Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (1690–1749) was a highly respected musician and composer who contributed works in all major eighteenth-century musical genres. His first Passion, Die leidende und am Creutz sterbende Liebe Jesu, was performed widely during his lifetime, including by Bach in the same year he composed his Christmas Oratorio, which imitates various aspects of Stölzel’s style. There are several characteristics of Stölzel’s Passion that demonstrate the composer’s unusual approach to the genre, including a lack of named protagonists, texts couched in the present tense to heighten the immediacy of the drama, a balance between recitatives and arias, and the employment of primarily seventeenth-century chorales with plain harmonizations that may have encouraged the participation of the listening congregation. Evidence of the Passion’s popularity is evident from the existence of a truncated and adapted mid-eighteenth century score, several excerpts of which are included in the edition’s appendix.
- ISBN: 9781987206135 (1987206134)
