According to his son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, his father had composed five Passion settings. Three of these have been lost in the course of time; just scores of the St Matthew- and the St John Passion have survived, at least in Bach's own hand writing. There exists a St Luke Passion which has formerly been attributed to Bach. Although partly copied by Bach himself, stylistic attributes and the quality of the work exclude him from the list of possible composers. Scholars suppose that Bach has arranged a work composed by one of his colleagues due to lack of time when he was in need of a Passion setting.

(Libretto of the St Mark Passion in Picander's Ernst=Schertzhaffte/ und/ Satÿrische/ Gedichte, Leipzig 1732)

Of the St Mark Passion exists a printed libretto. In his Ernst=Schertzhaffte/ und/ Satÿrische/ Gedichten (Serious/ and/ Satyric Poetry), Christian Friedrich Henrici published the text for a “Passion setting According to the evangelist St Mark [performed] on Good Friday 1731”. Henrici, better known as Picander, was librettist for many of Bach's cantatas. But not one note of music has survived. The last copy of the score has burned during the Second World War.
Thanks to scholarly research we know that the music of most of the choruses and arias had been composed for other poems before Bach used it for the St Mark Passion. As in the Christmas Oratorio, he reused compositions from cantatas which had been written for other, singular occasions as birthday or funeral festivities of sovereigns. If the poems would have equal measures and the content would describe similar affects, the same music could be used. This so-called parody-technique was a common practice at Bach's time, a way to work efficiently. By the means of comparisons of verses in feasible vocal works with the poems in Picander's libretto, scholars could reconstruct the music for the two big choruses and most of the arias.
Since the 1960's the Bach scholars agree that for his St Mark Passion, Bach has reused the opening- and final choir of the funeral ode Laß, Fürstin, laß noch einen Strahl, BWV 198, composed for the funeral of Christiane Eberhardine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth in 1727. Also three of the five arias come from that work. One further aria could be recoverd from cantata BWV 54.
(In 2009 the text of a later version from 1744 with two additional arias was discovered in Saint Petersburg. My completion from 2010/11 is based on the textbook for the 1731-performance and does not contain the two arias added by Bach for a later performance.)

In the case of reused music from BWV 198, it seems as if Picander has modelled his poems after the ode for BWV 198 by Johann Christoph Gottsched. Here an example from both poems:

The first edition of these reconstructed movements was published 1964 by Dieter Hellmann. Anyway, since no music is detectable that would fit to the measure of the poem Angenehmes Mordgeschrey!, this aria could not yet have been reconstructed from Bach's own music. Also the music for narrative text sections in prose, as the turba-choirs and the recitatives, is lost because the parody technique was used just for poems.
During the last fifty years, different attempts to reconstruct or complete the St Mark Passion have been made by several musicologists and/or muscians. Some of them were combining music by other composers as Johann Nicolaus Bruhns (such as Simon Heighes whose completion was published by Bärenreiter) or newly composed music in modern style with the pieces published by Hellmann. Others parodied recitatives from the St Matthew Passion to reconstruct the missing ones from the St Mark Passion—by trying to get a more ‘Bachisch’ result by working that way, they failed ignoring the fact that recitatives were not parodied since it was easier to just compose them newly instead of trying to make music written for a text in prose fit to another text with different accents, emphases and numbers of syllables per sentence. And, as the other completions, the problem of the aria Angenehmes Mordgeschrey! was completely ignored, the poem was cramped in to a corset which had been made for another poem. (The duets on the text * 'Angenehmes Mordgeschrey!'* in some of the latest reconstructions make no sense, since the text is written in first-person.)
None of these attempts could convince stylistically. That is why a Dutch concert organisation asked me in 2010 to compose the missing parts of the St Mark Passion, based on the text for the performance in 1731 as published by Picander. The organisation knew me for my compositions in the styles of Telemann and Bach, amongst others, which have been performed by different orchestras, poets and theatres before.

to be continued...
Jörn Boysen, 2012, revised in March 2018

Part 2 of this article is here

You can listen to a performance of the completion here on Steemit

(Autograph score of the opening chorus from Bach‘s Trauerode, BWV 198)

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