J. S. Bach – The Apocalypse

What is the idea behind your performance, »Apocalypse«, based on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach?

Total syncretism. Serge van Veggel, who selected the music, took fragments of works by Bach and wove them together as if Bach were a neo-Romantic composer who has abandoned the Baroque forms. Then we added a narrator, who speaks melodramatically, as if the Evangelist had wandered into a Brecht play. And then we crossed the religious fanaticism of the Münster Anabaptists with modern aberrations and had all of this accompanied by a Baroque orchestra. It sounds weird but it works really well.

On which criteria were the choices of the individual programme components from the Bach cantatas based?

Quite simply, whether they made sense dramaturgically and above all emotionally in the overall dramatic context. But the quotations are not just from the cantatas, they’re also from the Passions and instrumental works.

»… the opera Bach never wrote« – that’s how you announce the performance. But in all honesty: do you think Bach would have written an opera if he’d had the chance in Leipzig?

Oh, Bach would certainly have written operas. After all, with the »Coffee Cantata« he did produce a kind of opera buffa. And I can definitely imagine him writing the music for an Italian opera seria based on classical material, like Metastasio’s »La clemenza di Tito«, for example. What he certainly would never have done is write an opera about the Anabaptists. But that’s what we’re here for.