A C A D E M Y O F A N C I E N T M U S I C 2018 - 19 S E A S O N
Programme Note continued
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arts education elsewhere in Europe. Brockes' grand tour took in Prague, Paris, London and the Low Countries, but, like Handel, he was most influenced by Italy, like him absorbing and engaging with its culture.
established to host its first performances in his own house, to an audience (so he reported) of all the upper echelons of Hamburg society and "the entire foreign nobility, all the ministers and residents with their ladies", numbering over 500.
Nevertheless, when Brockes returned to Hamburg, he forged a profile as a leading German poet at a time when German was at its lowest ebb as a literary language. The Society of German Practitioners which he co-founded in 1715 was a trailblazer, discussing the roles of language and rhetoric and collaborating in translations of Italian, French and English into German. Brockes himself produced translations of Marino's La strage degli innocenti ("Massacre of the Innocents"), Pope's Essay on Man and Thomson's The Seasons. He also engaged fully in civic life, becoming a respected senator and holder of several important civic positions. Already by the time of Keiser's setting of his Passion text (1712) he was sufficiently
Der fĂźr die SĂźnden der Welt gemarterte und sterbende Jesus aus den vier Evangelisten in gebundener Rede vorgestellt ("Jesus suffering and dying for the sins of the world, presented in verse out of the four Evangelists"): the title of Brockes' libretto declares that it belongs to the genre known as Passion oratorio, a freely paraphrased, versified and amplified dramatisation of the Passion story based on chosen elements of all four gospels ("harmonisation" of the gospels; principally, in Brockes' case, St. John's). Hamburg was the birthplace of this form of Passion text, and Brockes was its chief instigator. He was preceded only by Christian Friedrich Hunold (who wrote under the pseudonym "Menantes"), whose text