Markus Passion (JS Bach)

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The Markus Passion , BWV 247, is an oratorical passion by Johann Sebastian Bach , which has the passion and death of Jesus Christ according to the Gospel according to Mark as its theme. While Picander's libretto is completely preserved in a collection of poems, the music is considered lost, in contrast to the completely preserved St. Matthew Passion and St. John Passion ; the Luke Passion is considered largely inauthentic.

The Markus Passion was premiered on Good Friday on March 23, 1731 in Leipzig. In addition, recent research has shown that Bach himself performed this Passion at least once again, namely on Good Friday in 1744, in a revised version (late version). In addition to changing smaller text passages, he added two more arias.

Although the music has been lost, the work can to a certain extent be reconstructed from the fully preserved libretto of the early version from 1731 and the late version from 1744. In contrast to the other two authentic passions that have survived, the Markus Passion was probably a parody , i.e. Bach re-used sentences from works that had already been composed, for example from two sacred cantatas ( Resist sin , BWV 54; Laß, Fürstin, laß noch one beam , BWV 198). Two choirs from the St. Mark Passion may have been reused in the Christmas Oratorio . However, a few arias are still missing, which are taken over from other works by Bach in attempts at reconstruction. The recitatives are also lost, so that some attempts at reconstruction use the recitatives from St. Mark's Passions by other composers, e.g. B. the composition attributed to Reinhard Keizer . Bach himself performed the passion attributed to Keizer at least twice.

The numerous attempts at reconstruction include those by Diethard Hellmann (1964/1976), Gustav Adolf Theill (1978), Andor Gomme (1997), Rudolf Kelber (1998), Ton Koopman (1999), Johannes HE Koch (1999; based on Hellmans Version from 1976), Alexander Ferdinand Grychtolik (2007 based on the text of the early version from 1731 and 2010 as the first publication based on the text of the late version from 1744) and Jörn Boysen (2010). In addition, Andreas Fischer presented a reconstruction to Ortus-Verlag in 2016 , which applies Bach's parody method to all missing parts and in this way not only wins arias and choruses, but also the recitatives. The templates come from Bach's cantatas, but the two known passions are not used. Fischer's version uses only the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. In 2018, another attempt at reconstruction by Alexander Grychtolik and Jordi Savall based on the version from 1744, which also exclusively uses music by Johann Sebastian Bach, was released as a live recording from Versailles .

In addition to these attempts at reconstruction, the modern supplement And I tell (1993) by Otfried Büsing , based on texts by Walter Jens (retransmission of the Gospel of St. Mark), represents a further possibility for dealing with the Bach fragment. In 2001 Matthias Heep composed eight in itself as a supplement closed movements for solos, choir and modern orchestra.

Individual evidence

  1. Tatjana Schablina, "Texts on Music" in St. Petersburg - Further Findings , in: Bach Yearbook 2009 , pp. 11–48.
  2. Examples on Youtube: On the first day of sweet bread (Boysen) and Aria: Pleasant Mordgeschrey (Boysen) .
  3. Ingobert Waltenberger: The Lost Passion - Live recording from March 26, 2018. In: Online-Merker, March 24, 2019, accessed on February 2, 2020.
  4. Music for the Passion Time (IV) - Bach's Markus Passion (BWV 247): Music unknown? (Part 2) ( Memento from July 15, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) on klassik-musica-classica.com

Web links