J. S. Bach: St Mark Passion | A Contemporary Reconstruction by Bálint Karosi | BWV 247

The origins of Bach’s St. Mark Passion (BWV 247) go back to the Trauer-Ode (Lass, Fürstin, lass noch einen Strahl,” BWV 198), a funeral cantata written in 1727 for Electress Christiane Eberhardine of Saxony. Composed for a specific occasion, the Trauer-Ode was no longer of any practical use once it had been performed, so already in 1729, two years before the first performance of the St Mark Passion, Bach incorporated some of its individual movements into another secular-sacred work, (Köthener Trauermusik, BWV 244a) through the process of parody. Evidence for the existence of the St. Mark Passion exists in the form of the libretto by Picander, Bach’s most important author of texts, published in the third part of his Ernst-, Sherzhaffte und Satyrische Gedichte of 1732, with a reference to the first performance of the passion on Good Friday in 1731, in Leipzig. Another printed copy of the text of the St. Mark Passion, discovered in the Russian National Library in 2009, not only testifies to a