Customer Reviews

Gottfried Heintich Stölzel: Brockes Passion

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
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I am writing this review because the two other reviews on the Amazon site (at the time of writing) in my view underestimate the power and beauty of Stölzel's great Passion. It is not a four star work. It is five stars and the performance by Ludger Remy and his singers and players are also five stars. The astonishing opening of this passion, although quite brief, is as electrifying as the great and much longer opening of J S Bach's St John Passion. It is simply one of the great openings in the entire classical music repertoire.

Stölzel was born five years after J S Bach, and in fact was better known and more successful during his lifetime. His music is harsher and tougher than Handel and Telemann, in which respect he resembles J S Bach. But unlike J S Bach, who had a son, C P E Bach, also a great composer and much more famous in his day than J S, and who preserved the memory of his father, there was no one who actively preserved the memory of Stölzel. So Stölzel was forgotten for 250 years and all 18 of his operas are irretrievably lost (as far as we know).

I agree with one of the Amazon reviewers in his complaints about the text. The text of the Brockes Passion was fashionable in its era, having also been set by Handel (in a version nowhere near as striking as Stölzel's) but it does pile on the misery, and the text of passions that are more closely based on the New Testament are more restrained. However you should enjoy these two discs, which are a bargain at the Amazon price, for the marvelous music. All of the singers are good, and the Telemann-Kammerorchestra Michaelstein gives a first rate period performance - very gutsy. But listen in particular to Dorothee Mields, her voice has an unearthly plangency. Remy who has been the champion of Stölzel's music writes in the notes to the CD, that he regards this mighty passion "as one of the most moving and genuinely human pieces of music I have... had the good fortune to hear..." Enough said.

From the opening chorus, you are immediately taken away by the beauty of this passion. The recitatives are superb and move brisquely. Overall, the music is very heartfelt and the intersperion of recitative, arias, chorales, and turbae choruses is splendid. However, don't expect Bach-like longer, contemplative arias- most arias are only about 2 minutes and many are not da capo. Nonetheless, almost every aria is sublime. Wonderful recording of an unjustly neglected work and composer

It is clear that the conductor of this 1725 work, Ludger Remy, considers this short Passion a revelation, "philosophizing is nothing other than a preparation for death" (de Montaigne). Remy has disinterred it from Stoelzel's lifetime corpus of seven passions and 900(!) cantatas and premiered it here. This passion is based on a once-famous original (non-liturgical) text by the Hamburg poet and burger B. H. Brockes. As its title states, it is strongly, nay graphically, focused on the "Suffering and Death of Jesus." The text emphasizes bloody rites of whipping, thorning, beating, and crucifying, and bloody feelings about the blood sacrifice of Jesus: "my entrails screech on hot coals" (Peter), "rend my flesh, crush my bones...the world is fit for flames" (Judas). The point of this Pietistic text and frightful imagery may have been to so thoroughly terrify the congregation that only Jesus could truly rescue them, for all else collapses in utter betrayal and failure.

The recording consists of 62 tracked sections, usually aria or recitative with a gradual increase in the frequency of choruses as the angry lamentations peak. While there is a strong musical sensitivity to the text, it is of its period and one will not hear the chromatic agony of a late Romantic work, for which the intimately apocalyptic text seems to cry out. (I have not heard other composer's versions of this text, like Händel's.) Over the horrendous events described in the text the music glides with light textures due to the small numbers of participants; the scale is personal and in-your-face throughout. Listening to this music before and then after following the text is a different experience. The German text is somewhat unusual, its strokes and equal-signs following 1725 text conventions rather than indicating something specifically musical. The German text is given with English translation, with the background notes on Stoelzel in French as well. The only illustrations in the 84 p. booklet are of the conductor and the title page in Gothic. I am having trouble liking the music under the fierce onslaught of the gross and accusatory tone of the text ("Do you foam, you scum of the world?" CD2:16).