Theresa von Bibra; Franziska Blomer; Christian Rohrbach; Hans Jorg Mammel; Matthias Horn; Matthias Vieweg; Capella Cathedralis Fulda; L'arpa festante; Franz-Peter Huber - Jacob Schuback: Brockes-Passion

Jesus, tortured and dying for the sins of the world: This is how the Hamburg librettist and senator Barthold Heinrich Brockes (1680-1747) titled his dramatic adaptation of the Passion narrative--a text so popular that it was set to music nearly a dozen times in Hamburg alone. Composers included Reinhard Keiser, Johann Mattheson, George Frideric Handel, and Georg Philipp Telemann, among others. The jurist and diplomat Jacob Schuback (1726-1784) also composed his version of this so-called Brockes-Passion. And one must not assume that he, the son of a highly respected family, was merely a dilettante in the art of music. What Schuback created around the age of 30 during his musical leisure hours is, in the truest sense of the word, a gripping work. Choruses, recitatives, and arias follow one another with an almost operatic intensity, while characters imbued with vivid reality come to life with striking immediacy. Unsurprisingly, this Passion acquires a more profound, secondary significance...