Cantus Thuringia - Keiser: Der blutige und sterbende Jesus (2019)

Reinhard Keiser’s Der blutige und sterbende Jesus is not only the very first German Passion oratorio but also a highly suspenseful contribution to the Passion season. Lost for many years, it is now available for listening on CD in the revised version of 1729. The dramatic and musical design of Keiser’s work is astonishing. As in the Italian oratorio type that gained currency after 1700, there is no Evangelist or other narrator, which means that the work has a purely dramatic structure. Even though Keiser’s librettist Christian Friedrich Hunold, whose pseudonym was »Menantes,« did not cite any one of the four Evangelists word for word in his adaptation of the Passion narrative, it is quite evident that the poetic elaboration is (primarily) modelled on Luther’s translation of the Gospel of Matthew. As might be expected, Hunold and Keiser based their work on the dramatic means of the opera typical of their times while working on the one hand with contrasts between short, often homophonic five-part choirs of the two different groups of participants and on the other hand with multipart, interior monologues by the main characters.