Koor en Orkest Il Fondamento - Paul Dombrecht

The first performance of Johann Wilhelm Hertel's Passion Cantata 'Der sterbende Heiland' was in Schwerin on Good Friday 1764. It is the first in a series of ten such large-scale works Hertel wrote during his thirty years in the service of the rulers of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He was born in Eisenach in 1727 and is a typical example of an eighteenth-century German court composer or 'Kapellmeister', whose extensive body of work is still waiting to be discovered. 'Der sterbende Heiland' was written in imitation of the hugely popular 'Der Tod Jesu'. This Passion Cantata by Carl Heinrich Graun, based on a text by Karl Wilhelm Ramler, was first performed in Berlin in 1755 and marks the transition from a Baroque to an early-Classical musical aesthetic. In comparison with Graun's emphatically melody-oriented musical idiom, Hertel sticks much more to the baroque aesthetic, which is expressed mainly in the highly contrapuntal nature of the score and in the countless examples of tone painting. However, in his harmonic approach Hertel showed himself to be truly modern and progressive, so that his score is quite ambiguous and consequently very intriguing.