MENDELSSOHN: Paulus.(Review)

MENDELSSOHN: Paulus

[] Gritton, Rigby; Banks, Coleman-Wright; BBC National Chorus and Orchestra of Wales, Hickox. Text and translation. Chandos 9882(2)

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the history of oratorio recognizes Felix Mendelssohn as the musician responsible for the revival of Johann Sebastian Bach and, also, the composer of the masterwork Elijah. But between Mendelssohn's conducting of Bach's Matthaus Passion in Berlin in 1829 (not only a debut for Mendelssohn the conductor but the Berlin debut of Bach's oratorio) and his own Elijah in 1846 (just before his early death), Mendelssohn composed an oratorio on a subject near to his heart: St. Paul.

The privileged son of a renowned philosopher, Mendelssohn was born to a Jewish family who converted to Christianity when he was just seven years old. The compassion he would have felt for St. Paul could hardly be clearer. But in his oratorio Paulus (1836), the parallels with another love of his life, J. S. Bach, are even more marked. And the inspiration he clearly gained from the great Bach passions are Paulus's greatest strengths. The oratorio is constructed, as are Bach's passions, from a combination of recitatives, arias, choruses and chorales. Mendelssohn took most of his material for the action from the Book of Acts in constructing the recitatives; he then used texts from Psalms, Revelation and the books of the prophets for the arias and choruses to provide reflective commentary. He used familiar chorale tunes to make special points; "Wachet auf" ("Sleepers Wake") opens the oratorio's overture and returns later to underline the oratorio's central theme. He varied his choral textures between homophonic utterance and more textured fugues. He even pilfered rhythmic figures from Bach at parallel points in his oratorio. Yet Paulus, for all its lovely music, fails to rise to the dramatic heights of Bach's Passions.

Despite Mendelssohn's best efforts to create musical comparisons between Paul and the Christ of the Passions, there is a central difficulty with the dramatic situation: it is a story in two distinct parts, and the second is less interesting. The first part tells of Paul's condemnation of the Jews, ...