John Butt on Bach's elusive St Mark Passion (and theatrical Handel)

Staged and semi-staged performances of sacred oratorios aren't that rare - both the St John Passion and St Matthew Passion of JS Bach have been adapted for the stage - but the St Mark poses a unique challenge. Incomplete and requiring reconstruction, it offers both obstacles and opportunities.

A new edition by Malcolm Bruno, that deliberately leaves gaps rather than artificially filling them with pasticcio, gives space for a more intimate, almost passion-play-like approach, with actors on an equal footing with musicians.

And it's this version that John Butt and his Dunedin Consort are bringing to Scotland's Lammermuir Festival in a couple of weeks' time (link to book tickets below) - so what better time to catch up with John and find out more...?

You’re bringing Bill Barclay’s staged version of Bach’s St Mark Passion to Lammermuir later in September - where did this idea first come from?

I know the man who made the musical edition we're using very well - Malcolm Bruno. It's not the first edition by any means, but it's one of the ones that's most honest to what survives. Malcolm wanted to find a good way of doing this, and what he planned was that anything that is missing from the Bach version (since we don't have the music) could be said, and done dramatically or simply read out. So that was the starting point - it's inherent to the way Malcolm's edition works. I'm not quite sure how the connections were made with Bill Barclay and so on, but they've done it with a group in the US and they're doing it with us in Europe. It's become a thing - it's grown a leg or a wheel or two and is proving, I think, to be very, very moving as a short, dramatic presentation of the St Mark Passion story.

There’s a big can of worms around reconstructing this work - what’s the starting-point for Malcolm Bruno’s version? It seems to be a deliberate reimagining, rather than trying to faithfully recapture an original that’s been lost?

So, we have the libretto of 1731, but there's no music with it. We can see from the structure of the text that it's been modelled partly on the text for the Trauer-Ode from a couple of years earlier, which was for the commemoration of the death of the Electress of Saxony. For Bach it was a way of reusing some absolutely wonderful music and repurposing it for the Passion text.

We're fairly confident that at least those movements - about nine or ten of them - were used by Bach, because we can tell that the librettist has modelled the text exactly with the same sort of rhyming schemes and so on. There are one or two other things in the text which tie in with other pieces of Bach that we know. That's a slightly less certain connection, but Malcolm has provided another three or four pieces which fit those texts - these might or might not have actually been used by Bach.

Then all that remains for Malcolm - who obviously isn't going to write any recitatives or the remaining missing arias - is to include some of the chorales. We have Bach's harmonisations of the chorales that we can see in the libretto; these might not be identical to the ones that he used, but at least they're Bach.

So in other words what it gives you is a fairly honest impression of the torso of the piece, with the onus on the user to find ways of making it work as a performance or as a drama or however they want to do it. In this performance we're not going for a particularly elaborate staging, but a reasonably complex one, based on the singers and narrator Joseph Marcell. It makes a very short, sharp but also sweet account. Quite a powerful impression, I think.

I remember there was a version that came out a little while ago from Jordi Savall, using the recitatives from the St Matthew...?

Yes, and longer ago Ton Koopman did one where he'd written his own recits; Andor Gomme did one where he took the music from Keiser's so-called Mark Passion (which we know Bach performed) and used those bits to fill in the missing sections.

To my mind none of these really is satisfactory, because they try to make something complete that isn't complete. It might be that one day we have a score suddenly appear - you never know, these things do happen - but what makes this version particularly attractive to me is that it's not ashamed of its incompleteness, and it's our responsibility as the performers and the actor (or actors) to make it work.

The thing that I found surprising about it is that it does work very well.

It almost reminds me of the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer, making a deliberate feature of the fact that it was broken.

Yes, it's like that. Nothing like the other Bach Passions - it doesn't have the continuous music, the recitative - but it does have a musical and emotional narrative through the arias and choruses. It's not pretending to be the full Passion.

Speaking of the original - do we know what happened to it? CPE Bach supposedly handed the score over to Bach’s publisher, but later when they came to catalogue all his works, it was just… gone. Do you think it might still be out there somewhere?

Well. There was a rumour that somebody had seen it just before the Second World War, but from what I understand that was somewhat mistaken. So I don't think there's any actual record of it beyond the mid-18th century. That's not to say that it might not appear; one of the things that happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall was that many things were discovered in Eastern Europe - Germany, Poland, all the way through to Russia - many, many archives revealed things by Bach that we didn't believe could have travelled so far. And in fact that's where we find many of the libretti, particularly in St Petersburg.

So if the situation - which has got far worse in recent years - improves, and people start doing archival work eastwards again, particularly in Russia and Ukraine, then it might well be that we find something. Who knows?

It’s a pretty distant third among the Bach Passions, at least in terms of familiarity. For people who haven’t come across the work before - what’s it like, what should they expect, and how does it compare to the Matthew and the John?

I wouldn't even compare it to those two - it's more like a passion play with music by Bach. I think this is why it works so well dramatically, actually; most performances of the other two Passions, when they're dramatised, actually flatten something of the multiple narratives of the piece. It's very hard to bring that across when you're acting it out, because you become just a single character. In this case, where we don't have any of the recitative and are missing some of the arias, an honest acting of it can be effective. And the roles swap - there isn't just one person as Jesus - and that's very moving in a way. It's a different beast in a way that the other two Passions rarely do.

It's more intimate, in some ways - it was written in what one might call the galant style, a modern style which Bach didn't tend to use so much in the 1720s. It's partly because the original librettist for the Trauer-Ode was Gottsched - the leading literary figure in Leipzig at the time - so Bach was to an extent playing to that slightly more modern taste, which is a little more sentimental, slightly softer and gentler.

It doesn't have one of those big emotional showstoppers like 'Erbarme dich' - it feels as if the heat's slightly off in a way?

Slightly, yes. Though one of the arias we've put in is 'Erbarme dich' in a different guise - 'Erbarme meine Sünde', I think it is - taken from Cantata 55, and while it does have emotional peaks, it's a more stylised thing.

Doesn't put you through the wringer in the same way that the Matthew does!

It doesn't, no. But the combined forces of the acting and the music flowing in and out of it do actually make it very powerful in its own different way. Particularly contrasting with the John, which is like getting on the wrong train and having no way of getting off it until the end!

Your most recent recording, Handel in Rome from late last year, has a rather different mood to it; it feels Handel just gazing around him at the splendour and decadence of the city and reacting to that heady mix through his music. Is this programme of cantatas something you’d ever consider adapting to a staged production?

Oh, absolutely yes. They can be staged in various ways - with minimal movement, or a little bit, or you can do something more elaborate. After all, they are basically scenes or chunks from operas. In fact, at the Edinburgh Festival in a couple of weeks we're doing Clori, Tirsi e Fileno which is a cantata for three singers lasting nearly an hour, and that's really like a single act of an opera. With one and a half days' rehearsal we don't have the time to stage it properly, but I'm hoping that we might be able to do some minimal movement, just to make it work a bit better.

So yes, these early cantatas are absolutely stunning pieces. Very fresh and daring. And some form of movement or dramatisation is almost impossible to avoid. It's so visceral, the way it's written.

More broadly - you’ve recorded many of the big cornerstones of Baroque and Classical choral repertoire, so the obvious question is - where do you go from here? Is there anything you can tell us about your future plans for performing and recording?

We have a whole pile of possibilities - it all depends on funding and the market and the shape of the record industry. Several things are in the pipeline; hopefully another big Handel oratorio Belshazzar, which we're doing in Vienna in two years' time. We're trying to get that to all come together. The Pergolesi Stabat Mater is one we're thinking of as well - either in Pergolesi's original version or in Bach's really weird arrangement, which is a very interesting thing. 

Several other things too - Mozart's arrangement of Messiah is something we're quite interested in. We've often wanted to do another version of Messiah having done one nearly twenty years ago now, and the record label people say 'no no, that one sells too well, we don't want to dilute it!' - so by going to Mozart that might be an interesting route. His horn concertos are another possibility, too - we have a very fine horn player who could do those.

So we have about six things on either the back burner or at least out of the fridge, and it's a question of how we can make them work with the rhythm of the performances. 

The trouble is that as you know, CDs are often more of a calling-card than a way to make significant amounts of money, so what we want to do is make sure that our calling-cards give a coherent view of the group. We might also try and simultaneously do other things - videos and less formal recordings that could go on YouTube or wherever. That seems to be equally important now - to hit different demographics.

One ambition I have, and that Andrew [Trinick, Chief Executive] shares, is to do more regular informal, less curated, recordings. Things that can go up immediately. And then really concentrate on the strategy for the CDs (and even the LPs!). There's been a huge change in the market, and with the recovery from Covid we've slowed down quite a bit on several fronts. We're getting there again, but there were so many things that were planned over that time but never happened, where we're just picking up the pieces. And the strategy that we would have had has changed anyway - so in general, watch this space!

For readers within travelling distance of the Scottish Borders (St Mary's Parish Church Haddington, about twenty miles east of Edinburgh), tickets to the Dunedin Consort's staged performance of the St Mark Passion with narrator Joseph Marcell on 15th September are available at https://www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk/event/dunedin-consort-bach-markus-passion/.