Even as a teenager he designed his own Baroque churches, says Alexander Grychtolik and refers to neat drawings that still hang on the wall in his apartment today. Now the 42-year-old conductor, harpsichordist and musicologist, who is a lecturer at the music academies in Frankfurt and Weimar and is actually also a trained architect, has done something almost comparable by designing a full-length vocal work of the Baroque period almost architecturally: His Passion Oratorio based on a text by Johann Sebastian Bach's most important lyricist Christian Friedrich Henrici alias Picander comes with selected music by Bach on Saturday, 1 April, in the series of Frankfurt Bach Concertos at the Alte Oper – with seven vocal soloists, choir and the Ensemble Il Gardellino under Grychtolik's direction.

Guido Holze

Editor at the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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As a Baroque expert, Grychtolik has already reconstructed several vocal works by Bach, including a late version of the lost St. Mark Passion, which was only documented in 2009. Only the St. Matthew Passion BWV 244 and the St. John Passion BWV 245 have survived in their entirety by the Leipzig Thomaskantor. However, in 1754, four years after Bach's death, Bach's son Carl Philipp Emanuel and his pupil Johann Friedrich Agricola mention "Five Passes" in the catalogue raisonné of their necrology. Since then, much research and speculation has been done about the three lost works.

It is important to know that the sheer number is surprisingly small for the time: Bach's diligent contemporary Georg Philipp Telemann wrote 46 Passions. And Bach, too, as cantor, was required to constantly compose new works for Sundays and holidays. Older pieces were reluctant to be performed several times.

Bach was under pressure to produce

So it is likely that Bach was always on the lookout for text templates, especially in his first years as Thomaskantor due to the production compulsion. In Picander he found a suitable poet in Leipzig and set texts to music from his extensive "Sammlung erbaulicher Gedancken", freshly published in 1725. Thus, the "Erbauliche Gedancken auf den Grünen Donnerstag and Charfreytag über den Leidenden Jesum / In einem Oratorio" contained therein were soon targeted by research: as a text possibly set to music by Bach, to which the music could have been lost.

Even Bach's biographer Philipp Spitta, a progenitor of modern musicology in the 19th century, printed the text. The oratorio was found as a mere text under BWV Anh. III 169 even found its way into the Bach List of Works, especially since, among other things, the final chorus "Wir setzen uns bey deinen Grabe nieder" was only slightly altered as "Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder" (We sit down with tears) found its way into the St. Matthew Passion.

Parallels to the Easter Oratorio

Grychtolik is of the opinion that it could be "an abandoned passion project of the Thomaskantor from the year 1725". In contrast to Bach's two existing Passions, the oratorio is not literally based on the Gospel text, but offers in verse form "a free poetic summary" of the Passion of Christ, comparable to the Brockes Passion, which was often set to music in the Baroque period, including by Handel and Telemann.

In terms of text, Bach's Easter Oratorio BWV 249 fits very well "into the same pot" as Picander's Passion Oratorio, explains Grychtolik. Thus, in both cases, John and Peter have their say, and the soul also plays a special role. For the Easter Oratorio, Picander is also suspected to be the lyricist. It would fit Bach's way of working if he had cyclically combined the story of suffering and resurrection.

In his "artistic experiment", which is supposed to bear traits of a scientific reconstruction, Grychtolik now had the difficult task of finding musically suitable movements in Bach's approximately 200 surviving cantatas and underpinning the texts of the vocal lines as closely as possible to the music-rhetorical figures. This corresponds to the "parody process" customary in the Baroque, a kind of musical recycling.

Only for the final chorus and an aria Grychtolik could easily make use of the St. Matthew Passion. He had to find other things, such as three arias each for the most important parts, the soul, which he assigned to an alto voice, and Peter, who is sung by a bass according to tradition. Grychtolik recomposed the unadorned recitatives in Bach's style.

The world premiere of the Passion Oratorio begins at the Alte Oper on Saturday, April 1, at 20 pm.