When Oskar Gottlieb Blarr went to Israel for eight months in September 1981, he experienced the story of Jesus as something newly transpired: the entry into Jerusalem was a week ago, the crucifixion three days ago, Easter early this morning. Out of that experience grew the Jesus-Passion, premiered in 1985 and first performed in Jerusalem in 1987 — in the presence of David Flusser and Schalom Ben-Chorin. Blarr wanted to tell the passion story without anti-Judaism; in conversation he distances himself clearly from Bach’s St John and St Matthew Passions, whose texts, he says, have that tendency woven into them.
The texts of the three oratorical scenes are drawn mainly from the Bible. For the passages of the New Testament originally written in Greek, Blarr chose the Hebrew reconstruction made by Franz Delitzsch in 1885, which David Flusser regarded as the best approximation of the tone of biblical language. The first part, the Entry into Jerusalem, brings out the regal theme in Jesus’s life, also in its political dimension, and ends with the mediaeval versicle Aus hartem Weh die Menschheit klagt, one of the few postbiblical strophes with which Jews and Christians can pray together. In the second part, Jesus in Gethsemane, an Aramaic protest song from the time of Jesus, preserved in the Talmud, appears alongside the early pietist text Im Garten leidet Christus Not in the original setting by Johannes Eccard, Kapellmeister of Königsberg Cathedral. The third part is the Crucifixion.
The organist and composer Odilo Klasen, who devoted a doctoral thesis of more than five hundred pages to Blarr, traces the success of the oratorio to one peculiarity of Blarr’s style: being immediately graspable, even for someone who does not know these complex processes at all. Blarr recognised early on that the reception of demanding contemporary music needs something beyond the abstract — an image, a story, an anecdote, a hint towards inspiration. Between the premiere in 1985 and 2018 the Jesus-Passion was performed twenty-six times.
In conversation with Mirjam Wiesemann, Blarr tells of his youth in East Prussia, of the flight in 1945 and of the stations of his life up to 1961, when he settled in Düsseldorf, where he still lives. Three images from his earliest years recur throughout his life: his grandfather’s black, broad-brimmed hat, symbol of the free and self-determined man, which became Blarr’s visual trademark; the great forge fire and the rhythmic noises in his father’s smithy, which later led him to study percussion; and the organ of Bartenstein, which he played as a child between 1938 and 1945 — I would certainly not have become an organ person if I had not played that organ in my first years as a child. The motto of this volume also comes from him: if I do not believe, then the organ as the voice of God is a figment of the imagination.
The Jesus-Passion was recorded on Good Friday, 30 March 2018, during the concert at the Lutherkirche in Wiesbaden. Mirjam Wiesemann recorded the conversation with Oskar Gottlieb Blarr on 15 April 2018 in his Düsseldorf flat and the conversation with Odilo Klasen on 21 May 2018 at the Cybele Studios. The edition was made possible by the support of Udo van Meeteren, honorary citizen of Düsseldorf.