Easter Oratorio (review)

Essentially extended cantatas, Bach's three oratorios consist largely of secular cantata movements to which new sacred texts were fitted when there was a need for a larger than normal concerted piece for a major religious feast in Leipzig. Thus movements composed in early 1725 for a birthday cantata for Duke Christian of Weissenfels, recycled (with a new sacred libretto) in an Easter cantata that same year, and revised around 1738 and again between 1743 and 1746, eventually became known as the Easter Oratorio. Over the various stages of revision, the notes of the original secular cantata's arias and closing chorus hardly changed, though new recitatives were necessary for the initial sacred parody. The 1725 Easter libretto (which may be the work of Picander, who penned the birthday text) is a drama on the discovery of Jesus' resurrection with four named characters: Peter (tenor), John (bass), Mary, mother of James (soprano), and Mary Magdalene (alto). As such, the work is anomalous in Bach's sacred output.

As edited by Neil Jenkins for the New Novello Choral Edition, the Easter Oratorio may finally receive the attention it deserves. One of the best things about the New Novello edition is its uncluttered presentation. Like other instalments in this series, the present edition imposes nothing extraneous on Bach's vocal lines; the keyboard reduction is likewise admirably clear, and there are orchestral parts for hire. In addition to the German libretto, this edition of the Easter Oratorio also features a newly translated English text. Jenkins wisely makes no attempt at a strictly literal translation; instead, he treats the libretto freely, preserving the general sense of each movement with words and phrases that match the original note values. A more literal translation might have been included, but with so many available these days in print and online, the lack of one is not a serious handicap.

On the whole, Jenkins's translation is nicely poetic and very serviceable, despite the occasional awkward match of new words and old notes. His rendering of the tenor aria is particularly good: the libretto's 'Sanfte soll mein Todeskummer / Nur ein Schlummer' (which Richard D. P. Jones, in the new English edition of Alfred Dürr's indispensable The Cantatas of J. S. Bach, translates unblinkingly as 'Gently shall my death-agony be / But a slumber') is here transformed into 'Softly shall my eyes be closing / Once reposing in the care of Him I love'. Peter's realization that his own death is but the path to eternal life is thus infused with the spirit, if not the letter, of the original in English phrases that make good rhythmic and semantic sense on their own. Other sentences are quaintly Victorian: the opening movement's blunt command to 'get to the cave that hides Jesus' ('Erreichet die Höhle, die Jesum bedeckt') is rendered touristically, as advice 'to visit the garden wherein Jesus lay'.

The soprano aria 'Seele, deine Spezereien sollen nicht mehr Myrrhen sein' presents a translation problem of a different kind. Translated literally, the opening line reads 'O soul, your spices shall no longer be myrrh', while in Jenkins's translation one finds 'Welcome are the precious spices that anoint the lifeless Lord'. The shift in meaning is tolerable, but the new word order awkwardly places melismas on 'that' (the originals more sensibly enliven 'sollen', the verb). Such things are especially frustrating when one realizes that Bach himself laboured to make this aria more singable: the three versions of its text underlay in the Neue Bach Ausgabe (II/7, Anhang A) show how the composer (and Picander?) adjusted this aria's underlay and occasionally changed words to improve its musical diction.

One of the biggest challenges of translating such works is finding the right words for recitative, the most speech-like texture in Baroque music and consequently the most difficult to render successfully in another language. A translator who tries to preserve the original syllabification, and to neither add nor subtract any notes, can hardly avoid changes to...