Passion Oratory

In the past, you’ve focused particularly on the reconstruction of lost Bach works, such as the Köthen funeral music and many of the secular cantatas. Where does this interest come from?

Take the Seven Wonders of the World, of which only the Great Pyramid of Giza still remains: for centuries these marvellous edifices of antiquity have fascinated people and inspired them to build a picture of them. Thanks to intensive research, we now have a really good idea of how some of them looked. It’s probably no exaggeration to claim that Bach’s music is a kind of »eighth wonder of the world«! Much of Bach’s secular vocal work is very interesting, but only fragments of it have come down to us. I’ve done research into some of these works myself, but I also wanted to make them playable again.

With the reconstruction of the Passion Oratorio of 1725, you’ve gone one step further, as we have no direct proof that Bach set this libretto by Picander to music. How did you go about reconstructing a work that perhaps never existed?

I believe that Bach had planned or begun a setting of the Passion libretto for 1725, because at that time he already worked closely with Picander. A banning of the text under the usual censorship of the time would be the most plausible explanation of why he fell back on the St. John Passion, which he had performed for the first time the previous year and which has long been debated as being a kind of »emergency solution«. Of course, the Passion oratorio is rather experimental in character, and even the surviving text throws up many unanswered questions. But we have proof that Bach performed Passion oratorios in Leipzig – by Telemann for example – and was evidently interested in this type of Passion music, in which the action is described not verbatim after the Bible text, but in freely versified form.

According to which criteria did you choose the arias and choruses for this reconstruction?

The work is a kind of pasticcio in which the choruses and some arias are reconstructed from similar texts from surviving Bach works like the St. Matthew Passion and the Mass in A major. The other arias, borrowed from other Bach cantatas, and the newly composed recitatives, are there to create a complete Passion work and underscore its lyrical character: unlike the St. John and the St. Matthew Passion, the focus is not on the drama of the Passion story, but on human compassion for Jesus’ suffering.