl And Passions

Der Tod Jesu of Carl Heinrich Graun (1704–59), completed in 1755, was for decades the musical mainstay of Passiontide services (a position now held by Bach’s and St. John Passions), being performed by the Berlin Singakademie virtually every Good Friday until 1884. Unlike the passions of Bach, Schütz, and other predecessors, Graun’s work does not set any texts of Scripture. Instead, in line with burgeoning Enlightenment sensibilities, the entire libretto by Carl Wilhelm Ramler (1725–98) is written in the exalted style of impassioned poetic declamation common to opera libretti of the era, in supposed imitation of Greek tragedy. At less than half the length of the Bach passions, and musically far less complex, with dignified and attractive arias composed in a style somewhat akin to those of Handel’s Messiah , it remains winsome even today, and its enduring popularity is readily comprehended.

Have you ever wondered what or who is the missing link between the Passions of J.S. Bach and the more ‘enlightened’ oratorios of Josef Haydn and his contemporaries? For that matter how did things come to change so quickly? I have recently reviewed some cantatas by Gottfried Homilius (1714-1785) on Carus 83.183 and he is certainly a link. But really it is C.P.E. Bach, that great reactionary and under-estimated genius, who is ‘yer man’.

C.P.E Bach moved to Hamburg in 1768 and was asked to perform the prevailingly popular “Old School” passions in the city’s churches. Bach himself hadn’t been sure whether Hamburg preferred passions “in the historical and old fashion with the Evangelist” as he wrote in an anxious letter to Georg Michael Telemann “or in the fashion of an oratorio.” The answer was the former; the latter, the more modern way, involved contemporary texts.