Goodman / Koopman St. Mark Passion
Jaime Jean
Koopman completely different works or are there any similarities?
(performance aside). They are both based on the "parody" technique (highly
questionable, considering that neither the SJP or SMP are parody works). Do
they base their reconstruction on the same arias and choruses from the
cantatas, or did each find a different set of cantata parts to parody?
Thanks in advance.
Jaime Jean
Mexico City
Sybrand Bakker
Jaime Jean <jj...@data.net.mx> wrote in message
news:sdd3vv...@corp.supernews.com...
It seems to be customary to use the Trauerode as a basis. Koopman doesn't
use the Trauerode.
He also doesn't 'borrow' recitatives, he composed them himself. Should at
least be very different from the van Veldhoven reconstruction. I presume the
Goodman one is actually by dr. Simon Heighes?
Regards,
Sybrand Bakker
Tom Hens
Sybrand Bakker <pos...@sybrandb.demon.nl> wrote...
> Just read an article about that.
> It seems to be customary to use the Trauerode as a basis. Koopman doesn't
> use the Trauerode.
> He also doesn't 'borrow' recitatives, he composed them himself. Should at
> least be very different from the van Veldhoven reconstruction. I presume
> the Goodman one is actually by dr. Simon Heighes?
Yes, and if you live in the Netherlands or Belgium it can be obtained for
almost no money at all in any Kruidvat store... (according to Diapason,
it was originally released on a label called Musica Oscura).
Van Veldhoven, according to Heighes, used recitatives from a passion by
Marco Giuseppe Peranda (1625-1675) "in order that the listener can clearly
distinguish where the real Bach begins and ends", which seems to be a
laudable aim in a reconstruction, even though it seems to me he could have
achieved the same effect with spoken recitation (as some other St. Mark
reconstructors have suggested).
Tom Hens
Jaime Jean <jj...@data.net.mx> wrote...
> Are the reconstructions of the St. Mark Passion by Roy Goodman and by Ton
> Koopman completely different works
Yes. See below.
> or are there any similarities?
> (performance aside). They are both based on the "parody" technique
> (highly questionable, considering that neither the SJP or SMP are parody
> works).
It's not all that questionable, IMO. It makes perfect sense for Bach to
have recycled music written for a one-off performance like the Trauer-Ode
into a work for regular use. The comparison wouldn't be the St. John or St.
Matthew but the Christmas Oratorio, which is also largely based on cantatas
composed for special occasions. And just like the Christmas Oratorio, one
might surmise that this wasn't a post-factum decision, but that Bach and
Picander planned it that way right from the start. Certainly Picander's
libretto for the St. Mark fits a lot of the music from the Trauer-Ode like
a glove. Such a highly consistent match in metrical structure, rhyming
scheme and affect between two works by one librettist who worked closely
with Bach is highly unlikely to have arisen purely by chance.
This is not exactly a new idea. From Simon Heighes's notes to his own St.
Mark reconstruction (the one recorded by Goodman):
"The realisation that the St. Mark Passion was probably a parody work came
as early as the 1860s when Wilhelm Rust, the editor of many volumes of the
Bach Gesellschaft, was examining Picander's text of the St. Mark and
noticed that several of the stanzas mirrored the metrical structure and
rhyme scheme of the main choruses and arias of Bach's Trauer-Ode (cantata
198) written in 1727. He concluded that Bach must have commissioned
Picander to write the text of the St. Mark Passion in such a way that the
chief numbers of Cantata 198 could be incorporated into the new Passion
with the minimum alteration."
> Do
> they base their reconstruction on the same arias and choruses from the
> cantatas, or did each find a different set of cantata parts to parody?
Simon Heighes takes the opening and closing choruses and three of the six
arias from the Trauer-Ode and one aria from BWV 54, which seems to be the
scholarly consensus (I can post a more complete list if anyone is
interested). There is less agreement on the source of the two remaining
arias. Heighes takes one from BWV 204 ("Himmlische Vergnuegsamkeit" becomes
"Angenehmes Mordgeschrei"), and one from the 1725 version of the St. John,
deleted in the 1730 version (the aria "Himmel reisse" becomes "Welt und
Himmel") -- since we know some music migrated between the St. John and the
St. Matthew, it doesn't seem unlikely a leftover from the St. John wandered
into the St. Mark. The recitatives and turba choruses are largely taken
from a Passion by Reinhard Keiser (1674-1739), which Bach is known to have
performed on at least two occasions (in 1713 and 1736). (Interestingly, the
words of Christ have the same string "halo" Bach adopted for the St.
Matthew.)
Based on a review of Koopman's version in Diapason, I'm not sure his effort
can even be described as an attempted reconstruction. He doesn't use the
Trauer-Ode at all, but instead imagined himself in the position of a pupil
of Bach in 1731 given the task of choosing appropriate music from Bach's
earlier cantatas for Picander's libretto. He composed the recitatives
himself (I don't know what he did with the turba choruses). The reviewer
for Diapason was more than puzzled by the fact that the CD booklet doesn't
even specify which cantata movements Koopman used. Presenting it as "St.
Mark Passion, BWV 247, ed. Ton Koopman" seems completely unjustified. Not
that I don't like Koopman in general, but to be honest, based on what I've
read I fail to see what the point of his exercise is.
Jaime Jean
Jaime
"Tom Hens" <tom....@iname.com.DELETE.THIS.BIT> wrote in message
news:8b6nm...@enews1.newsguy.com...
Zachary Uram
> > Mark Passion, BWV 247, ed. Ton Koopman" seems completely unjustified. Not
> > that I don't like Koopman in general, but to be honest, based on what I've
> > read I fail to see what the point of his exercise is.
To gain more notority and income I fear :( He should have called
it the "Koopman Invention"!
SDG,
zach
________________________________________________________
ur...@cmu.edu
"Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have faith." - John 20:29