CD 45
Music from Stams Monastery XIX
Hans Baldung, known as Grien, Lamentation, 1513
All of the works featured at the 1998 Tyrolean Passion Music Concert date from the second half of the 18th century. That was when music for Holy Week still had a distinct character. Composers gave this time of grieving, self-communion and contemplation suitable expression in their works. The scoring was usually reduced to singing voices and the style avoided the otherwise common cantilena ornamentation of the period in favor of the severe stile antico of classic vocal polyphony of the 16th century. It was the style of Palestrina’s time that was considered ideal for lofty music, and it thus briefly crowded out the all too sensually joyous Rococo ornamentation that characterized not only art but also church music at the time. In Stams Monastery, moreover, this ascetic musical ideal caused the harsh-sounding harpsichord to replace the sonorous organ during Lent. Compositions of masses for Holy Week left out the joyous song of praise of the Gloria, and included instead the introitus, graduale and offertorium with their especially moving texts for this week. The Passion according to St John the Evangelist presented here is preserved at Stams Monastery in an edition printed in Kempten in 1694. Other editions published later can be found in many of the archives of Tyrolean parish churches. The fact that this Passion was used for the Holy Week liturgy in Stams as late as in the 18th century is demonstrated by the hand-written entries by P. Stefan Paluselli, the choirmaster at that time. They indicate the cues for the choir and “soliloquents” (in the roles of St Peter, maids, high priest, etc.). The choral passages of the turbae in several parts have survived in an anonymous 18th-century manuscript in the music collection of the Ferdinandeum. Tiroler Passionskonzert 1998
Track 14, 2:00