Handel: Brockes Passion
programme notes by Frits de Haen
In the case of Handel’s Brockes Passion, we have to make do without a manuscript by the composer. But we do have copies. None other than Johann Sebastian Bach owned one, part of which he had copied out by hand himself. The fact that he performed sections of it shows just how highly the great Thomaskantor regarded 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 wealthy family and became a lawyer, having studied at Leiden, amongst other places. Blessed with a gift for languages, he spent time abroad from time to time on diplomatic missions; from 1720 onwards, he served as a senator in Hamburg.
Brockes’s credo? Poetry should not be an empty play on words, but rather something that could also serve as a lesson to people: ‘Thus I wrote the first Passion oratorio, which was subsequently translated into various languages. I had it performed in a solemn ceremony at my home.’ 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. The performance mentioned by Brockes did indeed take place at his home. It must have been quite a spectacle: more than five hundred people were in attendance.
With this performance, Brockes and Keiser offered the people of Hamburg an ‘erlaubte Belustigung’ (permitted entertainment) during Passiontide (when the Opera was closed), whilst at the same time it also led to ‘Erbauung’ (edification). And indeed, it made a great impression; the text was reprinted no fewer than thirty times over the next fifteen years. Following the first performance in 1712, the author had a revised version ready just one year later. This second edition was followed by numerous further revisions, and a Swedish translation was even published.
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Pietism
Not only did Brockes’ *Passion* cater to the more theatrical tastes of the people of Hamburg (and provide an income for opera singers who were unemployed at the time), but his Passion libretto also aligned with Pietism. It was not so much orthodoxy that took centre stage; 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 prioritisation of a personal Christian life. Of course, Spener was not the first to promote such ideas; Geert Grote’s (1340–1384) ‘Modern Devotion’ had also already advocated a personal religious life devoted to Christ.
In music, this gave rise to the genre known as the Passion oratorio, as a counterpart to the oratorio Passion. Although the distinction is not entirely clear-cut, it could be said that the oratorio-passion adhered more strictly to the Gospels, whilst the Passion oratorio focused somewhat more on the believer’s emotional response and could be more theatrical.
Various interpretations
Brockes was certainly well connected in the world of music. He knew Georg Friedrich Handel, was in contact with Georg Philipp Telemann (Brockes had lobbied for Telemann’s appointment in Hamburg) and was therefore also friends with the opera composer Reinhard Keiser.
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Numerous musicians drew inspiration from Brockes’ text. Among them was Telemann, who had already performed his setting of the Brockes Passion in Frankfurt am Main in 1716. Johann Mattheson, Director of Music at Hamburg Cathedral, programmed his own musical setting there on Palm Sunday 1718.
Among the other composers who set the Brockes Passion to music were Johann Friedrich Fasch (1722–23), Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (1725), Johann Balthasar Christian Freislich, Jacob Schuback and Johann Caspar Bachofen (all three in the 1750s).
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Job application for Händel in Hamburg?
Georg Friedrich Handel set more than a hundred texts from Brockes’ extensive libretto to music. His version was first performed on 23 March 1719 in Hamburg. He made extensive use of the dramatic potential of Brockes’ text, for example in the arias of the Daughter of Zion; her rage aria ‘Was Bärentatzen’ would not be out of place in an opera.
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It is, incidentally, remarkable that Handel used a German libretto, as he was in England at the time and naturally had less need for a German-language Passion there. There is some uncertainty regarding the exact dating of the music: Johann Mattheson recounts how, in 1716, Handel sent a musical setting of Brockes’ text from London ‘in an extremely tightly written score by post’. Was this an application for a post in Hamburg? For the cantor’s post there, in conjunction with the directorship of the Gänsemarkt Opera? At least, that is what Mattheson suggests in his *Grundlage einer Ehren=Pforte* from 1740.
Be that as it may, it seems that Mattheson was the driving force behind the musical settings of Brockes’ text. Owing to their enthusiastic reception, these settings became a recurring phenomenon: in the years 1719, 1720, 1721 and 1723, Mattheson even organised a sort of ‘Brockes festival’ in which he programmed performances by Keiser, Telemann, himself and, consequently, Handel on consecutive days.
Comments
The large number of composers who set Brockes’ text to music is testament to its great popularity. Yet not everyone was equally positive about the results: ‘Brockes’ work is tasteless and meaningless; it is brimming with exaggerated or unworthy imagery; yet it possesses a great sensual power which imposes itself like a theatrical effect and thus overwhelms the listener’, judged Handel’s publisher Friedrich Chrysander a century after Handel’s setting.
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The nineteenth-century English musicologist Richard Alexander Streatfeild considered the oratorio to be one of Handel’s least satisfying works, as it gives the impression of someone working with awkward material. Much later, in 1980, Winton Dean wrote in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians that Handel’s commentary arias are at times unconvincing, even though the setting of the dramatic episodes is praised.
According to Dean, it is in this work that Handel comes closest to challenging Bach, but he retreats ‘somewhat uneasily’. On the other hand, Handel himself reused some musical passages in *Esther*, *Deborah*, Athalia and a version of Acis and Galathea, whilst in 1747 Bach placed a Passion pasticcio on the music stands containing both music from a St Mark Passion attributed to Reinhard Keiser and seven arias from Handel’s Brockes Passion.
Edition
As no autograph score by Handel has survived, we must rely on other copies which differ considerably from one another – a real challenge for musicologists and musicians. In 2008, as part of the Stuttgart Handel Urtext Editions, an edition edited by the German musicologist Andreas Traub was published. This is based primarily on the copy made by Johann Sebastian Bach and forms the basis for this afternoon’s concert.
Incidentally, the influence that Handel’s Brockes Passion exerted on Bach can be heard in the aria ‘Eilt, ihr angefochtnen Seelen’. For Bach, the way in which Handel had the ‘Gläubige Seele’ sing the interjections ‘Wohin’ in that piece proved a rich source of inspiration when, a few years later, he set the same text in the St John Passion.
Frits de Haen
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