Baroque bestseller
The poet Heinrich Barthold Brockes, a standard-bearer of the German literary enlightenment, owes his enduring fame to music history. He wrote a highly popular oratorio libretto, the full title of "Jesus Tortured and Dying for the Sins of the World ," or simply the Brockes Passion . The text was immediately a bestseller after its premiere in 1712, set to music by Reinhard Keiser. It went through thirty reprints in the first fifteen years of its publication.
Handel and Brockes' moving Passion story
No fewer than ten composers set the libretto to music after Keiser. And they were not the least. Three of Brockes' friends also took up the challenge: Telemann, Mattheson, and Handel. The latter had already been living in London for four years at the time, where he was at the beginning of his spectacular career as a composer of Italian operas. The fact that he still composed this German-language oratorio in 1716 indicates that he did not yet want to completely sever his ties with the continent. The dramatic and powerfully visual poetry with which Brockes tells the biblical Passion story fits Handel's pronounced theatrical instincts like a glove.
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