RICHARD OSBORNE
HANDEL’S BROCKES PASSION
Easter approaches; let us keep the feast.
Not that it was kept last year, when churches were closed for the first time since 1208. A man purporting to be the Archbishop of Canterbury addressed the nation from his kitchen. And no Passion music was heard live in the land.
A year on, the Bach Choir is advertising tickets for Elgar’s Gerontius in June, but the annual Eastertide performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion has gone by the board for a second successive year, and may do for a third if state-sponsored risk aversion remains the order of the day.
There is always the gramophone, of course. The great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter would invite friends to his Moscow apartment on Good Friday to hear Bach’s St Matthew Passion.
He favoured the Klemperer recording – a fine choice, though I’ve occasionally opted for a wonderful 1958 Leith Hill Festival performance conducted by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Sung in English, it has about it something of that sense of devotion and spiritual calm the Leipzig Lutherans must have experienced at the time of the work’s creation.
This year, however, I shall be turning to a revelatory recording from Richard Egarr and the Academy of Ancient Music of Handel’s Brockes Passion.
Composed six years after Handel took up permanent residence in England, this astonishing piece has been little noticed by his adopted countrymen for nigh on 300 years.
The commission came from an old university friend, the well-heeled Hamburg merchant, international man of letters and amateur poet Barthold Brockes, whose oratorio text Jesus, martyred and dying for the sins of the world was already winning a powerful following among anti-pietist Lutherans.
Unlike a traditional Passion text, in which a verbatim Gospel narrative is filled out with brief crowd scenes, chorales and contemplative arias, that of the Brockes Passion is a freewheeling, theatrical paraphrase, designed, like some latter-day news channel, to terrify the punters and lure them in.
Bach uses verses by Brockes in his St John Passion, but his Leipzig congregations would have been appalled by Brockes’s commissioning competitive settings (four, including Handel’s) for the 1719 Easter season. ‘Ah, Hamburg!’ they would have murmured; Hamburg being a city where crowds flocked to hear celebrated composers locking horns, much as they do nowadays to witness the jousting of top-flight footballers.
Bach admired Handel’s setting, stole bits from it and performed it in Leipzig in 1746. Others, however, can never forgive the text. ‘Explicit, garish, saccharine’ are some of the words used by John Eliot Gardiner in his exuberant Bach volume, Music in the Castle of Heaven (Allen Lane, 2013).
Still, it’s difficult to see how one avoids matters bloody, garish and explicit –
even occasionally sado-masochistic – when unfolding so dreadful a tale, not least in the scenes of scourging and crucifixion, which people of an age long before our own would have known at first hand.
Consider George Herbert: he may be a better poet than Brockes, but meditations such as The Agonie and The Crosse make for no less easy reading.
Brockes provides a swift-moving text: 105 numbers in 150 minutes in Handel’s setting. We need to adjust to his decision to give so much of the story-telling and spiritual reflection to the anonymous-sounding Daughter of Zion, one of the most astonishing roles in baroque oratorio, superbly realised on the AAM recording by soprano Elizabeth Watts.
Yet there are things here – her aria after Judas’s suicide, ‘You squander God’s grace’ – that do in two minutes what some in Messiah do in six.
Brockes’s humanising of the story sits well with Handel’s operatic genius. The scenes of Peter’s denial and remorse are as strong as any in Passion music. And the portrayal of Jesus is more than usually naturalistic. The setting even includes a duet with his mother before the crucifixion. Very Netflix, but touchingly done.
Handel scores the piece for strings, continuo and a mob of oboes and bassoons – superb in the AAM performance – which both terrify and console.
The beautifully designed and endlessly informative 220-page hardback book includes a bonus CD on which we hear sections of the Brockes Passion for which the creator of the text of Messiah, Charles Jennens, another well-heeled man of faith and literary ambition, produced some preliminary translations.
It was an odd exercise, given that there was no chance of the piece’s being performed in England, even in translation. Was this the cue Jennens needed to make his own ‘scripture text’, an anthology entitled Messiah, which he then invited his friend to set, causing the world’s best-loved oratorio to be sung in English?
Perhaps God is an Englishman after all.