Soloist: Bloch Jepsen, Jakob

Soloist: Mortensen, Lars Ulrik

Ensemble: Concerto Copenhagen

Conductor: Mortensen, Lars Ulrik

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Composer: Buxtehude, Dieterich

Ich bin die Auferstehung, BuxWV 44

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Venue: Trinitatis Church, Copenhagen

Date of Concert: 11-19-2018

Playing Time: 00:06:01

Catalogue Number: 8.226623

UPC: 636943662328

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One can vividly imagine the musical spectacle of the Abendmusiken, as it finds expression in the bass cantata Ich bin die Auferstehung und das Leben. Here Jesus is portrayed in the form of the bass singer in the St. John's Gospel's narrative of The Raising of Lazarus (Chapter XI, vv. 25-26), which is the reading for the 16th Sunday after Trinity.

Bearing in mind the Resurrection, this church concert may very well have been used to celebrate Christ's victory over death on Easter Sunday, as Buxtehude's use of the military instruments zink and trumpet could imply. Christ's words about the believer's life after death: "der wird leben, ob er gleich sturbe" (though he were dead, yet shall he live) is delivered rhetorically as recitative, after which the contrast between death and life is presented with imaginative dramatics in the following instrumental section.

Ich bin die Auferstehung und das Leben, like the great majority of Buxtehude's vocal music, has been preserved in the Duben Collection, into which it was copied in 1683. It was via Lubeck merchants and Baltic traders that the Swedish court kapellmeister Gustav Duben was supplied with manuscripts of music by, among others, Buxtehude to the court of Stockholm.