Händel: Brockes-Passion
programme notes by Frits de Haan
In the case of Handel's Brockes-Passion, we have to make do without the composer's manuscript. But we do have copies. None other than Johann Sebastian Bach had one, partly produced by himself. The fact that he performed parts of it shows how much the great Thomas Cantor appreciated this passion music by Georg Friedrich Handel.
Despite this appreciation, Handel's Brockes Passion has always remained a lesser-known score.
An unknown 'fifth evangelist'
But who is this unknown fifth evangelist? We know that Barthold H(e)inrich Brockes lived from 1680 to 1747. He grew up in a well-to-do environment and became a lawyer, after studies in Leiden, among other places. Blessed with a knack for languages, he spent time to time abroad on diplomatic missions; from 1720 he was a senator in Hamburg.
Brockes' credo? Poetry should not be an empty play on words, but rather something that could also serve to teach people: 'Thus I wrote the first Passion oratorio, which was later translated into several languages. I had it solemnly performed in my house.' And indeed: in 1712 Brockes published his Passion, entitled Der für die Sünde der Welt gemarterte und sterbende Jesus. It was Reinhard Keiser who was the first to set this text to music. Indeed, the performance mentioned by Brockes took place in his house. It must have been quite crowded: more than five hundred people attended.
With this performance, Brockes and Keiser offered the Hamburgers during Passion time (when the Opera was closed), an 'erlaubte Belustigung', while at the same time it also led to 'Erbauung'. And yes, this made a big impression; the text was reprinted no less than 30 times in the next 15 years. After the first performance in 1712, the author had a revision ready just a year later. This second edition was followed by numerous further revisions, and a translation into Swedish even appeared.
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Pietism
Not only did Brockes' Passion respond to the more theatrical needs of Hamburg's population (and provide income for unemployed opera singers at this time), but he also aligned with Pietism with his Passion text. Not so much orthodoxy was central; rather, pietists focused on the believer's personal relationship with Scripture.
It was Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705) who, in his Pia desideria (1675), had sought to combine the Lutheran emphasis on the Bible with the centrality of a personal Christian life. Of course, Spener was not the first to promote such ideas; even the Modern Devotion of Geert Grote (1340-1384) already advocated a personal religious life dedicated to Christ.
In music, this gave rise to the genre called passion oratorio, as a counterpart to oratorio passion. Even if the dividing line cannot be drawn sharply, one can say that oratorio-passion adhered more strictly to the gospels, while the passion oratorio focused a bit more on the emotional response of the believer, could be more theatrical.
Different statements
Brockes was undoubtedly well versed in the music world. He knew Georg Friedrich Handel, maintained contacts with Georg Philipp Telemann (Brockes lobbied for Telemann's appointment in Hamburg) and was thus also friends with opera composer Reinhard Keiser.
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Numerous musicians were inspired by Brockes' text. Among them we find Telemann, who had already performed his setting of the Brockes-Passion in Frankfurt am Main in 1716. Johann Mattheson, Director Musices at Hamburg Cathedral, programme his own setting there on Palm Sunday 1718.
Among all the other composers who set the Brockes-Passion to music we find Johann Friedrich Fasch (1722-23), Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (1725), Johann Balthasar Christian Freislich, Jacob Schuback and Johann Caspar Bachofen (all three in their fifties).
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Apply for Handel in Hamburg?
Georg Friedrich Handel set over a hundred texts from Brockes' voluminous libretto to music. His version had its first performance on 23 March 1719, in Hamburg. He exploited the dramatic possibilities of Brockes' text extensively, for instance in arias by the Daughter Zion; her raging aria 'Was Bärentatzen' would not be out of place in an opera.
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That Handel used a German libretto is remarkable, by the way, because he was in England at the time and obviously had less need for a German-language passion there. The exact dating of the music is unclear: Johann Mattheson recounts how Handel wrote from London in 1716 a rendition of Brock's text 'in einer ungemein enggeschriebenen Partitur auf der Post hieher geschickt'. Was it an application for a Hamburg post? To the Kantorat there, in conjunction with the Direktion der Gänsemarkt-Oper? At least that is what Mattheson suggests in his 1740 Grundlage einer Ehren=Pforte.
Be that as it may, it seems that Mattheson was the driving force behind the settings of Brockes' text. Due to its enthusiastic reception, its settings became a recurring phenomenon: in the years 1719, 1720, 1721 and 1723, Mattheson even organised a kind of 'Brockes festival' in which he programme the renditions of Keiser, Telemann, himself and thus Handel on successive days.
Comments
The large number of composers who ventured into Brockes' text demonstrates its great popularity. Yet not everyone was equally positive about the results: 'Brockes's work is tasteless and pointless, it is bulging with exaggerated or unworthy imagery, it has, however, a great sensual power that imposes itself as a theatrical effect and thus overwhelms the listener,' judged Handel publisher Friedrich Chrysander a century after Handel's setting.
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Nineteenth-century English musicologist Richard Alexander Streatfeild found the passion one of Handel's least satisfying works, as it gives the impression of someone working with uncomfortable material. Much later, in 1980, Winton Dean writes in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians that Handel's commentary arias are at times unconvincing, even if the setting of the dramatic episodes is praised.
According to Dean, Handel comes closest to challenging Bach in this work, but retreats "little comfortably". On the other hand, Handel himself reused some musical passages in Esther, Deborah, Athalia and a version of Acis and Galathea, while Bach put a Passions-Pasticcio on the lectern in 1747 that included both music from a Markus-Passion attributed to Reinhard Keiser and also seven arias from Handel's Brockes-Passion.
Edition
Since no manuscript by Handel has survived, we have to rely on other copies that differ quite a bit from each other - a chore for musicologists and musicians. In 2008, as part of the Stuttgarter Händel-Ausgaben Urtext, an edition edited by German musicologist Andreas Traub was published. It is based primarily on the copy made by Johann Sebastian Bach and forms the basis for this afternoon's concert.
The influence that Handel's Brockes-Passion exerted on Bach is, incidentally, audible in the aria 'Eilt, ihr angefochtnen Seelen'. For Bach, the way Handel has the Gläubige Seele sing the interjections 'Wohin' in it formed a grateful inspiration when he put the same text in the St John Passion some years later.
Frits de Haen
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