Composing a recitative—An explanation of the procedure using an example from the St Mark Passion

Part 2

This is the continuation of my explanation of the process of recitative composition, appendix to my articles about the completion of Bach's Mark Passion, Part 1 and Part 2.

3. Harmony

Before determining the harmonic structure of the recitative, I must determine in which key the preceding piece (in our case the preceding section of the recitative) ends and in which key the next piece begins. (It was customary not to compose the various movements of a (passion) cantata in the order they should be performed. Arias, chorales, and choirs were often fixed before the connecting recitatives were written.) In our case the preceding section of the recitative ends with a complete cadence in c# minor (“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.“). The following aria is composed in b minor (the main key of the St Mark Passion). That means that the recitative needs to modulate from c# minor to b minor.
I also need to analyse the punctuation marks, since every one of them asks for its own harmonic treatment. i.e. a period requires cadence, either perfect or imperfect, depending on whether it is the end of a sentence or a whole section. A colon and some commas require a harmony that gives the listener the expectation that something else will follow (e.g. a dominant chord with or without 7th in 1st or 3rd inversion). A question mark can be expressed by a half-cadence (see bar 9 in my recitative). Depending on the number of cadences to be made, I have to make more or less ‘detours’ before ‘landing’ on the final cadence of the recitative. Besides, emphases require stronger harmonies than other syllables.
This is what I came up with in 2010:

4. Melody

The next step is the composition of the melody. Care must be taken to ensure that the syllables are placed on the corresponding high or low notes, depending on the intensity of their emphasis. (An emphasis can be achieved by a relatively high as well as low note.)
Writers such as Scheibe and Marpurg also emphasize the importance of composing the recitative tune as much as possible according to the natural language melody. (It must be imagined that the words are declaimed in their respective affect.)
Incidentally, Bach was criticized by his contemporaries and later generations for failing to abide by it. An example of this is Bach's composition of the description of the tearing curtain (No. 63a) in the St. Matthew Passion. He lets the melody exhaust the entire vocal range of the tenor to portray the tearing of the curtain from top to bottom, the quivering earth, the rocks and the opening graves. This type of "painting" composition is contemptuously called “Pickelhering” (i.e. salted herring, the name of a popular coarse-comic figure of German-speaking comedy) in contemporary sources.
Incidentally, in order to make my baroque recitatives sound 'Bachisch’, it was very important for me to use the same compositional techniques as Bach in comparable passages in the text from the Gospel of Mark, and thus basically make the same "mistakes" as Bach did (at least in the eyes of his contemporaries).

5. Accompaniment of the words of Jesus

In principle, the recitative is finished. I had decided not to compose the words of Jesus as secco recitative, but to accompany them with string chords, as Bach did in his St Matthew Passion. Therefore I had one last step ahead of me: the composition of this accompaniment—in a certain way the cherry on the cake. (Note my “Pickelhering” in the accompaniment after the words “Stehet auf”.)
Here the score of the whole recitative:

I hope you enjoy listening to the result:

Jörn Boysen, revised in March 2018

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