Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750): German composer of the Baroque era, the most celebrated member of a large family of north German musicians. Although he was admired by his contemporaries primarily as an outstanding harpsichordist, organist, and expert on organ building, Bach is now generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time and is celebrated as the creator of the Brandenburg Concertos, The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Mass in B Minor, and numerous other masterpieces of church and instrumental music. The Bach family already counted several composers when Johann Sebastian was born as the last child of a city musician in Eisenach. He was orphaned at the age of 10, and lived for five years with his eldest brother Johann Christoph, who was an organist, after which he continued his musical education in Lüneburg. From 1703 he was working as a musician for Protestant churches in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen and, for longer stretches of time, at courts in Weimar, where he expanded his organ repertory, and Köthen, where he was mostly engaged with chamber music. From 1723 he was employed as cantor at St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig. There he composed music for the Lutheran churches of the city, and for its university’s student ensemble Collegium Musicum. From 1726 he published some of his keyboard and organ music. In the last decades of his life he reworked and extended many of his earlier compositions. He died of complications after eye surgery in 1750 at the age of 65.
The St John Passion is the earlier of the surviving Passions by Bach. It was written during his first year as director of church music in Leipzig and was first performed on April 7, 1724, at Good Friday Vespers at the St. Nicholas Church. The structure of the work falls in two halves, intended to flank a sermon. The anonymous libretto draws on existing works (notably by Barthold Heinrich Brockes) and is compiled from recitatives and choruses narrating the Passion of Christ as told in the Gospel of John, ariosos and arias reflecting on the action, and chorales using hymn tunes and texts familiar to a congregation of Bach’s contemporaries. Compared with the St Matthew Passion, the St John Passion has been described as more extravagant, with an expressive immediacy, at times more unbridled and less “finished”.The work is most often heard today in the 1739–1749 version (never performed during Bach’s lifetime). Bach first performed the oratorio in 1724 and revised it in 1725, 1732, and 1749, adding several numbers. “O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde groß”, a 1725 replacement for the opening chorus, found a new home in the 1736 St Matthew Passion but several arias from the revisions are found only in the appendices to modern editions.
Soloists: Brittany Smith, Sanele Bambatha, Siyabonga Maqungo, Aubrey Lodewyk, Bongani Mthombeni.
Conducted by Richard Cock.
Bach Johannes Passion St John Passion BWV 245 John Eliot Gardiner – YouTube
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