Handel's Transcendent Realism

George Frideric Handel: Brockes-Passion

"Never before had naturalism transfigured itself by such a conception and execution. Never before had a painter so charnally envisaged divinity nor so brutally dipped his brush into the wounds and running sores and bleeding nail holes of the Saviour. Grünewald had passed all measure. He was the most uncompromising of realists, but his morgue Redeemer, his sewer Deity, let the observer know that realism could be truly transcendent. A divine light played about that ulcerated head, a superhuman expression illuminated the fermenting skin of the epileptic features. This crucified corpse was a very God, and, without aureole, without nimbus, with none of the stock accoutrements except the blood-sprinkled crown of thorns, Jesus appeared in His celestial super-essence, between the stunned, grief-torn Virgin and a Saint John whose calcined eyes were beyond the shedding of tears." 

- J. K. Huysmans, on Matthias Grünewald's Crucifixion at Cassel, from the first chapter of his novel Là-Bas

Even today Matthias Grünewald's Large Crucifixion has the power to shock us. The work was painted in 1523-24 (it's now in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe), and having looked at it through the intense lens of J. K. Huysmans, one realizes that one cannot understand life without looking closely, without flinching, at pain and suffering. And it's especially those rare artists like Grünewald that help us to a deeper understanding through their transcendent art.

Two hundred years later, in 1712,  Barthold Heinrich Brockes published a passion libretto nearly as naturalistic and graphic as Grünewald's painting. Coming as it did in the midst of the Enlightenment, it was perhaps even more shocking. Many of the critics found it objectionable, or at the least in poor taste. "Viewer discretion is advised", or the 18th Century equivalent. But it was a big hit with three great artists who understood its emotional power, and were anxious to bring their best music to the task. Georg Philipp Telemann set the Passion in 1716, Georg Frideric Handel wrote his some time before 1719, and Johann Sebastian Bach used a number of Brockes' texts in his St. John Passion of 1727. Bach also performed the Telemann and Handel Passions in Leipzig.

This recording by the Academy of Ancient Music, under Richard Egarr, is intensely emotional and darkly coloured by pain and suffering. It provides an almost cinematic experience; I'm thinking of here of artists such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Francis Ford Coppola and Carl Theodor Dreyer. For that, we can thank Egarr, his choir, solo singers and instrumentalists, and the sound engineers of AAM's own label, but also Handel and Brockes.

This is also a major scholarly release, based on a new edition of the work. The third disc provides alternative readings, but you needn't worry about untangling versions. Handel's endless invention provides passionate arguments, profound sorrow and pity, and redemptive uplift that always somehow entertains, as only the greatest of opera composers - Mozart, Verdi, Wagner - can. And to do all this while working in the bailiwick of the greatest of Passion composers, J. S. Bach,  well, that's really some accomplishment!



This album will be released on October 4, 2019.