St Mark Passion BWV 247 – Reconstruction

By its very nature, J.S. Bach’s St. Mark Passion, BWV 247, is a composition open to reinterpretation. It comes to us in missing, lost parts, requiring a composer to fill in the blanks to complete the non-extant composition. Dr. Karosi, Saint Peter’s Cantor and Director of Music, joins a small number of composers who have undertaken this considerable task. In his reconstruction Dr. Karosi reimagines Bach’s lost Passion, one that does not exist in a definite form, for Saint Peter’s annual Good Friday liturgy.

In identifying the lost parts of the St. Mark Passion—namely the missing arias, turba choruses, and recitatives—scholars have put forward many different suggestions of form and style. Reconstructions typically borrow five moments from the Trauer-Ode, BWV 198, confirmed to be Bach’s parody models for the St. Mark Passion, leaving the connective tissue of the piece and the Biblical narrative to be newly composed. Dr. Karosi’s reconstruction seeks to present a coherent yet stylistically diverse composition, particularly for the recitatives and turba choruses.

From a music history standpoint, Saint Peter’s presentation of the St. Mark Passion is a significant achievement for Bach scholarship. Karosi’s reinterpretation seeks to further demarcate the historic from the newly-composed by positioning the historic source material in conversation with his new material.

The sensibilities of a modern audience and the musical tradition of Saint Peter’s, one which spans many languages and styles, are reflected in the composition’s structure— one that incorporates the past and the present. Just as Bach wrote in his context for his contemporaries in German, Karosi’s additions simulate the same experience, composing in English for the Saint Peter’s context and audience.

Karosi’s reimagining of the missing parts of the St. Mark Passion are in a distinctively modern, contemporary musical language—his experimentation can find comparisons in jazz and American minimalism. By contrasting the musical language of the additive passion narrative to that of Bach’s arias and chorales, Karosi creates transparency within the composition. The audience knows immediately what is historical and what is new, all while being immersed in a cohesive musical whole.