J.S. Bach Markus-Passion
S. Bach wrote Passion settings not only for the gospels of St Matthew and St Luke, but for St Mark as well. But his Markus-Passion was lost shortly after his death in 1750, the autograph having been delivered by his son Carl Philip Emmanuel to his publisher in Leipzig, Johann Breitkopf. Not until after1850 when the centennial complete works publication of Bach’s music began, was its loss spotted. Seeing the Markus-Passion listed in an inventory of the composer’s music but not finding the score, Wilhelm Rust, – one of Bach’s successors at the Thomas Kirche in Leipzig and an editor of the first complete works of Bach – began a search for such a major work in the early 1870s.
Though discovery of the original Passion itself proved elusive and so still continues today, its unique instrumentation – including two gambas and two colascioni (theorbo-family lutes) – led Rust to suspect that the music for this Passion might be related to or perhaps recycled from an earlier work. Through his work he extablished that the Trauer-Ode, the funeral tombeau Bach composed in 1727 for his former employer in Köthen, Prince Leopold, was indeed its predecessor. The Trauer-Ode’s text is, however, brief by comparison to the Passion-text. But with an extant copy fo the original libretto to hand a search for arias matching the scansion of the Markus-Passion text began…. It has persisted now for a century and half!
My edition offers three beautiful and little-known arias to fill the empty places left by the more compact structure of the Trauer-Ode, along with a role for an actor as Evangelist. Over the past 20 years – as a work-in-progress – it has been broadcast in America by the celebrated British Shakespearean actor, Simon Russell Beale (in English) and performed in the Lucerne Festival by the late Bruno Ganz (in German). More recently it has been performed a number of times with Ulrich Noethen in Germany and in Norway with the Norwegian actor, Svein Tindberg. In 2025 Theatre Concert Works has launched a tour in the US in a first dramatic presentation directed by Bill Barclay with Shakespearean actor Joe Marcell in the title role. Its tour includes New York and Pittsburgh and the Oregon Bach Festival on the West Coast, along with performances in the UK at the Aldeburgh Festival and Edinburgh. The edition was published lin 2019 by Breitkopf & Härtel.
