Interview, Richard Egarr on Handel's Brockes-Passion

As well known in his capacity as a conductor as he is at the keyboard, Richard Egarr has a slew of acclaimed recordings to his name - ranging from Bach's English Suites and Handel's Concerti Grossi to works rather further from the "mainstream" of early music, such as an all-star recording of Sullivan's HMS Pinafore in 2016. On Good Friday of last year, he directed a gripping account of Handel's visceral, often graphic Passion setting (known as the Brockes-Passion after its librettist Barthold Heinrich Brockes) at the Barbican to mark the tercentenary of the work's premiere. Comparable in scale to Messiah and often thought to have influenced Bach's St John Passion, the Brockes-Passion is no mere historical curiosity or precursor work, but a vivid and profound piece in its own right, with a decidedly theatrical feel that heightens the tensions of an already emotionally intense story. I spoke to Richard about his recording of this oft-neglected but immensely rewarding work, which was released in October on the Academy of Ancient Music's own label and is on the shortlist for next month's BBC Music Magazine Awards...

Brockes’ approach of humanising the Passion narrative and fleshing it out with additional characters creates more engaging personalities than traditional libretti drawn more closely from the Biblical accounts. Do you think this is partly why Handel’s setting is so vivid and in places visceral – was he consciously trying to bring the Passion closer to the immediacy of an opera?

I don’t think Handel was trying to make this passion into an ‘opera’. He was just responding naturally in the only way he could to such an extraordinary libretto. The fact that its content is so graphic, colourful and human would only speak more intensely to Handel the musician. How could he not respond in a brilliant way?

You comment in your notes on the influence Handel had on Bach, although the Bach Passions aren’t in quite the same vein as the Brockes-Passion. How much evidence can you see of Bach directly drawing on Handel’s model for inspiration in his own settings – are there specific moments where the connection is particularly clear?

There are clear instances of direct imitation by Bach. The ‘Eilt’ aria with the short chorus responses of “Wohin?” is lifted wholesale by Bach into his own St. John Passion from Handel’s version. The key is even the same. But it’s also the general form and even orchestration that Bach has inherited from Handel for the St. John in its original version. Of the two composers we would expect that Handel would be the musical thief not Bach, yet I know of several instances of Bach stealing ideas from Bach (not just for the case of the Brockes-Passion), and none the other way round.

Great choral works often tend to suffer in translation, or when the composer is setting a language that isn’t their mother tongue. Do you get any sense in the music of Handel being more at home with setting a German text than an English one such as the libretto for Messiah?

I think there’s no question that composing music to a text in one’s own native language must be more natural and comfortable. Handel’s is often criticised for setting English in a stilted and awkward manner, particularly some of the text underlay in Messiah. In his defence, that may be a historical anomaly to do with a slightly different manner of pronunciation, declamation and stress in Handel’s day compared to our own. It’s interesting if you listen to the extracts from our recording of the Jennens translations of the Brockes text and the way he sets them. They are just as stilted as those by Handel. I think this kind of thing is worthy of further investigation.

Where other oratorios and passions entered the regular repertoire in Britain and became staples of the choral-society scene, the Brockes-Passion notably failed to do so. What do you think prevented this work from being as widely-performed as other comparable ones?

Simply that it would be totally unusual to expect an English audience to accept a text of a ‘sacred’ work to be in anything other than English, Latin and Italian. The religious traditions of England and Germany at that time don’t allow for an acceptable crossover. Also the sensibilities of the English wouldn’t possibly allow for uncensored translation of Brockes’s vivid and gory text. Jennens tried but couldn’t bring himself to carry it out.

Handel’s genius is his ability expressing the human condition in music. With his setting of the Brockes Passion he surpasses himself. I am convinced it will (and should) become accepted as one of his great masterpieces. I hope that our efforts in this recording, our new edition and our research will go some way to reawaken the music world to this wonderful creation.