Passions (Bach)

As Thomaskantor, Johann Sebastian Bach provided Passion music for Good Friday services in Leipzig.

According to his "Nekrolog", the 1754 obituary written by Johann Friedrich Agricola and the composer's son Carl Philipp Emanuel, Bach wrote "five Passions, of which one is for double chorus".

Apart from the German translation of parts of the Gospel of St John and several Lutheran chorales, it used text of the Brockes Passion for its arias.

Picander's libretto for the Passion was once thought to have been destroyed in the bombing of Dresden in World War II, but the recovered copy seems to show that the work was a parody of music from the so-called Trauer-Ode, Laß, Fürstin, laß noch einen Strahl, BWV 198, and that some choruses were used also in the Christmas Oratorio.

[6] In the early 1710s Bach staged Jesus Christus ist um unsrer Missetat willen verwundet, a St Mark Passion, in Weimar.

[8][10] The Passion text included in Picander's Sammlung Erbaulicher Gedanken was published around the time (or shortly before) Bach started his collaboration with this librettist.

As such the Passion libretto was classified among the works spuriously attributed to Bach in the Anhang (Appendix) of the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, as BWV Anh.

[11] Wer ist der, so von Edom kömmt, a pasticcio Passion oratorio possibly compiled by Bach's son-in-law Johann Christoph Altnickol, contains a few movements attributed to Bach, including the arioso for bass BWV 1088, and Der Gerechte kömmt um (an arrangement of a SSATB motet attributed to Johann Kuhnau).

[12] Bach performed Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel's Die leidende und am Creutz sterbende Liebe Jesu on Good Friday of 1734.

This Passion oratorio, composed for Gotha in 1720, is also known after the incipit of its opening chorus, a setting of Paul Gerhardt's "Ein Lämmlein geht und trägt die Schuld".

Bach arranged one of its arias, "Dein Kreuz, o Bräutgam meiner Seelen", as Bekennen will ich seinen Namen, BWV 200.

He performed Graun's Ein Lämmlein geht und trägt die Schuld sometime in the 1730s-1740s, and even had a copy of the score in his library.

In addition to Telemann's Brockes Passion, there is evidence that Bach performed the original (Hamburg) version of his ''Seliges Erwägen des Leidens und Sterbens Jesu Christi'' TWV 5:2a between 1732 and 1735.

Bach's Passions are set for an orchestra with strings, woodwind instruments such as oboes and flutes, and a continuo including organ.