The ultimate CD for friends of the clavichord: On this recording, Bernhard Klapprott, a pupil of Bob van Asperen and today Professor of Early Keyboard Instruments in the Bach city of Weimar, exploits all the technical and tonal possibilities offered by the original clavichord by Joseph Gottfried Horn (1788).

Zachow was active over a period of twenty-eight years and numbered among the most renowned church musicians of his epoch (J. S. Bach applied to succeed him in 1712). Just how much George Frideric Handel valued his teacher and his music is shown by his continual citing of compositions by Zachow in his own work even during his years in London.

Reinhard Keiser’s Der blutige und sterbende Jesus is not only the very first German Passion oratorio but also a highly suspenseful contribution to the Passion season. Lost for many years, it is now available for listening on CD in the revised version of 1729. The dramatic and musical design of Keiser’s work is astonishing. As in the Italian oratorio type that gained currency after 1700, there is no Evangelist or other narrator, which means that the work has a purely dramatic structure. Even though Keiser’s librettist Christian Friedrich Hunold, whose pseudonym was »Menantes,« did not cite any one of the four Evangelists word for word in his adaptation of the Passion narrative, it is quite evident that the poetic elaboration is (primarily) modelled on Luther’s translation of the Gospel of Matthew.