Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Reconstruction by A.H.Gomme

with Recitatives and Turbae by Reinhard Keiser (1674-1739)

Did Johann Sebastian Bach compose a St. Mark Passion?  Some readers may still be wondering, though they have put their confidence in this concert, which advertises the evening’s music as being by Bach. The short answer is: yes, he did, but Bach’s St. Mark Passion does not survive in the form in which he composed it, and tonight’s performance is of a reconstruction which seeks to use, as much as possible, music which may plausibly be associated with the text Bach is known to have set to music.

Evidence of the existence of a St. Mark Passion by Bach

Bach is reported to have composed five Passions. The two that have come down to us intact are the St. John Passion of 1722 and the St. Matthew Passion of 1727. One of the remaining three is a St. Mark Passion of which the libretto survives among the collected works of its author, Picander (C.F. Henrici). Bach is known to have given a performance of the Passion according to St. Mark in Leipzig’s Thomaskirche on Good Friday, 1731. It is thought that the score of this Passion setting is the music listed in the 1764 catalogue of the Leipzig publisher Johann Breitkopf, as ‘Passion Cantata, according to Mark. “Geh Jesu, geh zu deiner Pein”’ – the opening words of Picander’s libretto. No other composer is known to have set this text. This piece listed by Breitkopf has been lost.

 Materials for a Reconstruction

The Trauer-Ode, BWV198

1730-31 was a particularly difficult time for Bach, when his relationship with his employers, the Leipzig Town Council, were at a low ebb, and he almost certainly didn’t have the time to compose completely new music for a Passion setting for performance on Good Friday. In 1865 Wilhelm Rust, an editor of the original Bach-Gesellschaft edition of the composer’s works, demonstrated that the music for the opening and closing choruses of the St. Mark Passion, and for three of its arias had been taken from Bach’s Trauer-Ode (Mourning Ode) of 1727 (BWV198). This piece had been composed for the memorial service of Christiane, Electress of Saxony and Queen of Poland. Because of its special occasion, the music for this ode was unlikely to be heard again, and would have been unknown to most of the congregation of the Thomaskirche. The scoring of the Trauer-Ode, for SATB soloists, four-part choir, and an orchestra of two flutes, two oboes doubling oboe d’amore, two violins, two violas da gamba, two lutes and continuo, is unique in Bach’s surviving scores and identical with that quoted by Breitkopf for the ‘Passion.Cantata according to Mark’ 

Chorales

The large number of chorales in the libretto Picander made for Bach is a sign of pressure of time. Music setting the words of all these chorales can be found in the edition of J.S. Bach’s Four Part Chorales by Kirnberger and C.P.E. Bach.

Parody Technique

Composers of Bach’s time frequently adapted existing music to words with the same metrical structure. Bach seems to have used this ‘parody technique’ for the choruses and three of the arias for his St. Mark Passion, probably asking Picander for words which would fit the music he had already written for the Trauer-Ode. On the assumption that he composed no new music, sources for the remaining three arias in the libretto may be sought among cantatas Bach had composed up to 1727. 

Thus far almost all the musicians who have attempted to reconstruct Bach’s St. Mark Passion agree, but different solutions have been found for the source of those remaining arias. 

Solutions for the Recitatives and Turbae

There remains a major problem: Bach must have composed new music for the Gospel narrative and the crowd choruses (turbae), to set Mark’s words, but none of this music survives.

If only music composed by Bach is allowed to be used, the result will be a ‘Passion cantata’ - a suite of choruses, arias and chorales, without any Recitative or crowd choruses. One editor who adopted that solution suggested that, to make the music available for liturgical performance, the Biblical narrative might be spoken, as laid out in Picander’s libretto, with the musical items inserted at the appropriate places. This solution was considered for tonight’s performance, but rejected.

Another solution is to make a composite of the recitatives and turbae from Bach’s other Passion settings, including the St. Luke which is almost certainly not by him, with adaptations to St. Mark’s narrative. But this ceases to be a ‘St. Mark Passion’. 

A third solution, adopted for example by the Dutch harpsichordist and conductor Ton Koopman, is to compose an entirely new setting of St. Mark’s narrative, in a Bachian style.

Yet another solution is adopted by the maker of the reconstruction used in tonight’s performance.

The St. Mark Passion of Reinhard Keiser

Reinhard Keiser (1674-1739) was a composer based in Hamburg, who had been a pupil at Leipzig’s Thomasschule. His setting of the St. Mark Passion was well known to Bach, who on two occasions copied large parts of it in his own hand, probably for performances. One of these very likely took place in the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig on Good Friday 1726. (There is now some doubt among scholars whether this St. Mark Passion is by Keiser. Bach believed it to be.)

Keiser was celebrated for his setting of recitative, and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion shows Keiser’s influence, in word treatment, and especially in the surrounding of Christ’s words with a ‘halo’ of string sound, which Bach took over in his St. Matthew Passion. Andor Gomme, the maker of the version heard tonight (published in 1997) , has decided to use Keiser’s St. Mark Passion as the source for the recitatives and turbae. Gomme believes that ‘the recitative in Bach’s St. Mark must have been very like Keiser’s and could well have incorporated some of it’.

Keiser’s crowd choruses (turbae), however, while competent and sometimes exciting, are less harmonically adventurous than Bach’s, and lack the bite and dramatic effect of those in his St. John and St. Matthew Passions.

Using Keiser’s St. Mark Passion as the source for the recitatives and turbae, although it introduces into the work music of one generation earlier, has the merit of making the narrative out of stylistically consistent music, music Bach is known to have admired and even copied, consciously or unconsciously, in his surviving Passion settings.

This ‘solution’, nevertheless, introduces two further problems. The breaks in Keiser’s narrative, the placing of the arias and chorales, do not always correspond with those in Picander’s libretto for Bach. This is fairly easily solved by introducing some extra cadences in Keiser’s recitatives. More seriously, Keiser’s text starts when Christ and the Disciples move to the Mount of Olives, whereas Picander’s opens with the Last Supper, 25 verses earlier. This extra text contains one aria and three chorales. Andor Gomme’s solution, in keeping with his aim of basing all the recitative on Keiser, is to find openings for the chorales later in the text, and to move the aria (No.61) to the end, just before the final chorus, where it can be interpreted as the reflexion of a devout soul on the whole Passion story.

Because Picander’s narrative has been abbreviated, Gomme moves the break between the two halves of the work, from the flight of the disciples (where Picander put it), to after Peter’s denial.

Sources for the remaining three arias

Following Friedrich Smend’s discovery, for No.13, Gomme uses the opening aria of the solo cantata Widerstehe doch der Sünde (BWV54, 1714). The metre fits, the word ‘Gift’ (poison) is similarly stressed in both texts, and the sentiment, in the cantata, of calling on the soul to stand fast against sin is not inconsistent, in the Passion, with rejecting the false pretences of the flattering world.

For No.37 (‘Angenehmes Mord-Geschrei’ – ‘comfort-bringing murder cry’), sung after the mob call for Christ to be crucified, Gomme follows C.S. Terry in using the closing aria of the cantata for solo soprano BWV204, (which Bach had already ‘parodied’ in two other works) . The text in both cases begins with the word ‘Angenehme’, in addition to the close metrical parallel.

For No.57 ‘Welt und Himmel’, Gomme follows Diethard Hellmann in using a soprano aria from the wedding cantata Herr Gott, beherrsche alle Dinge (BWV120a), in turn based on Cantata BWV120. Gomme justifies the bright open texture and brilliant violin obbligato at this dark moment of the Passion by pointing out that the text is in fact reassuring. After calling on Earth and Heaven to take note of Jesus’ last cry, it tells us that he has by his death restored the lost Eden. The modified da capo brings us back to an expression of that last cry.

Summary – How much of this St. Mark Passion is by Bach?

Choruses (No.1 and No.62 - opening and closing):  Bach – From Trauer-Ode, BWV198

Arias:

No.11 (soprano) Bach, from Trauer-Ode, BWV 198

No.13 (alto) Bach, from Cantata BWV54

No. 18 (tenor) Bach, from Trauer-Ode, BWV198

No. 37 (soprano) Bach, from Cantatas BWV 216 and 204

No.57 (soprano) Bach, from Cantatas BWV120a, 120

No.61 (alto) Bach, from Trauer-Ode, BWV198

Chorales:

16 in total, all Bach, with same words, from C.P.E.Bach and Kirnberger J.S. Bach’s Four-Part Chorales, except for No.49 (choral fantasia on the same words from Cantata BWV178) and No.59 (written out by Bach within his copy of Keiser’s St. Mark Passion).

Recitatives and Turbae:

All by Reinhard Keiser, from his St. Mark Passion.

Mark’s Gospel narrative, now thought to be the earliest, a source for Matthew and Luke, is remarkable for realism and vividness, particularly as to the manner, look and gestures of Jesus, giving prominence to his human emotions, and to those of the disciples, especially Peter. Keiser’s setting of the recitative, as already mentioned, highlights the words of Jesus with a halo of string sound. (Bach, in his St. Matthew Passion, only departs from Keiser’s example at the words ‘Eli, Eli, lama asabthani?’, to symbolise abandonment by God).

Picander’s words for the opening chorus ‘Go, Jesus, go to all thy pain’, and Bach’s music is a great procession, of mourners in the Trauer-Ode and in the Passion.  The words ‘Geh, Jesu’ are emphasised, as were the words ‘Lass, Fürstin’ in the Trauer-Ode. The distinctive scoring with flutes, oboes d’amore, two gambas and two lutes is opulent and warm. This scoring unique in the Trauer-Ode among Bach works, gives the Passion with which it shares five numbers a distinctive texture.

The final chorus is in pastoral style, in 12/8 time, similar in feeling to the closing chorus of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. 

It remains to add the suggestion of Andor Gomme, developing an idea already hinted at by others, that, rather than being composed for the Trauer-Ode then adapted for the St. Mark Passion, at least some of the numbers which survive in the Trauer-Ode may have been intended all along for the St. Mark Passion, and that, in Gomme’s words ‘in rejoining them with the text of the Passion we are rediscovering a shadow, not of a parody work, but of a great original composition’.

In summary, the reconstruction by Andor Gomme performed tonight makes available a setting of the St. Mark Passion similar in form and structure to Bach’s other Passion settings. It provides music by Bach for all the choruses and arias contained in Picander’s libretto, of which the two choruses and three of the arias may have been conceived with adaptation to Picander’s words in mind. For the three other arias, a similar case can be made. Although Bach must have composed his own music for the recitatives and turbae, ‘borrowing’ the setting by Reinhard Keiser at least has the merit of using music from the same tradition of Passion music, and which Bach admired and probably performed.

David Garrett © 2003