Johann Sebastian Bach only got to know the ‘big wide world’ through music – as well as his cosmopolitan colleague and classmate Georg Friedrich Händel. We don’t know how Bach got hold of the sheet music for Händel’s Roman cantata Armida abbandonata in Leipzig in 1731. But he undoubtedly presented it to visitors to the Zimmermann coffee house.
Untypically for Bach, he made virtually no changes to the solo scene of the abandoned Armida crying out her pain to the fleeing Ruggiero, which was almost a quarter of a century old at the time.
It was a completely different story 15 years later. To fit Leipzig’s Lutheran liturgy, the already legendary ‘Stabat Mater’ by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi had to be properly reworked in terms of text and music. The St Thomas cantor thus transformed the sensitive Neapolitan Marian motet into a late baroque German psalm cantata ‘Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden’.
This production is realized with the support of the Tax Shelter measure of the Belgian Federal Government through Flanders Tax Shelter.
